According to 2600 News, 1,500 attendees of this years Last HOPE (Hackers On Planet Earth) hacker conference will be tracked via RFID in a large social experiment which will include games focused on RFID technology. From the press release:

"Players will seek ways to protect their privacy, find vulnerabilities in the tracking system, employ data mining techniques to learn more about other participants, and choose how much personal information they will disclose in order to play."

Cool stuff...if you are into being tracked via RFID! It should be interesting to see some of the results of this experiment from the conference attendees and to see some cool hacks to gather RFID data and ways to protect your privacy. I did an article on RFID awhile back talking about ways to protect your identity using credit card "shields".

The Last HOPE takes place July 18 to July 20, 2008 at the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City.

Brain Salcedo was convicted back in 2004 of hacking the Lowe's (a national home improvement retail chain) computer network through an unsecured wireless network. Brian and his partner found the unsecured wireless network while Wardriving. Brian's plan was to eventually tap in and siphon off millions of credit card's through a backdoor installed in a proprietary Lowe's program called "tcpcredit" that Brian and his partner had modified.

Brian is currently serving out a nine year prison term even though there is no evidence that he even saw one credit card number (note that the longest federal sentence for a hacking offense was the 68 months imposed on Kevin Mitnick). During the investigation only six credit card numbers were found in the file that was created from the modified "tcpcredit" program. Ironically enough Brian seems to blame lack of fame and notoriety as to why he did what he did (he mentions the felony he was on probation for before the Lowe's hack):

"It took awhile to work out the dilemma then consuming my head. Why did those around me get acclaim for exposing security flaws? They got hired, I was convicted of a felony. What was I doing wrong? After what seemed like a lifetime absence from computers, I decided to renege on my commitment to stay away from it and I simply relapsed into this all-out cracking binge."

Two years later enter TJX ...

Back in November of 2006 TJX disclosed that there was about 17 months of unauthorized network access resulting in the compromise of 46 million credit card accounts. To date this is the largest single breach of personal data in history. How did the TJX breach happen? Almost the same way Lowe's got hacked...lack of wireless security. In this case TJX was using WEP which is known to be extremely vulnerable to attack. Of course there were other vulnerabilities that had to be exploited on the internal TJX LAN but the wireless network was the start. As we all know, it only takes one vulnerability to potentially bring down a network.

Two more years later enter Dave & Buster's and Hannaford...

Just today, it was announced that Dave and Buster's was victim to a data breach that resulted in bank losses of up to $600,000. This time apparently the attackers used "social engineering" to install packet sniffers to obtain credit card information. That's right...social engineering. Ironically, one of the accused was apparently involved in the TJX breach (I could only find one source on this). Hopefully we find out more details in coming days about how this social engineering attack took place.

The Hannaford Supermarket breach resulted in 4.2 million credit card numbers being compromised just this year. The attackers had apparently planted malware on the servers at each of the 294 affected stores. This malware apparently sent the compromised data overseas.

While details about all of these intrusions are still coming out, one can start to see the similarities with Lowe's, TJX, Dave & Busters and Hannaford.

Lessons Learned:

- Wireless is dangerous for retail if not properly secured. Now that WPA2 is widely available there is no reason that a retailer should not use WPA2. Interesting to note that I have reliable sources tell me that other major retailers are still using WEP to secure their wireless networks...and it's 2008!

- Stealing data in transit within an internal company network is the new hotness! Most of this information is unencrypted until it gets to the database. In many cases it's rather trivial to get this level of access (administrator rights on a workstation or server) to install a packet sniffer once you are on the internal network.

- Social engineering is on the rise! I wouldn't be surprised if all it took was a simple phone call from "the IT guy" asking a store manager to install a new piece of software in the case of Dave & Busters (or Hannaford, you never know).

- If you are a criminal thinking about doing the same thing...it's only a matter of time, you will most likely be caught and if you are a US citizen prepare to get the book thrown at you like what happened to Brian Salcedo.

- Finally, as a company don't put all your eggs in the PCI basket! Just because you are certified PCI compliant (Hannaford) doesn't mean you are secure!

I have seen a couple blogs posts, articles and even the creator of winlockpwn (the hack/script that allows you to bypass Windows authentication through FireWire) saying that this script is nothing more then a "partytrick"...

"Wow and amaze your friends by magically unlocking a Windows PC without a password!"

While this seems like a fun thing to do at your next party to impress the ladies (ladies that like geeks and slick python scripting of course!)...the truth is that it's a pretty serious issue. I have to hand it to the the creator of winlockpwn (Adam Boileau aka: Metlstorm) for having such a cool sense of humor about the whole thing and all the media attention he has gotten (he got "slashdotted" when he released the script). On his web site he mentions that "it's a pity to write code and have no one use it". Adam, we totally agree!

The No Tech Hacking Phenomenon
Attackers will always use the easiest way to gain access to the network, obtain confidential information, trade secrets, whatever. Since the majority of companies and organizations are locking down their networks it's becoming more and more popular to use social engineering to bypass physical security controls to gain access to the network. This is called the "No Tech Hacking" phenomenon which is recently popularized by Johnny Long and his book which was recently released (Johnny also gives a great talk on the same topic). No tech hacking involves things like social engineering, dumpster diving, shoulder surfing, tailgating, people watching, etc...I won't go into a ton of detail about this, read his book if you want to know more. The FireWire authentication bypass hack adds one more tool to the mix in which once you have physical access to a location and a computer, it is almost always game over. Sure, there are other attacks you could do like pop a bootable CD to change the admin password (this is assuming they are not using pre-boot authentication with hard drive encryption), or try and exploit another vulnerability, however, combine the FireWire attack with "no tech" hacking techniques, it just got easier for an organization to get pwned.

Demos and information about winlockpwn
I decided to try winlockpwn out on my own to see how easy it really is. There are a ton of articles out there already but few give you all the details about where this hack originated from and why this isn't a Microsoft specific issue. There are even videos up on YouTube demonstrating this. I was going to do the same type of demo but felt that screen shots would be just fine. To add to the twisted irony of all this I did record a video demo but couldn't find my 4-pin to 6-pin FireWire cable to hook up to my Mac to edit the video! Had a 6-pin to 6-pin of course...silly cables. Anyway, lets get right to it and talk about the background of the winlockpwn script and how all of this came about.

Where did winlockpwn come from?
Back in 2006 at the RUXCON convention security researcher Adam Boileau gave a talk called "Hit By A Bus: Physical Access Attacks With FireWire" which was about a "feature" with FireWire that if memory was accessed properly it would bypass Windows authentication. However, the code wasn’t released and according to Adam this was because “Microsoft was a little cagey about exactly whether FireWire memory access was a real security issue or not and we didn’t want to cause any real trouble”. Thats funny...Microsoft being "cagey" about something? More recently, because of the release of a video and paper detailing the “Cold Boot Attack” by a team of Princeton University researchers Adam felt that it was time to release his script (with a little coaxing from the Risky Business podcast folks.

Not a Microsoft Issue!
The inherent issue with FireWire is built into the OHCI 1394 specification. It is important to note that this issue is not a Microsoft problem...rather it’s a "feature" with how FireWire technology requires direct access to the memory of the computer. This is how it's designed and one of the reasons FireWire is as fast as it is.

How does the attack work?
In its simplest form, the authentication bypass attack involves having two PC’s. The target PC must be running Windows 2000/XP or Vista with FireWire ports (either built in or through a removable PCMCIA FireWire Card) and "locked". The attacking PC must be running a Linux/Unix variant loaded with the pythonraw1394 library bindings, a romtool (to escentially make your FireWire card an Apple iPod), and the winlockpwn.py script. What makes this attack easy is that you can use a Linux bootable forensics LiveCD called Helix (v1.9) which already has the pythonraw1394 library bindings and the romtool installed. When using the Helix (v1.9) LiveCD all you need is to download the winlockpwn.py script and run the romtool which will emulate the attackers FireWire port as an Apple iPod. To the target machine, it will look like a FireWire Apple iPod is being connected in the Windows device manager. Let the fun begin!

I want to note that not only can you use winlockpwn to unlock a PC but you can also use a tool called 1394memimage which will dump the physical memory of the victim PC to a USB drive. This could be even more valuable since you can then run "strings" and search for anything interesting (passwords, login information, etc...). I won't go into the details about 1394memimage (and I have yet to try this) but you basically use the same method that I will describe but when you get to the step to run winlockpwn, use 1394memimage. Here is a good, detailed article about this process.

Steps to demo the attack
It might be a good idea to demo this to your management and/or clients so I put together a little demo. Below is my lab setup:

- Desktop with a PCI FireWire Card running fully patched Windows XP SP2 (the victim)
- Laptop with a PCMCIA FireWire card (generic FireWire card, you can find a ton of these on eBay) booted with the Helix LiveCD (v1.9)
- 6-pin to 6-pin FireWire Cable
- USB Thumb Drive w/winlockpwn.py script

1. Boot the laptop with the Helix LiveCD. Next, "lock" the victim desktop. Copy the winlockpwn.py script to the correct directory on the laptop:

cp winlockpwn.py /usr/local/pythonraw1394



2. Connect the 6-pin to 6-pin FireWire cable to both PC’s.

3. Load the FireWire bindings and run ./businfo to see if it is loaded (should be port 0).

modprobe raw1394
./businfo

Click here for a screen shot of this.

4. Reprogram the CSR to mimic an Apple iPod. Run ./businfo again to see if the firewire card now emulates an iPod:

./romtool –s 0 ipod.csr
./businfo



Click here to see what businfo looks like with the iPod emulation.

5. Waited for a few seconds for the FireWire/iPod drivers to load on the victim desktop. Finally, run winlockpwn.py. Run winlockpwn with no parameters to see all the options. There are several (one will actually allow you to spawn a command shell right at the login screen!). For this demo, we are just using option 2 (regular non-fast-user-switching). The 0 and the 1 are the port and the node.

./winlockpwn.py 0 1 2

Click here to see what happens when winlockpwn is successful!

6. Press CTRL-ALT-DEL on the victim desktop. You will get a an error message box about an incorrect password. Don't worry about it and press ENTER. You will then be logged into the Windows desktop, bypassing authentication! Note that you can now lock/unlock the computer as many times as you want as the memory of the machine is "snarfed" until a reboot. Also, something to note is that if you want to do the demo again make sure you uninstall the FireWire drivers that loaded in the Windows device manager before rebooting the box. If not, you will probably have problems getting the hack to work again.

How to protect yourself from winlockpwn?
Well for starters, don't loose physical access to your PC! That sounds obvious but it goes back to the fact that once an attacker has physical access to your PC it's pretty much over regardless. However, here are some tips that myself and others are suggesting. Keep in mind, most of these can be circumvented, however a "defense in depth" strategy is always the best way to go:

- Ensure that all sensitive laptops/desktops are using whole disk encryption software with a pre-boot password.
- Disable the standby feature and also hibernate.
- Disable unused ports in the BIOS including bootable USB devices.
- Disable the PCMCIA slots in the Windows device manager (this may cause more problems then it's worth).
- Don't purchase laptops/desktops with FireWire ports (do you really need FireWire when you have USB ports?).
- Always secure laptops physically with a cable lock when unattended (depending on your environment).
- Mandate that users shut down their PC’s if they are going to leave a PC unattended for a long period of time.

If you have any more suggestions let us know in the comments.