Security

I started the second day with the Marcus Niemietz's talk “UI Redressing Attacks on Android Devices” about the chances to cheat on the users using hidden layers to perform unwanted actions. After this, another mobile subject, Peter Kieserberg shared his ideas about the use of QR codes as a vector attack.

After lunch it was Sergey Bratus and Travis Goodspeed's turn to speak about the security of USB ports, telling how it is possible to compromise the whole system via a unattended USB port. This was a really interesting talk that one can explore by himself taking a look at some good documentation on Travis' blog.

The talk “We Came In Peace – They Don’t: Hackers vs. CyberWar” by FX was next. He gave his opinion about the actual cyberwarfare and the difference between the point of view of Governments and cybersecurity experts about this subject. Some ideas from his talk: avoid the use of 0-days as weapons through Full-Disclosure, learn how to protect you playing CTFs and don't give up.
 

Until now I had not had enough time to write about my experience at my first Troopers. Due to some good comments about it I had had in mind going to Troopers since some time ago, but for one reason or another I hadn't been able to do it. Last year I had the opportunity to share table with Enno Rey, Troopers organizer and CEO of ERNW, at BlackHat Europe. That time I saw they were a good team and good people, and this year, living closer to Heidelberg, I had no excuses to go.

I arrived in Heidelberg at 3:30AM after 9 hours on the road due to the bad weather conditions. I was able to rest to be ready for the talks in the next morning. I missed the keynote by Rodrigo Branco, but I heard that it was really good. The first talk I attended was “Paparazzi over IP” by Daniel Mende and Pascal Turbing about hacking a CANON camera, equipped with a wireless adapter and other features. The result was that it was possible to see all the photographs taken, control the device remotely and intercept the images while they were about to be sent to a cloud storage.

As I mentioned in my last post about NFC, we can use NFC Forum tags to store and share information, normally used by marketing departments. This information must have a specific format called NDEF (NFC Data Exchange Format). Thanks to this format different NFC devices can share NDEF messages between them. Each of these messages can store several NDEF records containing different type of information like plain text, images, audio or video (media in general), URIs, etc. You can take a look at the NDEF specification to learn more about it.

Here I'm going to focus on the URI records and their possibilities to perform actions in NFC capable mobile phones when reading this type of tags. The URI specification says that these are the supported schemes:

NFC is a reality today. A lot of cities in the world want to add this technology to their daily life, using it for transport, payments, access systems and almost all we can think (in some countries, like Japan and Korea, NFC is used years ago). Even reading NFC tags can be used to perform certain actions in our mobile phones like put it in flight mode, synchronize data, etc.

NFC is based on the ISO/IEC 18092 standard, published at the end of 2003, and it's compatible with other standards like ISO/IEC 14443 A/B (RFID) and ISO/IEC 15693 (FeliCa - Sony). As probably you know, it's a short distance wireless technology (normally < 10cm), high frequency (13'56 MHz) and low speed (normally until 424 Kbps). Unlike RFID, NFC is capable to perform bidirectional communications, and the time to establish the communication is much lower than using Bluetooth.

The aim of this blog post is not explaining how NFC works but giving some advice to setup a lab and start playing with this technology. The first thing we need is a NFC reader/writer. After looking around the most used are the following:

Each of us has his own preferences: some people love Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber, others Rocco Siffredi or Laura Lion. The love for the latter can be dangerous if you are not aware of security problems when you have a non-updated system, and it's possible you end with an infected system asking for money to recover the control of the machine.

This was an interesting situation so I tried to help my friend. In this case, just after the desktop appeared, a full-screen window showed. It was a warning from the Spanish police ("Cuerpo Nacional de Policía") saying that the system had been blocked because it had been used to perpetrate illegal actions like child pornography, terrorism and violence against children: "Fue detectado un caso de actividad ilegal. El sistema operativo fue bloqueado por violación de las leyes de España!". A warning like this can be shocking for a normal user, so social engineering was working here. However, this warning was also asking for 100€ to be paid via Ukash or Paysafecard as a fine for this behaviour and in order to restore the system. This part can be a bit strange and maybe makes the victims call the police very quickly. Once this window appeared no other action was possible, like execute the Task Manager or return to the desktop, just enter a code to pay.