law enforcement
Microsoft Spyware Now Being Installed On Win 7
If you’re the sort of person who isn’t entirely happy about the idea of Microsoft claiming the right to copy your personal files, photos, emails, chat logs, diary entries, medical records, etc over to their own servers to sell to whoever they want for whatever they can get for your personal data – into markets that already exist for insurance companies to deny you insurance based on algorithmic analysis of your habits or your friends habits or for financial institutions to set your interest rates based on similar criterion, or perhaps even for law enforcement to investigate you without a warrant, then OBVIOUSLY you would never, ever install Windows 10 under any circumstances.
Well, Microsoft seems to have fully jumped on the Google/Facebook gravy train and is now completely invested in stealing your data and selling it to the highest bidder (Apple has been exfiltrating your data for a long time, but so far for internal use). I’ve become more suspect of Microsoft’s updates since they made the Windows 10 advertisement an important (not optional) update (important for what? their bottom line, obviously). Turns out that the latest updates to Windows 7 are pushing Microsoft’s new business model of stealing your data for profit to Windows 7 and 8.
Staying safe is going to require ever more vigilance. It may be possible to block windows components from reaching out to microsoft’s servers at the personal firewall level and certainly it can be done at the corporate firewall level (and should be), but blocking Microsoft is a somewhat complex issue. You can’t run Windows safely without installing security patches because the underlying OS is so completely insecure that new, critical, exploitable flaws are discovered every single week. If you don’t constantly patch these security failures, you will be hacked by people other than microsoft. If you install the wrong microsoft patch, you will be hacked by microsoft. Debian anyone? Also, software developers developing enterprise software, please, please, please stop developing for that horrible, insecure, performance hobbling abomination of a tarted-up single-user OS “Server” and focus on a secure, stable server OS like FreeBSD. Please. I hate, hate having to fork over $1k to microsoft for each box to run their horrible OS just so I can run your software. Why do you support that extortion? Do you despise your customers that much? Stop.
If you care about corporate governance and data security or HIPAA compliance, you are probably violating some critical requirements by installing windows 10 or these new updates to your existing Win7/8 base if you do not block data exfiltration to Microsoft’s servers. This is spyware. These updates are stealing your data and sending it to Microsoft. If your business is subject to data privacy laws, these updates put you in violation of those laws. Microsoft is doing something that is extremely significant and extremely evil and completely wrong. Take action or you may very well be facing personal or corporate consequences. srsly.
I am a strong believer in data privacy and extremely suspect of what I consider highly disingenuous business practices like Google’s but I recognize that there are reasonable people out there who think Google isn’t evil. However, this windows 10 issue, now being pushed to windows 7, goes well beyond Google taking advantage of people’s historical assumptions about the security of email to offer them a free look-alike honey trap to gather their data. Windows 10 and these Win 7 updates are intrusive, not merely misleading. Do not update. Srsly. Do not update. Block the spyware “hotfixes.”
- Russia considers banning windows 10
- Bit torrent trackers ban Windows 10 users
- Windows 10 steals so much data it breaks your data plan and costs you money
- Windows 10 is spyware, plain and simple, including a keylogger.
Stop Gap Fixes
In researching these updates, I came across this article on techworm that has a nice summary of the Malware updates Microsoft is pushing out (with some additional amendments I found):
- KB2952664 (this one reappears no matter how often you unselect it or hide it – so memorize it as evil)
- KB2976978
- KB2977759
- KB2990214
- KB3021917
- KB3022345
- KB3035583
- KB3044374
- KB3068708
- KB3075249
- KB3080149
- KB3112343
- KB3123662
- KB3123862 (new)
- KB3173040 NEW – “final” full screen nag advertisement for Win10 malware
With a whiff of irony, this google search “telemetry site:https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb” shows these patches and many more…
Do not automatically install Microsoft updates. You must turn that feature off or you will keep getting additional spyware installed. Go to windows update and verify your settings. I have mine set so windows downloads the updates (so the updates are waiting locally), but I don’t let windows install them automatically. That gives me a chance to review the updates and look for spyware.
When you get updates, you now have to check each one of them to find out if it is spyware or not. The list above is current as far as I know, but clicking on the “more information” link to the right of the updates list will get you microsoft’s marketing speak obfuscation of the true purpose. Any update that “adds telemetry points” or something like that is spyware. Uncheck the install and hide the update. Note that some of these were moved from “optional” to “important.” Microsoft is absolutely intent on stealing your data and is taking some pretty underhanded steps to make it difficult for you to avoid it.
If updates get past you or it turns out later that a seemingly important or innocuous update was spyware (the fun part is that you now have to be vigilant and look all this stuff up), then you can uninstall them from the “installed updates” control panel.
Work to be done
I’ll start looking into firewall settings to block communication to microsoft’s servers. This is a standard anti-malware technique and should work here, except that microsoft has so many servers it is more challenging to block them than your typical malware botnet.
We need something like a variant of Peer Guardian to block microsoft’s servers using the standard P2P crowd-sourcing model to keep the list up to date. I’m not aware of anything like this yet, but I’m looking. Microsoft has become more of an enemy to privacy than the RIAA ever was.
UPDATE: this superuser answer includes a list of telemetry endpoints to block at your firewall or router. Alternatively you can edit your hosts file and add these entries from DSL reports.
Larger Significance
This shift in business focus by Microsoft from providing a product people are willing to pay for to stealing data from people to sell on the commercial market has some significant lessons for the entire software model.
It isn’t just that Microsoft is now adopting Google’s business model of giving away “free” goodies as traps to collect product (you) to sell to the highest bidder, but that the model of corporate trust that underpins most of the security assumptions the internet is built on is manifestly false and unsustainable. If any hacker tried to create these spyware updates, locked-down computers that only install signed code would refuse to install them. Ignoring for the moment that the signed code model is idiotically flawed as signing keys are stolen all the time, this microsoft spyware is properly signed with legitimate keys. It will be installed on locked down computers without complaint and will not show up in commercial anti-virus software. But it is spyware. It contains keyloggers and extremely productive data exfiltration code that is currently copying wholesale data dumps from unfortunate victims to Microsoft’s servers in such volume that their data caps are being hit.
If a non-commercial third party (e.g. “hacker”) did this, they’d be prosecuted. It makes no difference to you that your data is being stolen by Microsoft rather than by some clever teenager in a former eastern block country: your data is being stolen. But the model that has been promoted, a model of centralized corporate trust to validate the “security” of your system has been utterly and irrevocably shattered. This isn’t an accident, isn’t something that better data management might have prevented, this is an intentional ex post facto rewrite of the usual, customary, and regular assumptions we have about the privacy of our computer systems and one that significantly impacts the security of almost everyone in the world: military, medical, legal, fiduciary, as well as personal.
And even if you trust Microsoft (for whatever bizarre, irrational reason), Microsoft is creating a whole series of security holes in their already crappy and insecure operating system that will be exploited by third parties. By adding keyloggers and data exfiltration tools to the core OS, they’re making it even easier for non-corporate hackers to jump on the data theft gravy train. Everyone profits but you. You lose.
Making Chrome Less Horrible
Google’s Chrome is a useful tool to have around, but the security features have gotten out of hand and make it increasingly useless for real work without actually improving security.
After a brief rant about SSL, there’s a quick solution at the bottom of this post.
Chrome’s Idiotic SSL Handling Model
I don’t like Chrome nearly as much as Firefox, but it does do some things better (I have a persistent annoyance with pfSense certificates that cause slow loading of the pfSense management page in FF, for example). Lately I’ve found that the Google+ script seems to kill firefox, so I use Chrome for logged-in Google activities.
But Chrome’s handling of certificates is abhorrent. I’ve never seen anything so resolutely destructive to security and utility. It is the most ill-considered, poorly implemented, counter-productive failure in UI design and security policy I’ve ever encountered. It is hateful and obscene. A disaster. An abomination. The ill-conceived excrement of ignorant twits. I’d be happy to share my unrestrained feelings privately.
I’ve discussed the problem before, but the basic issues are that:
- The certificate authority is NOT INVALID, Chrome just doesn’t recognize it because it is self-signed. There is a difference, dimwits.
- This is a private network (10.x.x.x or 192.168.x.x) and if you pulled your head out for a second and thought about it, white-listing private networks is obvious. Why on earth would anyone pay the cert mafia for a private cert? Every web-interfaced appliance in existence automatically generates a self-signed cert, and Chrome flags every one of them as a security risk INCORRECTLY.
- A “valid” certificate merely means that one of the zillions of cert mafia organizations ripping people off by pretending to offer security has “verified” the “ownership” of a site before taking their money and issuing a certificate that placates browsers
- Or a compromised certificate is being used.
- Or a law enforcement certificate is being used.
- Or the site has been hacked by criminals or some country’s law enforcement.
- etc.
A “valid” certificate doesn’t mean nothing at all, but close to it.
So one might think it is harmless security theater, like a TSA checkpoint: it does no real harm and may have some deterrent value. It is a necessary fiction to ensure people feel safe doing commerce on the internet. If a few percent of people are reassured by firm warnings and are thus seduced into consummating their shopping carts, improving ad traffic quality and thus ensuring Google’s ad revenue continues to flow, ensuring their servers continue sucking up our data, what’s the harm?
The harm is that it makes it hard to secure a website. SSL does two things: it pretends to verify that the website you connect to is the one you intended to connect to (but it does not do this) and it does actually serve to encrypt data between the browser and the server, making eavesdropping very difficult. The latter useful function does not require verifying who owns the server, which can only be done with a web of trust model like perspectives or with centralized, authoritarian certificate management.
How to fix Chrome:
The damage is done. Millions of websites that could be encrypted are not because idiots writing browsers have made it very difficult for users to override inane, inaccurate, misleading browser warnings. However, if you’re reading this, you can reduce the headache with a simple step (Thanks!):
Right click on the shortcut you use to launch Chrome and modify the launch command by adding the following “--ignore-certificate-errors”
Once you’ve done this, chrome will open with a warning:
YAY. Suffer my ass.
Java? What happened to Java?
Bonus rant
Java sucks so bad. It is the second worst abomination loosed on the internet, yet lots of systems use it for useful features, or try to. There’s endless compatibility problems with JVM versions and there’s the absolutely idiotic horror of the recent security requirement that disables setting “medium” security completely no matter how hard you want to override it, which means you can’t ever update past JVM 7. Ever. Because 8 is utterly useless because they broke it completely thinking they’d protect you from man in the middle attacks on your own LAN.
However, even if you have frozen with the last moderately usable version of Java, you’ll find that since Chrome 42 (yeah, the 42nd major release of chrome. That numbering scheme is another frustratingly stupid move, but anyway, get off my lawn) Java just doesn’t run in chrome. WTF?
Turns out Google, happy enough to push their own crappy products like Google+, won’t support Oracle’s crappy product any more. As of 42 Java is disabled by default. Apparently, after 45 it won’t ever work again. I’d be happy to see Java die, but I have a lot of infrastructure that requires Java for KVM connections, camera management, and other equipment that foolishly embraced that horrible standard. Anyhow, you can fix it until 45 comes along…
To enable Java in Chrome for a little while longer, you can follow these instructions to enable NPAPI for chrome <42 (which enables Java). Type “chrome://flags/#enable-npapi” in the browser bar and click “enable.”
Overthrow the Cert Mafia!
The certificate system is badly broken on a couple of levels and the most recent revelation that Turktrust accidentally issued two intermediate SSL CAs which enabled the recipients to issue presumptively valid arbitrary certificates. This is just the most recent (probably the most recent, this seems to happen a lot) compromise in a disastrously flawed system including the recent Diginotar and Comodo attacks. There are 650 root CAs that can issue certs, including some CA‘s operated by governments with potentially conflicting political interests or poor human rights records and your browser probably trusts most or all completely by default.
It is useful to think about what we use SSL certs for:
- Establishing an encrypted link between our network client and a remote server to foil eavesdropping and surveillance.
- To verify that the remote server is who we believe it to be.
Encryption is by far the most important, so much more important than verification that verification is almost irrelevant, and fundamental flaws with verification in the current CA system make even trying to enforce verification almost pointless. Most users have no idea what what any of the cryptic (no pun intended) and increasingly annoying alerts warning of “unvalidated certs” mean or even what SSL is.
Google recently started rejecting self-signed certs when attempting to establish an SSL encrypted POP connection via Gmail, an idiotically counterproductive move that will only make the internet less secure by forcing individual mail servers to connect unencrypted. And this is from the company who’s cert management between their round-robin servers is a total nightmare and there’s no practical way to ever be sure if a connection has been MITMed or not as certs come randomly from any number of registrars and change constantly.
What I find most annoying is that the extraordinary protective value of SSL encrypted communication is systematically undermined by browsers like Firefox in an intrinsically useless effort to convince users to care about verification. I have never, not once, ever not clicked through SSL warnings. And even though I often access web sites from areas that are suspected of occasionally attempting to infiltrate dissident organizations with MITM attacks, I still have yet to see a legit MITM attack in the wild myself. But I do know for sure that without SSL encryption my passwords would be compromised. Encryption really matters and is really important to keeping communication secure; anything that adds friction to encryption should be rejected. Verification would be nice if it worked, but don’t add friction to encryption.
Self-signed certs and community verified certs (like CAcert.org) should be accepted without any warnings that might slow down a user at all so that all websites, even non-commercial or personal ones, have as little disincentive to adding encryption as possible. HTTPSEverywhere, damnit. Routers should be configured to block non-SSL traffic (and HTML email, but that’s another rant. Get off my lawn.)
Verification is unsolvable with SSL certs for a couple of reason, some due to the current model, some due to reasonable human behavior, some due to relatively legitimate law-enforcement concerns, but mostly because absolute remote verification is probably an intractable problem.
Even at a well run notary, human error is likely to occur. A simple typo can, because registrar certs are by default trusted globally, compromise anyone in the world. One simple mistake and everybody is at risk. Pinning does not actually reduce this risk as breaks have so far been from generally well regarded notaries, though rapid response to discovered breaches can limit the damage. Tools like Convergence, Perspectives, and CrossBear could mitigate the problem, but only if they have sufficiently few false positives that people pay attention to the warnings and are built in by default.
But even if issuance were somehow fixed with teams of on-the-ground inspectors and biometrics and colonoscopies, it wouldn’t necessarily help. Most people would happily click through to www.bankomerica.com without thinking twice. Indeed, as companies may have purchased almost every spelling variation and point them all toward their “most reasonable” domain name, it isn’t unreasonable to do so. If bankomerica.com asked for a cert in Ubeki-beki-beki-stan-stan, would they (or even should they) be denied? No – valid green bar, invalid site. Even if misdirections were non-SSL encrypted, it isn’t practical to typo-test every legit URL against every possible fake, and the vast majority of users would never notice if their usual bank site came up unencrypted one day with a DNS attack to a site not even pretending to fake a cert (in fact, studies suggest that no users would notice). This user limitation fundamentally obviates the value of certs for identifying sites. But even a typo-misdirection is assuming too much of the user – all of my phishing spam uses brand names in anchortext leading to completely random URLs, rarely even reflective of the cover story, and the volume of such spam suggests this is a perfectly viable attack. Verification attacks don’t even need to go to a vaguely similar domain let alone go to all the trouble of attacking SSL.
One would hope that dissidents or political activists in democracy challenged environments that may be subject to MITM attacks might actually pay attention to cert errors or use perspectives, convergence, or crossbear. User education should help, but in the end you can’t really solve the stupid user problem with technology. If people will send bank details to Nigeria so that a nationality abandoned astronaut can expatriate his back pay, there is no way to educate them on the difference between https://www.bankofamerica.com and http://www.bankomerica.com. The only useful path is to SSL encrypt all sites and try to verify them via a distributed trust mechanism as implemented by GPG (explicit chain of trust), Perspectives (wisdom of the masses), or Convergence (consensus of representatives); all of these seem infinitely more reliable than trusting any certificate registry, whether national or commercial and as a bonus they escape the cert mafia by obviating the need for a central authority and the overhead entailed; but this only works if these tools have more valid positives than false positives, which is currently far from the case.
Further, law enforcement makes plausible arguments for requiring invisible access to communication. Ignoring the problematic but understandable preference for push-button access without review and presuming that sufficient legal barriers are in place to ensure such capabilities protect the innocent and are only used for good, it is not rational to believe that law enforcement will elect to give up on demanding lawful intercept capabilities wherever possible. Such intercept is currently enabled by law enforcement certificates which permit authorized MITM attacks to capture encrypted data without tipping off the target of the investigation. Of course, if the US has the tool, every other country wants it too. Sooner or later, even with the best vetting, there is a regime change and control of such tools falls into nefarious hands (much like any data you entrust to a cloud service will sooner or later be sold off in an asset auction to whoever can scrape some residual value out of your data under whatever terms suit them, but that too is a different rant). Thus it is not reasonable for activists in democracy challenged environments to assume that SSL certs are a secure way to ensure their data is not being surveilled. Changing the model from intrinsic, automatic trust of authority to a web-of-trust model would substantially mitigate the risk of lawful intercept certs falling into the wrong hands, though also making such certs useless or far harder to implement.
There is no perfect answer to verification because remote authentication is Really Hard. You have to trust someone as a proxy and the current model is to trust all or most of the random, faceless, profit or nefarious motive driven certificate authorities. Where verification cannot be quickly made and is essential to security, out of band verification is the only effective mechanism such as transmitting a hash or fingerprint of the target’s cryptographic certificate via voice or postal mail or perhaps via public key cryptography.
Sadly, the effort to prop up SSL as a verification mechanism has been made at the compromise of widespread, low friction encryption. False security is being promoted at the expense of real security.
That’s just stupid.
The SOPA/PIPA Fight is Not Over
Megaupload, the company that enables easy file transfer used by 50,000,000 people every day, was sized by the DOJ. Check www.megaupload.com
This is an illegal, unconstitutional seizure. It is an example of the scum who run entertainment companies like Universal (who illegally got MegaUpload’s video yanked from youtube by filing a false DMCA takedown) turning US law enforcement and the US judicial system into criminal enforcers to create a business model around theft and intimidation to replace their obsolete and irrelevant role as gate keepers and toll collectors between artists and their audiences.
If SOPA/PIPA pass, links to the sized domain would have to be expunged from any site even talking about them. This is intolerable. It is a subversion of democracy and outright theft of the public domain by those who would retard or even reverse progress to protect their profits and wealth.
The constitution grants the privilege of a temporary copyright to artists and inventors as a mechanism to promote the progress of science and the useful arts. Laws that extend this privilege in a manner that fails to promote the progress of science and the useful arts are plainly unconstitutional. Record companies have no natural right to stop you from using your hardware, your devices, to rearrange the bits on your systems in any way you like. They have turned the discussion to claim they have a property right to your data through manipulation and outright lies. The only fair response to their illegal and heinous acts is to revoke their privilege and drive them swiftly into bankruptcy so they no longer have the resources to bribe our representatives into ignoring the constitution.
The DOJ should be using RICO to shut down entertainment companies that use intimidation to protect profits, not innovative companies acting to expand the public domain in a manner clearly consistent with the goals of the framers of the constitution.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9caPFPQUNs[/youtube]
Strange weekend
We had some people over for dinner and each had their own strange brush
with law enforcement.
At the last minute we invited one of Carolyn’s friends to join us. He was
going to be an hour late or so, but planned to join us as soon as he got
his car back.
He arrived first.
One couple was coming over but we got a call from them shortly before we
expected them: they were robbed while they were out earlier in the day and
needed to figure out what was missing. In the end our friend Liisa came
over as soon as she could but her husband didn’t feel comfortable leaving
the house. Turns out it was some young kids in the neighborhood that have
been breaking into various houses in their neighborhood. They might end up
being very unhappy over their choice of targets thanks to her husband’s
connections to the OPD through his time in Iraq.
Another friend rang the door just about when he was supposed to, but
moments before his bag was stolen out of his car. He saw the house the
kids ran into and wanted to run over to get it. Knowing the gun ownership
rate in Oakland, I called the police first and they arrived in minutes and
went over with him. It turned into a huge production with various
residents covering for each other, lying, getting cuffed, police dogs…
in the end they couldn’t do anything but the OPD were really helpful and
sympathetic and professional. I was very impressed.
The last friend, the one who ended up first, he had to leave early because
he had to bail his friend out of jail in the morning.
.