Free Wordpress themes considered harmful

It used to be that you could tell what was likely to give your computer a virus: if you stayed away from the porn and "free screensavers" then you were pretty much ok. Nowadays, though, with cross-site scripting, it's much harder to gauge which content might be unsafe.

So Why You Should Never Search For Free WordPress Themes in Google or Anywhere Else caught my eye because it's a new example of how free... sometimes isn't. Why bother to exploit people's wordpress blogs, which is illegal in many places, when you can just give them the code and let them install and run it themselves? Mostly it looks like the code found is all about adding spammy SEO-boosting links for dubious properties, but there could definitely be worse elsewhere in those themes: that free theme could be using your blog to install malicious software on your visitors' computers!

Out of the ten sites on the first page of Google, here are the stats:

Safe: 1
Iffy: 1
Avoid: 8
8 out of 10 sites included base64 encoding in their themes. The average WordPress user no doubt knows that Google isn’t the best place to find themes but the stats on these sites show that there are thousands of people downloading them and using them on their websites. Someone who has come to WordPress on the first time is more than likely to type “free WordPress themes” into Google to find a site that gives them what they want. Unfortunately they’re more than likely to end up with spammy links, at best, on their site.

Read the whole article to hear about what might be hiding in that free template you just downloaded. Basically, if you see a bunch of random encoded stuff that you don't understand, you should be awfully wary... Thankfully, the author demonstrates the use of two tools for figuring out if that theme you'd like ot try is safe: Theme Authenticity Checker and Exploit scanner. I guess those are the new antivirus for Wordpress?

Will Facebook's choice of social authentication (face CAPTCHAs) lead to huge gains in facial recognition software?

Some of my friends,
for your future hacking pleasure
by Terriko.

We've actually talked about this sort of thing considerably within my research group, so it's hardly a new idea, but it's still interesting because I hadn't heard of a large scale implementation of this before: Nevermind CAPTCHA, Facebook Asks If You Know Your Friends.

They're calling it "social authentication" where rather than reading obfuscated text as in a normal CAPTCHA, you're asked to identify friends.

"Instead of showing you a traditional captcha on Facebook, one of the ways we may help verify your identity is through social authentication," writes Rice. "We will show you a few pictures of your friends and ask you to name the person in those photos. Hackers halfway across the world might know your password, but they don't know who your friends are."

Of course, that's not true at all. For many people with public profiles, flickr accounts, etc. it's pretty easy for a hacker to identify your friends. (Even easier if your would-be hacker is a jilted lover or angry sibling, but presumably those folk could also pass a regular CAPTCHA.) The key here isn't that this social authentication isn't hackable, though, it's that the hack has to be more carefully crafted to your account, and may well require a human to do the facial recognition necessary, thus slowing down the attack and doing exactly what CAPTCHAs were intended to do.

I'm curious to see how well it works in practice, though. CAPTCHAs in their current "mangled text" form relied on assumptions about the ineffectiveness computer text recognition... assumptions that have been rapidly broken as determined attackers and researchers have improved our text recognition algorithms. (Nowadays, many captchas can be bypassed with a higher than 90% success rate. Here's a link to one such paper but a websearch will turn up many others.)

Friends in costume
by Terriko.

So the interesting question to me is "Will Facebook's choice of Face CAPTCHAs lead to huge gains in facial recognition software?" -- we're well overdue for gains in that area, actually, given that law enforcement is hoping to use facial recognition to stop crime and even terrorism, but the technology is so poor right now that if they used it now they'd likely be arresting a lot of innocent folk. Facebook will lead to some great cases: What about when your friends are in costumes? Wearing different makeup? Different lighting? Different poses? Different hair?

Beyond the usual halloween costumes, my facebook friends include theatre geeks, haunted house aficionados, members of the 501st legion of Star Wars costumers and folk involved with things like the Society for Creative Anachronism. Will my friends' and acquaintances' penchant for elabourate costumes mean that I'm more secure? Or will it mean that I'll have more trouble identifying them in photos unless I've seen their standard costumes before?

Mostly I'm torn between excitement at new gains in image processing and a vague sense of unease when I contemplate the potential applications of better facial recognition software.

"My account got hacked"

Some bite-sized wisdom from Jeremiah Grossman:

Funny how people, "my account got hacked," rather than "someone hacked into my account", like they think getting hacked is an act of nature.

I had a good laugh, but it's got me wondering... given how frequently attacks occur online, maybe it really does make sense for people to conceptualize attacks as something that just happens as opposed to something more akin to "that guy robbed me." Makes it easier to deal with somehow, or perhaps easier to accept that there will likely be no retribution?

And more disturbingly, does this "act of nature" approach to hacking explain the general public's sometimes apathetic response to routine privacy violations, both online and offline?

Zuckerberg... hacked?

There's an amusing story up on TechCrunch suggesting that Mark Zuckerberg's fan page may have been hacked.

Obviously, Zuckerberg didn’t actually write it. Or at least, we’re pretty sure he didn’t. Instead, it would appear that his fan page was hacked. Facebook has now taken down the page — but not before we grabbed a screenshot.

Honestly, these things happen. But what made the story actually funny to me was this tweet:

@snipeyhead Hah. FB is flagging the Tech Crunch article reporting on Zuckerberg's fan page hack as "abusive or spammy" http://twitpic.com/3thf68 #classy

Edit: More news on what happened according to Facebook: Facebook blames bug for Zuckerberg page hack

Ethical hacking? How about some ethical writing?

Now, I haven't verified this at all, but here's an interesting link for you: Ankit Fadia / Manu Zacharia - "Network Intrusion Alert" Heavily Plagiarized.

An extremely detailed analysis has been performed for the first chapter (10 pages) to show the scope and method of plagiarism. Our analysis shows that roughly 90% of the first chapter, including the six graphics used, has been taken from other sources. Due to time constraints, notes are used for brevity for the rest of the material.

Given my experiences with plagiarism among my undergraduate students and the recent Cooks Source plagarism story (which attracted quite a lot of attention)... I'm sadly inclined to believe that this entire book may be plagiarized.

What's funny about this story is that the book in contention here is titled "Network Intrusion Alert: An Ethical Hacking Guide to Intrusion Detection." Emphasis mine.

Facebook now enabling annoying phone calls and paper junk mail?

Drowning in Verizon junk mail
by Night-thing.

Sophos points out that Facebook has made yet another change to the way it handles your information: this time, allowing third-party developers access to contact information on Facebook.

Now, part of me wants to just shrug: it's always been technically possible for third party developers to get access to this information because of the current state of web security. It's long been true that anyone who can execute JavaScript in your browser on a site (e.g. every facebook app) can gain access to anything you can see. So if your friend installed FarmVille and you've allowed your friend to see your phone number, FarmVille can see your phone number (and the pictures of you in that horrible halloween costume, and that drunken post you made on your ex's wall...). And if you install FarmVille, they can even more easily glean your phone number and anything else on your profile. What Facebook's doing is in some ways good: they're helping to make this clear to users, and maybe even helping to track who is actually looking at and using that info.

But of course, most people aren't aware that this has always been possible, so they're suddenly envisioning FarmVille sending them paper brochures filled with new crop info, or phoning all their friends to ask why they haven't helped out on the farm lately. Maybe an automated call would help convince you to join the game and seek out that lost kitten?

And maybe those third party apps didn't realize they could do it either, and they're salivating over the extended marketing possibilities. Technically possible doesn't imply endorsed by Facebook the way putting the ability into the API does, so while getting this information might have been in the realm of sketchy scams before, now it's going to be considered a legitimate asset by more companies. After all, you consented when you installed the app. And remember, corporate assets do tend to be about making money, so don't assume they won't sell those lists.

So, while it was technically feasible before, maybe now is a good time to reconsider what data you keep within Facebook. And it's always a good time to re-evaluate which applications you have installed or will install. As always, I recommend that you don't leave anything on facebook you wouldn't want shared with the world, so now's a great time to delete your phone number and address from your facebook profile. And if you don't? Well, don't be too surprised when you start getting texts saying that someone needs help with their FarmVille crops.

A bit late: Santa's privacy policy

A bit late, but sent to me by a few folk as a fun follow up to A brutally honest privacy policy, here's a gem of a privacy policy from... Santa Claus.

Santa Claus requires your information in order to compile his annual list of Who is Naughty and Who is Nice, and to ensure accuracy when he checks it twice. Your information is also used in connection with delivering the kinds of goods and services you've come to expect from Santa, including but not limited to toys, games, good cheer, merriment, Christmas spirit, seasonal joy, and holly jollyness.

Read the rest here: "Santa's Privacy Policy" and leave those christmas decorations up just one more day before getting back to regular old January.

A brutally honest privacy policy

Dan Tynan has decided to cut through the legalease and confusion inherent in many privacy policies and produced a "real" privacy policy which is open-sourced for anyone to adopt. What results is hilarious and sad at once because it reflects a lot of how "private" data may be used. Here's an excerpt:

"At COMPANY _______ we value your privacy a great deal. Almost as much as we value the ability to take the data you give us and slice, dice, julienne, mash, puree and serve it to our business partners, which may include third-party advertising networks, data brokers, networks of affiliate sites, parent companies, subsidiaries, and other entities, none of which we’ll bother to list here because they can change from week to week and, besides, we know you’re not really paying attention.

We’ll also share all of this information with the government. We’re just suckers for guys with crew cuts carrying subpoenas.

Remember, when you visit our Web site, our Web site is also visiting you. And we’ve brought a dozen or more friends with us, depending on how many ad networks and third-party data services we use. We’re not going to tell which ones, though you could probably figure this out by carefully watching the different URLs that flash across the bottom of your browser as each page loads or when you mouse over various bits. It’s not like you’ve got better things to do.

...

So just to recap: Your information is extremely valuable to us. Our business model would totally collapse without it. No IPO, no stock options; all those 80-hour weeks and bupkis to show for it. So we’ll do our very best to use it in as many potentially profitable ways as we can conjure, over and over, while attempting to convince you there’s nothing to worry about.

Read the rest along with commentary on Dan's blog. He notes that it’s 5,085 words shorter than Facebook’s policy, just for comparison.

Security Costs vs Benefits: Should companies deploy SSL to deal with Firesheep?

SSL
by jeff_golden.

Yesterday, I talked about why end-users don't care about security and how that actually makes a certain amount of sense for them since the cost of behaving more securely can overwhelm the cost of an actual breach.

However, what I didn't talk about is whether this is true for companies. A single security breach in a single user account maybe doesn't cost a company much, but if breaches get common enough that they start losing users, it could be a problem with a much higher cost.

While users trying to protect themselves from curious folk with firesheep are counseled to use a VPN, website owners can choose to do encryption right from their end using SSL. But it was thought that SSL was computationally costly and even environmentally costly due to the supposed need for extra electricity and machines.

But who's been looking at what those costs actually are? A blog post entitled Overclocking SSL looked at the severity of these costs as they deployed SSL, and made a pretty clear statement:

If there's one point that we want to communicate to the world, it's that SSL/TLS is not computationally expensive any more. Ten years ago it might have been true, but it's just not the case any more. You too can afford to enable HTTPS for your users.

So there you have it: the people who should be protecting users from firesheep attacks are probably the companies who run the websites, since SSL isn't likely to be as costly to them as numerous complaints and support requests would be from their users. The cost equation might not be the same for all organizations, since the cost of certificates and labour can be non-trivial if you don't already have expertise on hand. But sure enough, Google has decided to provide https access by default to all gmail users, so they clearly believe it's worth it.

This leads to an interesting question: Does the burden of security always fall heavily on corporations and large organizations rather than on end-users? Many would argue that this is naive and that users must bear some responsibility, others would argue that only corporations have the resources necessary to make an impact on security. This is a much larger discussion that I expect we'll see occurring over and over again for a very long time.

Apathy or sensible risk evaluation: why don't people care about security?

Starbucks' Christmas Bokeh
by pierofix.

Engineer Gary LosHuertos decided to try Herding Firesheep in New York City: He sat down in a Starbucks, opened up his laptop and started gathering profiles, then sent messages to people whose facebook accounts he could access warning them of the security flaws. Some people closed up and left, but some just ignored his message and went on with their day. Confused, he sent another message, but they just didn't seem to care and continued using their accounts.

This is the most shocking thing about Internet security: not that we are all on a worldwide system held together with duct tape that has appalling security vulnerabilities; not that a freely available tool could collect authentication cookies; and certainly not that there are people unaware of either. What's absolutely incomprehensible is that after someone has been alerted to the danger (from their own account!) that they would casually ignore the warning, and continue about their day.

But is this shocking? To someone who cares about security, maybe. To someone who knows people? Less so.

Cormac Herley has an absolutely great paper entitled "So Long, And No Thanks for the Externalities: The Rational Rejection of Security Advice by Users"

It is often suggested that users are hopelessly lazy and unmotivated on security questions. They chose weak passwords, ignore security warnings, and are oblivious to certificates errors. We argue that users’ rejection of the security advice they receive is entirely rational from an economic perspective. The advice offers to shield them from the direct costs of attacks, but burdens them with far greater indirect costs in the form of effort.

So let's think a little bit about cookies and firesheep. One of the ways to be most safe is to browse using a VPN. For someone who already has one set up, this is pretty much a matter of toggling something on your computer: pretty low difficulty and less trouble than having your accounts hacked. You can see why many geeks think it's ridiculous that people wouldn't just secure their sites: even if you include time setting up the VPN, for many folk that's a task that falls under the heading of "something I meant to do anyhow" and isn't really perceived as costly.

But if you're not a computer-savvy person who has a server online to host a VPN, setting up a VPN can be stupidly costly. Maybe you'd have to replace your router with one that can handle it. Maybe you'd have to pay for hosting. Maybe you'd have to spend hours figuring out how to generate keys, or pay someone else to do that. Maybe just figuring out what you need to do at all is going to take hours. Quickly, the hours required seem worth more than the cost of having some stranger send you messages from your own facebook account, or maybe set your status message to something embarrassing.

Perhaps what we need to raise the costs of a security mishap is a little evil. It's actually easy to craft a firesheep-based attack that would raise the cost high enough to make VPN hunting (or just not using the Starbucks wireless) seem worthwhile to most people: Log into someone's account, delete all their status messages, notes and photos, defriend all their friends. Since there's no easy way to back up your facebook profile, the results would be devastating and partially unrecoverable: worth more than the pain of setting up a VPN or going without FB while in a coffee shop. It might be easier to litigate for theft/unauthorized access than it is to restore that profile, so I don't recommend any security vigilantes start doing this!

So I guess the take-home message here is that while it's worth trying to educate users so they can make smarter decisions, they're not necessarily being delusional or foolish when they just say "meh" and go on with their lives. If we want to make a really huge impact, we need security solutions that are so low-pain that there's no longer any rational reason to reject them.

Apparently Facebook hates privacy so much that they pay lobbyists to stop privacy laws

Privacy is not a crime
by sunside.

This maybe shouldn't surprise anyone, but Mashable is reporting that Facebook Lobbied to Kill Social Networking Privacy Act in the USA.

It's one thing to believe that privacy isn't important, or to make mistakes that expose users, but paying people to lobby against privacy legislation that might protect your users seems like a big step further. It makes me concerned as a user of the service.

Incidentally, Facebook has already broken Canadian privacy law (they're not the only ones), and likely the laws of several other countries, so I guess it makes sense that they wouldn't want to run afoul of further laws... but I really wish they'd do this by handling privacy issues better rather than paying people to make sure the laws don't come into effect. Maybe the law was simply ill-conceived (I haven't read it) but this really doesn't sound like the actions of a socially-responsible company. Very disappointing.

Why 12 year olds may be our best bug hunters

You may have heard the news: Mozilla pays 12-year-old San Jose boy for hunting bugs in system:

bugged
by Oℓivia.

It's safe to say a typical Willow Glen 12-year-old doesn't earn $3,000 for a couple of weeks' worth of work. Then again, Alex Miller is no typical 12-year-old.

Alex is a bug hunter, but the bugs he's uncovering are unlikely to end up in any entomological reference book. Instead, the bug Alex found was a valid critical security flaw buried in the Firefox web browser. For his discovery, he was rewarded a bug bounty of $3,000 by Mozilla, the parent company of Firefox.

Much of the coverage I've seen has been along the lines of "wow, if a 12 year old can find a bug, then anyone can do this!" which I think is awesome if it has more people out looking through code in hopes of one of those $3k bounties. But I also find that attitude a little sad because frankly, Alex Miller sounds like a pretty smart guy and implying that what he did is easy because he's young is a bit condescending and likely incorrect.

But the more I think about it, the more I think that maybe younger bughunters have some natural advantages, and maybe we should go out of our way to recruit them. I taught 17 year olds doing in-lab tutorials for several years running, and work students down to around 12 years old when I've taught mini-courses in the spring, and they're pretty darned sharp.

Here's some assets younger folk bring to the table when it comes to security flaws:

• A different point of view -- Some teachers take it as incredibly frustrating that their students just don't see the world the way they do because it can be hard to teach without common ground, but I've always found it fascinating how my students will write code in ways completely different to what I expect. Frankly, I don't see this kind of diversity when I work with my colleagues, probably because we have similar educational backgrounds. A different way to think can help you find things that others are going to miss, in research or in security bug hunting!
  
  
• Time -- Alex Miller says he only spend 90 minutes/day for around 10 days to find his bug, but in general tweens and teens can have a lot more free time than their adult counterparts. Sure, there's school and homework and often a slew of extra-curriculars, but there's usually less time spent on childcare, laundry, groceries, cooking, cleaning, yardwork. Younger students may do some of that, but usually not all of the above.
  
  
• Enthusiasm -- Let's face it; if you stare at code all day at work, you're not always likely to set aside 90 minutes/day to do it at home. Whereas when I was a teenager and was writing essays at school, 90 minutes of debugging sounded like a lot more fun!
  
  
• Chutzpah -- It's easy for us as adults to think "meh, so many people have looked at this... I'll never find anything" and in general the students I work with have a lot more guts and are just more willing to believe that they personally will change the world if they just try. Certainly, my gaming students often propose genre-busting epic game ideas that I can just imagine getting shot down at a company meeting.
  

So maybe we shouldn't be saying "if a 12 year old can do it, anyone can" and instead thinking "how can I channel my inner 12 year old?"

Quick Hit: Firesheep

Mountain view with sheep
by Jule_Berlin.

By now, probably everyone's already heard of firesheep, the nice user-friendly way to use cookies to do session hijacking. Want to be logged in as someone else on Facebook? No problem.

It's nothing spectacular on a technical level, since it's been easy enough to use other people's cookies for quite some time, but it's a pretty impressive social hacking tool. It's making it clear to a lot of people (and media) that this is a real problem, and that it's an exploit anyone can do now.

I'm actually sort of surprised that I haven't seen this earlier: it used to be a bit of a game in the undergrad lounge to see what one could sniff off the network, with people using some tool whose name I've forgotten to show any images that came up from users surfing on the wireless. Hacking session cookies would have been a fun addition to our childish games -- and I'll bet plenty of college kids are using it for just that. Or for checking out their ex-boyfriends/girlfriends...

Does expiring passwords really help security?

Change is Easy
Originally uploaded by dawn_perry

I've heard a lot of arguments as to why expiring passwords likely won't help. Here's a few:

• It's easy to install malware on a machine, so the new password will be sniffed just like the old.
  
• It costs more: frequent password changes result in more forgotten passwords and support desk calls.
  
• It irritates users, who will then feel less motivated to implement to other security measures.
  
• Constantly forcing people to think of new, memorable passwords leads to cognitive shortcuts like password-Sep, password-Oct, password-Nov...
  

And yet, many organizations continue to force regular password changes in order to improve security. But what if that's not what's really happening? Three researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have unveiled what they claim to be the first large-scale study on password expiration, and they found it wanting.

They focus especially on the idea that consecutive passwords will be related, and build a system which could try a variety of transforms such as changing which letter was uppercase, duplicating letters/numbers/symbols, and even "leet" translation (eg: raven becomes r@v3n). The implications of their results are fairly clear and potentially disturbing for those who thought password changing was providing extra security in the case of a breach:

• With offline attacks: "On average, roughly 41% of passwords can be broken from an old password in under 3 seconds."
  
• With online attacks: "An average of 13% of accounts can be broken (with cer- tainty) in 5 online guesses, and 18% can be broken in 10 guesses."
  
• "As we expand our consideration to other types of transform trees, we would not be surprised to see these success rates jump significantly."
  

In essence, they've shown that changing passwords doesn't provide nearly as much security as system designers had hoped, and they suggest we abandon the practice rather than continue to annoy users with a policy that has been proven ineffective.

Privacy and Twitter lists

I think twitter may have among the simplest privacy settings of any social network. Your choices are either everything you post is public, or everything you post is private.

But simple does not mean that things will stay private. Just like everything on the internet, the minute you post something someone else might choose to share it. Some researchers have actually studied how often people retweet private content on Twitter.

Something I haven't seen studied, however, is how private information can leak out through twitter lists.

Twitter allows you to make lists of people who you'd like to have grouped together. For example, I have a list of technical women who I follow. These are women in technology who I've met in person or interacted with extensively online, and I really made it for my own personal use but since it's a public list others can (and do) follow it. Presumably they're looking for more cool women to expand their social networks.

Twitter allows you to see what lists a person has been added to, and this is where it gets interesting. Let's take a look at the lists of which I am a member and see what we can learn about me.

Here's a few things you can get a glance:

• I have a lot of real-life friends on twitter (and now you know many of them are)
• I'm a musician
• I work in security, technology and on open source software
• I'm speaking at an upcoming conference and have attended a variety of events
• My friend Leigh is stalking me ;)
• I live in Ottawa

Wait... what? Despite the fact that I explicitly chose to say a more generic "Canada" in my profile information, my current city can be determined by the fact that it shows up in several of the lists I'm on. There's of course no way to be sure that any of this is true, but when more than one person lists me as being in Ottawa it seems fairly reasonable to guess.

I'm not personally concerned (obviously, since I'm talking about all this information in a public blog post!) but some folk are much more private than I am.

So what are your options if you want to hide this information? Well, if I don't like the lists I'm on, I can... uh... There's no apparent way to leave a twitter list. I suspect one could block the list curator, but the people revealing your location are most likely to be actual real life friends: people you wouldn't want to block. So you'd have to resort to asking nicely, but that's assuming you even notice: while you can get notifications of new followers, you do not get notified when you're added to a list. I've been asked about exactly two of the lists I've been put on (thanks @ghc!) so obviously it's not the social norm to ask (I certainly have never asked anyone I've listed!)

A quick check says I can usually get the current (and sometimes some former) cities for many of my friends, as well as information related to their occupations, interests, and events they've attended. For most of these people, I know this isn't information they consider private either. But it's obviously possible that this could be a problem... I wonder how many people it affects in a negative way?

Maybe this is a potential little workshop paper if I have time to analyse a whole bunch of twitter lists. Anyone want to lend me a student who's interested in social media privacy?

Edit: A note for those concerned about not being that privacy-violating friend. You can make twitter lists private if you want (it's just not the default), so just do that for the lists you think are sensitive and you're good to go!