Author Archives: Patrick Howell O'Neill

Domain fronting has a dwindling future

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Getting around government censorship of the internet — like China’s “Great Firewall,” for instance — requires an arsenal of tricks. One of the most common ways is known as “domain fronting,” which can mask internet traffic that would otherwise be blocked. However, the practice was recently banned by Amazon and Google, two cloud behemoths that run the underlying technology behind much of the world’s web traffic. While U.S. lawmakers are calling on tech giants to reconsider their bans, the practice may be soon a relic of the past. Domain fronting uses HTTPS encryption to disguise internet traffic, so that a person who may be using a censored service or visiting a blocked website looks to be visiting a benign website like Google.com. As this in-depth 2015 research paper lays out, it’s an easy technique that can be done without any explicit support from a cloud host. Its been used for years by developers and engineers, including those behind […]

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DOJ drops massive report on its efforts to protect U.S. from cyberattacks

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The Justice Department has laid out its strategy to fight malicious foreign influence and cyberattacks against U.S. elections. The Department of Justice’s internal “Cyber-Digital Task Force” released a 156-page report Thursday night detailing its work regarding election interference, attacks against critical infrastructure, industry and government as well as the spread of propaganda on the internet. Just prior to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announcing the new report, it was reported that the three top cyber officials at the FBI are leaving their posts, according to the Wall Street Journal. It’s a significant blow at a time when the FBI is playing a central role in the Justice Department’s cyber strategy. “The Russian effort to influence the 2016 presidential election is just one tree in a growing forest,” Rosenstein said in prepared remarks. “Russian intelligence officers did not stumble onto the ideas of hacking American computers and posting misleading messages because they had a free […]

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FBI director: Without compromise on encryption, legislation may be the ‘remedy’

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FBI Director Christopher Wray said Wednesday that unless the U.S. government and private industry are able to come to a compromise on the issue of default encryption on consumer devices, legislation may be how the debate is ultimately decided. “I think there should be [room for compromise],” Wray said Wednesday night at a national security conference in Aspen, Colorado. “I don’t want to characterize private conversations we’re having with people in the industry. We’re not there yet for sure. And if we can’t get there, there may be other remedies, like legislation, that would have to come to bear.” Wray described the issue of “Going Dark” because of encryption as a “significant” and “growing” problem for federal, state and local law enforcement as well as foreign law enforcement and intelligence agencies. He claims strong encryption on mobile phones keeps law enforcement from gaining access to key evidence as it relates […]

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Lawmakers call on Amazon and Google to reconsider ban on domain fronting

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Amazon and Google face sharp questions from a bipartisan pair of U.S. senators over the tech giants’ decisions to ban domain fronting, a technique used to circumvent censorship and surveillance around the world. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., sent a letter on Tuesday to Google CEO Larry Page and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos over decisions by both companies in April to ban domain fronting. Amazon then warned the developers of encrypted messaging app Signal that the organization would be banned from Amazon’s cloud services if the service didn’t stop using Amazon’s cloud as cover. “We respectfully urge you to reconsider your decision to prohibit domain fronting given the harm it will do to global internet freedom and the risk it will impose upon human rights activists, journalists, and others who rely on the internet freedom tools,” the senators wrote. The technique uses HTTPS encryption to communicate with […]

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TechCongress program grows as Capitol Hill plays catch-up on tech issues

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Interest is rising in a program that stations technology experts with Congress, giving lawmakers a sorely needed way to understand the litany of society-shifting tech issues that come to their attention. TechCongress opened up its application process for its 2019 Congressional Innovation Fellowship class last week. Started in 2016 with two fellows, the number of fellows has been rising every year since. The 2018 class saw seven fellows, with a record-high five receiving job offers. The 2019 class which will have up to ten fellows. Although cybersecurity and data privacy experts are in the highest demand, health and transportation experts like former Economist editor Sunmin Kim and biotechnologist Robbie Narang have gone through the program. The 2018 class of fellows, which is still active, includes Washington D.C.-based researcher Collin Anderson, former Mandiant consultant James Gimbi and former U.S. Army special operations veteran James Price. The most publicly well-known fellow may be Chris Soghoian, […]

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Russian cybercrime suspect to be extradited to France despite Moscow’s objections

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Russian cybercrime suspect Alexander Vinnik will be extradited to France after a Greek court ruling Friday. Vinnik, 38, has pleaded not guilty to charges of laundering $4 billion in bitcoin while running the cryptocurrency exchange BTC-e. Although Vinnik was arrested under a U.S. warrant, Greek authorities will extradite him to France where he is charged with hacking, money laundering, extortion and involvement in organized crime. The Russian Foreign Ministry criticized the ruling and said the country will look to a response. Vinnik’s lawyer is filing a response, according to Russia’s TASS news agency. “Several days after taking an unfriendly decision to expel Russian diplomats and to deny entry to several Russian citizens, they have adopted a decision to extradite Russian citizen Alexander Vinnik to France,” Russia’s Foreign Ministry wrote in a statement. “It is obvious that Russia cannot leave these actions unanswered.” The decision marks the latest chapter in a months-long intense legal battle over Vinnik’s fate. Vinnik is […]

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LuminosityLink malware author pleads guilty

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The author of the LumunosityLink malware pleaded guilty in federal court on Monday. Colton Grubs, a 21-year-old man from Kentucky, faced up to 25 years in prison had the case gone to trial. LumunosityLink first earned a spotlight in 2015 when Proofpoint researchers looked past the benign advertisements for the product and found a “very aggressive key logger that injects its code in almost every running process on the computer.” The malware was sold for $40 as a Remote Access Tool (RAT) that, according to the product’s advertising, “allows system administrators to manage a large amount of computers concurrently.” In reality, it was malware that allowed over 6,000 customersto take over thousands of computers in 78 countries. Here was LuminosityLink’s website boasting about “powerful surveillance” capabilities: LuminosityLink was sold on HackForums, an infamous information security community that routinely features heavily in cybercrime indictments. The Mirai botnet found its way to […]

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Alleged Silk Road employee extradited from Ireland to U.S.

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An alleged high-level employee of the dark web market Silk Road was extradited from Ireland to the United States on Friday, the Department of Justice announced. This follows a years-long legal fight against extradition that failed last month. Gary Davis, also known as Libertas, is accused of being a salaried administrator on Silk Road, one of the first multimillion dollar dark web markets that took advantage of cryptocurrency. The vast majority of the illicit goods available on Silk Road were illegal drugs but other digital services and goods, including some malware, was available for purchase on the underground market. Silk Road was shuttered in October 2013 after a high-profile FBI investigation ended with the arrest of Ross Ulbricht, who is now serving a double life sentence in American prison. It’s difficult to overstate the degree to which Silk Road, for a short but intense period of time, drew global attention […]

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Google Chrome shifts browser architecture to thwart Spectre attacks

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Google Chrome is enabling a new security feature called Site Isolation in response to the set of speculative execution side-channel attacks known as Spectre and Meltdown. One day after a new Spectre-like attack was disclosed, the newly enabled Site Isolation feature attempts to provide what Google’s security team believes is “the most effective mitigation” possible. This is the latest improvement for Chrome, widely considered to possess the best security features among different browsers. Spectre and Meltdown use the speculative execution feature of a machine’s processors to access memory that is supposed to be off-limits to users. Site Isolation aims to keep data in the same process so that a Spectre attack can’t siphon off important data. The security feature is available in the current version (Chrome 67) of Chrome on Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome OS. The Chrome team is now working on extending the coverage to Android. The team […]

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Industrial cybersecurity firm Radiflow raises $18 million in funding

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Israeli industrial and critical infrastructure cybersecurity company Radiflow has announced that it took in an $18 million investment, led by the Singapore-based multibillion dollar engineering giant ST Engineering. Boasting of doubling sales of its threat detection tools in the last year, Radiflow has over 50 worldwide customers. The company collaborates with partners, including U.S. cybersecurity firms Palo Alto Networks and RSA. ST Engineering will also enter into a partnership with Radiflow that will include access to the Israeli firm’s defensive tools. Radiflow’s customers include critical infrastructure operators in power generation, electricity supply and water facilities. Earlier this year, the company released a case study on a cryptocurrency miner attack against a water facility. Industrial cybersecurity companies are attracting vast sums of investment at the moment. One month ago, the Israeli-American firm Claroty took in a $60 million investment. Industrial cybersecurity companies like Dragos and Nozomi Networks have also taken in multimillion dollar sums in recent months, […]

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