View proposed changes to the Facebook SRR/ToS

fb_governanceYou can view and comment on changes to the Facebook SRR (Statement of Rights and Responsibilities or better known as “Terms of Service”) located on the Facebook Governance Page.  You can download and review the redlined proposed changes here.  The deadline for comment is 12pm PST August 18th.  It is important for Facebook users to review these new terms as there are significant changes to the SRR and the wording that is used.  Most of the SRR will affect your privacy as a Facebook user.

For example, make sure you note the following:

1. For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (“IP content”), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non‐exclusive, transferable, sub‐licensable, royalty free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (“IP License”).  This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account (unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it).

3. When you add an application and use Platform, your content and information is shared with the application.  We require applications to respect your privacy settings, but your agreement with that application will control how the application can use the content and information you share.

4. When you publish content or information using the “everyone” setting, it means that everyone, including people off of Facebook, will have access to that information and we may not have control over what they do with it.

You should already know these things though, right?  🙂 Remember: Anything you post to Facebook private or not…consider it public information.  You can leave your comments on the Facebook Governance Page or feel free to comment here.  We would love to hear your opinion of these upcoming changes.

Twitter and Facebook DDoS was Targeted at One User

The following article was just posted over at CNET News regarding the massive DD0S (Distributed Denial of Service) that targeted Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal and more.

Via CNET News:

A pro-Georgian blogger with accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal and Google’s Blogger and YouTube was targeted in a denial of service attack that led to the site-wide outage at Twitter and problems at the other sites on Thursday, according to a Facebook executive.

Read the entire article here.

New Research Released on Koobface

Today Trend Micro released probably the most comprehensive research yet on the Koobface social network worm.  This research details how Koobface works, the malicious payloads it carries and how this worm has spread to all the major social networks.  The most recent victim being Twitter.   Most alarming is that Koobface will still continue to evolve and is the beginning of a new generation of malware targeting social networks.

Check out the article and download the PDF for the full report.  We will also have this link posted in the “Research” section of the site.

Security and Privacy in Social Networks Bibliography

We just added a fantastic link to 70+ academic papers about security and privacy issues in social networks. It is maintained by Joseph Bonneau from the University of Cambridge.  You will see a page titled “Research” at the top of the page where you can get links to this and other academic papers and research papers.

Thanks to Joe for the submission!

Another Twitter Scam: Twitviewer

twitviewerOne of the trending topics today on Twitter was “Twitviewer” becuase of a site called Twitviewer[d0t]net which asks visitors to enter in your Twitter user id and password to find out who is “stalking” you.  When you do, you get a sample of people on Twitter that are not even following you as stated in this Mashable post.  The app also sends out a tweet using your credentials stating: “Want to know whos stalking you on twitter!?: hxxp://TwitViewer[d0t]net”.  If you did fall victim to this you better change your password ASAP!  Check out the screenshot of the site before it was taken down…yeah, phishy indeed.

Who knows what the developers of this application were planning (malicious or others).  Regardless, you should never give a third party site (especially ones that look phishy like this one) your Twitter credentials.  In fact, I recommend you only use third party Twitter sites that use OAuth for authenticating you to Twitter.  That way you don’t have to give your credentials to the web site and worry about them being compromised.  Also, look to see what the purpose of the site is before you give the jewels away…if it’s a way to see who’s following you, enter credentials to get millions of followers, etc…then it’s probably a scam or just completely useless.

Think about this.  If the developer of a site like this wanted to they could easily use your captured Twitter credentials and start trying them on other social networks and/or web mail services.  They can then use these credentials for anything else they wanted.  Unfortunatly, most users of these sites use the same password for everything.  Again, this is a reminder to use a password manager if you are one of those that use the same user id/password for everything.  See this article for more information on password managers and social media web sites.

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Social Zombies Invade Las Vegas!

zombieYes, you are reading the title of this post correctly!  Massive Zombie attacks at DefCon this year…bring your shotgun (we are kidding of course, please do not bring firearms to DefCon…you will make the goons very unhappy)!  Seriously though, Kevin Johnson and I will be presenting “Social Zombies: Your Friends Want to Eat Your Brains” at DefCon 17 in Las Vegas on Sunday, August 2nd at 4pm.

My part of the talk is focused on security and privacy concerns with social networks, fake accounts, using social networks for penetration testing and the proliferation of bots on social networks.  I will also be talking about a new version of Robin Wood’s fantastic “Twitterbot” (we actually have a new name for the tool which will be announced at DefCon).  I’ll be providing a live demo showing the new and improved features of his tool!  Big shoutout to Robin for all the work he did on this tool!

The other speaker is Kevin Johnson who you may know as the project lead for BASE and SamuraiWTF (Web Testing Framework).  Kevin is also a SANS instructor for Security 542 (Web App Penetration Testing and Ethical Hacking).  When he isnt managing projects and teaching he’s most likely abusing “playing with” social networks.  Kevin will be talking about SocialButterfly which is an application that can leverage and exploit various social network API’s.  He will also talk about manipulating social networks (and thier users) with third-party applications.  Remember: please accept any and all “friend requests” from Kevin Johnson! :-)

From our talk abstract:

In Social Zombies: Your Friends want to eat Your Brains, Tom Eston and Kevin Johnson explore the various concerns related to malware delivery through social network sites. Ignoring the FUD and confusion being sowed today, this presentation will examine the risks and then present tools that can be used to exploit these issues.

This presentation begins by discussing how social networks work and the various privacy and security concerns that are caused by the trust mass that is social networks. We use this privacy confusion to exploit members and their companies during our penetration tests.

The presentation then discusses typical botnets and bot programs. Both the delivery of this malware through social networks and the use of these social networks as command and control channels will be examined.

Tom and Kevin next explore the use of browser-based bots and their delivery through custom social network applications and content. This research expands upon previous work by researchers such as Wade Alcorn and GNUCitizen and takes it into new C&C directions.

Finally, the information available through the social network APIs is explored using the bot delivery applications. This allows for complete coverage of the targets and their information.

How did this talk come together?  Kevin and I had some past converations regarding social network bots (mostly from my Notacon 6 talk) and decided that much of our research was similar so it made sense to “combine forces” to work on some of this research together.  Also, by working on bots and socnet bot delivery mechinisms we hope to raise awareness about some of the security and privacy threats that are out there, not just for the users of social networks.  Oh, and we both like Zombies.  See you at DefCon!

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Password Length and Complexity for Social Media Sites

July 1st was “Twittersec” day as coined by @hevnsnt over at I-Hacked.com to designate July 1st as change your Twitter password day. Why? Mostly because July is the “month of Twitter bugs” created by a security researcher in which he will announce a bug in a “3rd party Twitter application” everyday for the month of July to raise awareness on security issues with the Twitter API. Technically, this should be “month of 3rd party” Twitter bugs but whatever. Either way it will raise awareness about some of the security issues of Twitter and 3rd party applications.

ANYWAY, back to my point….I sent out some tweets about changing your Twitter password and now being a good time to use a password manager like Keepass to manage multiple, complex passwords for everything…not just social media sites. One problem though is that each site might have different password length and complexity requirements. This becomes an annoying issue when you choose a randomly generated password like I suggest when using a password manager. You will encounter many sites that have specific requirements and others that do not. Obviously, the longer and more complex the password is the harder it is to crack so I suggest going as long as you can. Sad that there are these limitations on certain sites (blame the site developers) but if you set your random password generator to a very large number (I recommend at least 20 with a mix of everything you can throw at it including white spaces if the site will let you), it’s as good as your going to get.

Keep in mind, some applications even supported by the site (like the Facebook app for BlackBerry and iPhone) might not like passwords over a certain length or even certain special characters…you will know once you use these apps. Also, I mention Keepass as a password manager because you can use it on a BlackBerry or Windows Mobile device as well…an iPhone version is being worked on. So here you go…max password lengths for the major social media sites:

Twitter
None. I tried a 500 character password with everything but white spaces and it worked.

Facebook
None. I tried a 1000 character password with everything but white spaces and it worked.

MySpace
10 characters! Wow…really bad. Now I know another reason MySpace sucks.

LinkedIn
16 characters! This is interesting. LinkedIn truncates the password to 16 characters! Even if you put in a password larger then 16 characters it will only use the first 16, you can actually see this when entering in a password. No user notification, no info about this in the ‘help’ section. Sneaky and evil.

YouTube
None. Your account is tied to your Google account so is kind of a pain to change…but I didn’t find any issues with length or complexity.

On another note…I wonder if Twitter and Facebook truncate the passwords at a certain length and don’t tell you? Not sure…but it would be interesting to find out. This is another bad design as a they could easily just hash the entire password (which is a certain manageable length) and the hash is stored in the database not the large character password. Does this mean that sites like MySpace and LinkedIn are storing passwords in clear text? Also, I have run into other sites (non-social network) that actually truncate the password because when you try to login with an overly complex password…you get denied! Then you enter the cycle of doom…resetting your password thinking you fat fingered that password to begin with over and over. :-/

Are social media password limitations working against you?
Finally, just a quick point on this. Social media sites like MySpace and LinkedIn should NEVER have any limitations on password length or complexity. Certain complexity restrictions (like white space or strange characters) I could understand since you would have to use these passwords on mobile devices and other integrated apps. However, there are no technical limitations of just hashing the passwords to a constant length…and we all know storing passwords in a database in clear text is never a good thing.

Shouldn’t these social media sites that you already give your personal information to be trying to protect you the user as best as they can by letting you set a long and complex password? Let’s hope MySpace and LinkedIn get better at this real soon!


Establishing your social media presence with security in mind

If you have been using social media or are curious of the security of this emerging technology you may be interesting reading my recently published article in issue 21 of (IN)SECURE Magazine. In my article I discuss why companies are starting to use social media, the benefits/risks and what information may be posted about your company on social media/networking web sites. I also talk about some cost effective tools your company can use to start your own social media monitoring program (without spending a ton of cash) and how to put in place guidelines for employees regarding the use of social media. Yes, even if you block these sites in the workplace employees are going to use social media/network sites outside of work if you like it or not…you had better get used to it and adapt your policies!

This article started from me actually seeing how much information there is about businesses within social networks. Both good and bad! The information I have found has been extremely valuable when conducting penetration tests. In fact, this information can be so valuable that you may be surprised how easy it is to use this information for social engineering or more…the possibilities are endless. As I pointed out in my article, get together with the business leaders in your marketing and/or public relations group and talk about social media and how to use it with a bit of security and privacy in mind. You might be surprised how receptive they are to the input from a security professional!


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