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[ISN] An Indonesian's Prison Memoir Takes Holy War Into Cyberspace
by InfoSec News 16 Dec '04

16 Dec '04

Forwarded from: William Knowles <wk(a)c4i.org> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62095-2004Dec13.html By Alan Sipress Washington Post Foreign Service December 14, 2004 JAKARTA, Indonesia -- After Imam Samudra was charged with engineering the devastating Bali nightclub bombings two years ago, he taunted his police accusers in court, then greeted his death sentence with the cry, "Infidels die!" So when Samudra published a jailhouse autobiography this fall, it was not surprising that it contained virulent justifications for the Bali attacks, which killed 202 people, most of them foreign tourists. But tucked into the back of the 280-page book is a chapter of an entirely different cast titled "Hacking, Why Not?" There, Samudra urges fellow Muslim radicals to take the holy war into cyberspace by attacking U.S. computers, with the particular aim of committing credit card fraud, called "carding." The chapter then provides an outline on how to get started. The primer on carding is rudimentary, according to U.S. and Indonesian cybercrime experts, but they said the chapter provides a rare glimpse into the mounting threat posed by terrorists using Internet fraud to finance their operations. "The worry is that an army of people doing cybercrime could raise a great deal of money for other activities that terrorists are carrying out," said Alan Paller, research director of the Sans Institute, a U.S. Internet-security training company. Samudra, 34, is among the most technologically savvy members of Jemaah Islamiah, an underground Islamic radical movement in Southeast Asia that is linked to al Qaeda. He sought to fund the Bali attacks in part through online credit card fraud, according to Indonesian police. They said Samudra's laptop computer revealed an attempt at carding, but it was unclear whether he had succeeded. Internet crime experts said Samudra's book seems unprecedented as a tool for recruiting radical Muslims into a campaign of online fraud and building networks of fundraisers. "This is exactly the kind of advice you would give someone who wanted to get started in cybercrime," said Paller, who reviewed a translation of the chapter. "It doesn't focus on a specific technique, but focuses on how you find techniques and focuses on connecting with other people to act loosely together." Titled "Me Against the Terrorist!" the book depicts Samudra on the cover in a now-classic pose from his trial last year in Bali. He is clad in a white shirt and white Muslim skullcap, with his right arm outstretched and a single finger raised as he lectures the judges. Four thousand copies in Indonesian have been issued by a small publisher and are selling for about $4 each in at least seven cities across the islands of Java and Sumatra, said Achmad Michdan, Samudra's attorney, who wrote the forward. Michdan said the publisher is planning a second run and is considering translating the book into English, French and Arabic. Profits benefit Samudra's wife and children. Samudra remains on death row. Most of the book is a memoir that tracks Samudra from his early schooling in Java, through his arms training in the Afghan mountains, his exile in Malaysia and his return to Indonesia. It includes arguments for killing Western civilians and bitter critiques of U.S. policy in Israel, Afghanistan and Iraq, including photographs of Muslim civilian casualties. Toward the end, Samudra informs readers that the United States is not as invincible as they might think. "It would not be America if the country were secure. It would not be America if its computer network were impenetrable," he writes at the beginning of the hacking chapter. He continues by urging fellow militants to exploit this opening: "Any man-made product contains weakness because man himself is a weak creature. So it is with the Americans, who boast they are a strong nation." The chapter is less a how-to manual than a course of study for aspiring hackers and carders. Samudra directs them to specific Indonesian-language Web sites that provide instruction. For those who find these sites too sophisticated, he counsels first learning computer programming languages, in particular Linux, and suggests several other Web sites, including one run by young Muslims. Then he advises learning about hacking by finding mentors through online chats. He lists six chat rooms as sources. Next, Samudra discusses the process of scanning for Web sites vulnerable to hacking, then moves on to a three-page discussion on the basics of online credit card fraud and money laundering. "This is hacking for dummies," said Evan F. Kohlmann, a U.S. consultant on international terrorism who also reviewed the chapter. "But in this day and age, you don't have to be an expert hacker to have a tremendous impact." Kohlmann and other cyberterrorism experts said the kind of online fraud preached by Samudra is becoming increasingly attractive as a source of funding for al Qaeda operatives in several regions of the world. One of the chief hazards posed by Samudra's book is that it could direct religious extremists into the company of more accomplished hackers. Indonesian police assert their country now has more online credit card fraud than any other in the world. "If you succeed at hacking and get into carding, be ready to make more money within three to six hours than the income of a policeman in six months," Samudra tells his readers. "But don't do it just for the sake of money." He adds, "Remember, the main duty of Muslims is jihad in the name of God, to raise arms against the infidels, especially now the United States and its allies." Samudra had first sought to finance the Bali nightclub attacks by ordering the robbery of a shop selling gold jewelry in western Java. The heist allegedly netted five pounds of gold and $500. Then he turned to more lucrative targets on the Internet, police and prosecutors said. At Samudra's trial, police testified that his computer had been used to communicate in chat rooms with others involved in online credit card fraud and contained information on ways to obtain credit card details. Petrus Reinhard Golose, head of cybercrimes investigations for the Indonesian police, said in an interview that Samudra had asked for religious permission to conduct carding from Abubakar Baasyir, the radical cleric and alleged head of Jemaah Islamiah now on trial in Jakarta in connection with terrorist bombings, including the one in Bali. Golose said police did not know whether Baasyir had blessed Samudra's Internet activities. Special correspondent Noor Huda Ismail contributed to this report. *==============================================================* "Communications without intelligence is noise; Intelligence without communications is irrelevant." Gen Alfred. M. Gray, USMC ---------------------------------------------------------------- C4I.org - Computer Security, & Intelligence - http://www.c4i.org *==============================================================* _________________________________________ Open Source Vulnerability Database (OSVDB) Everything is Vulnerable - http://www.osvdb.org/ --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Re: Gait advances in emerging biometrics
by Major Variola (ret) 16 Dec '04

16 Dec '04

At 12:31 PM 12/14/04 -0500, Sunder wrote: >Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/12/14/alt_biometrics/ >Gait advances in emerging biometrics > >By John Leyden (john.leyden at theregister.co.uk) >Published Tuesday 14th December 2004 15:07 GMT > >"Great Juno comes; I know her by her gait." >William Shakespeare, The Tempest > >Retinal scans, finger printing or facial recognition get most of the >publicity but researchers across the world are quietly labouring away at >alternative types of biometrics. > >Recognition by the way someone walk (their gait), the shape of their ears, >the rhythm they make when they tap and the involuntary response of ears to >sounds all have the potential to raise the stock of biometric techniques. >According to Professor Mark Nixon, of the Image Speech and Recognition >Research Group at the University of Southampton, each has unique >advantages which makes them worth exploring. Look up Johansson, et al. Point light displays. Yes you can tell sex, age, etc., from the ratios of rotational axes, etc, but a stone in the shoe is a bitch. All faith is in drivers' licenses, a total joke, I got gummies on your 'prints, all your time-derivatives are mine. But grant$ are good, and flavor$ of DARPA be bitchin.

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EU Moves Forward with Data Retention
by Eugen Leitl 16 Dec '04

16 Dec '04

Link: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/16/0052222 Posted by: samzenpus, on 2004-12-16 07:47:00 from the find-out-what-you-said-last-week dept. KokoBonobo writes " euobserver.com reports on [1]controversial proposals to require EU service operators to retain data about telephone calls and e-mails as part of an overall fight against crime and terrorism. The retained data would not only consist of logs, but of entire conversations and contents of the e-mails and SMS messages. This [2]document from the [3]European Commission's Information Society goes into further detail." [4]Click Here References 1. http://www.euobserver.com/?aid=17906&sid=9 2. http://europa.eu.int/information_society/topics/ecomm/doc/useful_informatio… library/public_consult/data_retention/consultation_data_retention_30_7_04.pdf 3. http://europa.eu.int/information_society/index_en.htm 4. http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=5671&alloc_id=12342&site_id=1&request_id=1128523… p=click&page=%2farticle%2epl ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]

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[wearables] Nokia cellular cameras (fwd from ew206@cam.ac.uk)
by Eugen Leitl 16 Dec '04

16 Dec '04

----- Forwarded message from Mr Ellis Weinberger <ew206(a)cam.ac.uk> -----

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Re: The Values-Vote Myth
by Nomen Nescio 15 Dec '04

15 Dec '04

J.A. Terranson schrieb: > This election *proves* that at least half the electorate, about 60 > million people, are just Useless Eaters, who should be eagerly > awaiting their Trip Up The Chimneys. Wow! A Tim May copycat! (Both the 'useless eaters' and the 'chimney'!)

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Do 'Ocean's Twelve'-Style Heists Really Happen?
by R.A. Hettinga 15 Dec '04

15 Dec '04

This popped up in my "bearer" filter this morning... Cheers, RAH ------- <http://www.mtv.com/movies/news/articles/1494863/12142004/story.jhtml> MTV.com - Movies - News 12.14.2004 9:03 PM EST Reel To Real: Do 'Ocean's Twelve'-Style Heists Really Happen? Sometimes, but the real-life criminals can't possibly be as hot as George Clooney and Brad Pitt. While dodging nemesis Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia), Danny Ocean (Clooney) and Rusty Ryan (Pitt) plan the biggest and most difficult job of their now-storied careers. As the stakes rise higher and higher, even Ocean's straight-arrow wife, Tess (Roberts), gets involved. With astronomical amounts being bandied about, we couldn't help but wonder: What was the biggest heist ever pulled? The Real Story: There have been quite a few enormous heists over the years, several of which bear mentioning here. Art thieves tend to pull the biggest scores (in terms of dollar value, if not creativity). In 1991, in a heist worthy of Ocean's crew, thieves made off with 20 paintings worth about $500 million from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, Holland. The robbers pulled a basic "smash and grab," going up a ladder and through a window and heading back out with some of Van Gogh's most famous works, including "The Potato Eaters" and "Still Life With Sunflowers." However, in a very un-Ocean move, the thieves - after presumably panicking - ditched the paintings not far from the museum. Still, according to "Guinness World Records," it was technically the greatest art robbery ever. The biggest heist in U.S. history - and the biggest "successful" art heist - was a $300 million score from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990. The thieves - who pulled the old "walk in the front door dressed like cops" routine - made off with works by Vermeer, Rembrandt and Manet. All of the paintings are still missing, and the perpetrators are still at large. CNN.com reported in 2002 that the FBI is still actively investigating the case, so perhaps that whole "crime doesn't pay" thing will enter in at some point. Some thieves prefer to kick it old-school, including the man behind the world's largest mugging, which took place in London in 1990 (a good year for crime, it seems). In a heist typical of Matt Damon's Linus, a man mugged a courier carrying a briefcase containing 300 bearer bonds worth a total of $435 million. Pretty impressive, except that within hours every major bank had been informed that the bonds were stolen, rendering them virtually worthless. Finally, our favorite heist - history's richest jewel robbery - truly smacks of the skilled Ocean crew. The heist took place at the Antwerp Diamond Center in Antwerp, Belgium, and netted the thieves an estimated $100 million in gems. No alarms were triggered, the bombproof vault doors were not tampered with and there was no sign of a break-in, so no one knows when 123 of the 160 vaults were actually emptied. The crime was discovered on February 17, 2003, and, according to BBC News, is believed to have been carried out by a veteran group of Italian thieves known only as the School of Turin. While the heists carried out by Ocean and his gang are highly improbable, they are not altogether impossible. And, just like in the movies, things don't always go in the thieves' favor. One major difference between reel and real on this one, though: We doubt that any of these professional criminals are as hot as Clooney and Pitt. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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New, revollutionaary peenjs enlaargment tool! cocksure
by Sam Bermudez 15 Dec '04

15 Dec '04

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[ISN] Done the crime, now it's Mitnick's time
by R.A. Hettinga 15 Dec '04

15 Dec '04

--- begin forwarded text

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Cryptography Research wants piracy speed bump on HD DVDs
by R.A. Hettinga 15 Dec '04

15 Dec '04

<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/12/15/cryptography_research/print.html> The Register Biting the hand that feeds IT The Register ; Internet and Law ; Digital Rights/Digital Wrongs ; Cryptography Research wants piracy speed bump on HD DVDs By Faultline (peter at rethinkresearch.biz) Published Wednesday 15th December 2004 11:49 GMT Analysis Just about a year from today, if not sooner, if we believe the outpourings of both the DVD Forum and the Blu-Ray Disc Association, we will be able to go out to the shops and buy blue laser, high definition, high density DVDs in two completely different designs. We will also be able to buy the players and recorders by then, as well as studio content from virtually every major studio in the world, on one or the other system. If you believe the hype, DVD manufacturers will likely have to buy in two types of DVD manufacturing equipment. Households will have to buy two DVD players. Consumers will have to buy one PC with one type of high density DVD player and buy another separate player to read the other format of disk. We neither believe the hype, nor understand the argument between the two formats. Surely a single format is better for everyone, but it appears not. Every round of format wars that have gone on since the original VHS Betamax wars, has been split, and the result a draw, and it looks like this one will be too. In the end the devices are likely to be virtually identical. The Sony- Panasonic-Philips camp that inspired the Blu-ray version may have slightly more capacity on their discs, that's the official view right now, but it might change. They also have devices out right now and have had them for over a year, but they are very expensive, up at around $2,000 and are not the volume versions that will be able to play pre-recorded material. Eventually these devices will be about 10 per cent more than DVD players are now. The DVD Forum backed Toshiba and NEC technology may be slightly cheaper for studios to manufacture, but then again we only have the word of Toshiba on that, and most DVD producers seem set on supporting both. The disks need to play on PCs, as well as DVDs and games consoles, and it is unlikely that anyone is going to shoot themselves in the foot by making a disc that is incompatible with any of these devices. So Microsoft's VC 9 codec has to be supported, as does the prevalent MPEG2 and H.264 codecs, and nobody is planning to argue the toss about the quality of sound from Dolby. So there is a chance that all of the software on top of these disks is going to be identical. In the end all of the Blu-ray manufacturers are still in the DVD Forum, and given that the Blu-ray leaders make about 90 per cent of the worlds DVD players and that half of the studios have backed the DVD Forum standard, their players may well end up playing both formats. The early consumers may well be asking "What's the difference" a year from now having little clue as to how different the two technologies are, under the "hood." But what if they each choose a different way to protect the content on their disks? How much danger would that put the two groups in? The Content Scrambling System of the DVD has come in for a lot of criticism over the years, as piracy has become relatively rampant. It was designed more or less as a speed bump to put off anyone other than the professional pirate. But then along came the internet, and it has become possible for anyone to download CSS circumvention or to read up, on various websites, how to go about it. The speed bump has been somewhat flattened and it needs reinforcement in the next technology. So it falls to these same companies to build something for the studios that will be rather harder and more persuasive, to act as a hurdle against piracy for these new DVDs. In fact an organization called Advanced Access Content System (AACS), formed back in July by such notables as IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Panasonic, Sony, Toshiba, Disney and Warner Brothers has come together in order to create a decent speed bump against piracy that should last at least for the next decade, a decade during which broadband lines improve to the point where it will be child's play to download even a high definition movie. The definition of what is required has been very clear from the studios. They want a system that has the ability for the security logic to be renewed and which should also have some form of forensic marking in order to help track pirates. At the heart of this protection system will be the safety of the revenue of all the major studios, which now get way in excess of 50 per cent of any given film's revenues from DVD sales. Faultline talked over such a system with its authors this week, who are optimistic about its bid to become the new, but more sophisticated CSS for the next generation DVD disk. Cryptographic Research's senior security architect, who also mockingly refers to himself as "chief anti-pirate" is Carter Laren, and Cryptography Research is both realistic about just what it takes to stop pirates and how difficult that is, as well as optimistic that the two competing associations are set to choose its own submission as the basis for this protection system. Cryptography Research (CR) is just a 15 man intellectual property company, but it was single handedly responsible for discovering how professional pirates use Differential Power Analysis to read encryption keys and break complex coding systems thought to be uncrackable, and has also come up with circumvention strategies. Virtually all the intellectual property around DPA is held by CR and is licensed all over the world. CR also wrote the SSL3 secure sockets layer security version for the IETF. Put simply DPA is a system of "listening" to power distribution on semiconductors as they read encryption keys. Circumvention comes from balancing out all power use when an encryption key is being applied so that it cannot be read just by observing which circuits are active. If it appears to you that DPA is really about making it harder for the "professional" pirate who makes a fortune from illicit manufacture of pirated goods, rather than about stopping college kids from using P2P networks to swap files, then you'd be right. "We would rather chase professional pirates than College students," says Laren, and this shows in his strategy to build a protection system. What CR has built, he calls Self Protecting Digital Content or SPDC. In effect this is a form of content that is no longer passive and includes code that can execute in a specially constructed SPDC virtual machine that resides in each player. The logic behind this approach is that so far Digital Rights Management systems have tried to both support a trust chain, a way of moving decryption keys around between devices, as well as allowing the expression of rules to decide what usage is allowed with that content. What CR does instead is much simpler and more direct. It tries to cut off any player that has been used for mass piracy. "When a pirate makes a copy of a film encoded as SPDC, the output file is cryptographically bound to a set of player decryption keys. So it is easy when looking at a pirated work on a peer to peer network, or any copies found on copied DVDs, to identify which player made those copies," said Laren "When the content owner sends out any further content it can contain on it a revocation of just the player that was used to make a pirated copy." "We picture a message popping up on a screen saying something like 'Disney movies won't play on your player any more please call this number for further information.' Or perhaps 'To fix this please call Disney with your credit card,' something like that anyway. "We know that pirates can make copies by tapping the MPEG stream with modified players, or by making a bit for bit copy of the disk, or by using an analog attack (catching the film stream on the way to the TV over aerial cabling and re-digitizing it). But using this cryptographical binding we have forensic marking visible on the copy." The neat thing about this process is that if someone makes copies for their own use, that can be enabled. Private individuals could be allowed to make copies for other players, even for their friends, and that's no problem. It's only when a pirated copy is discovered coming back to a content owner (presumably watching P2P sites) that a player will get revoked, and that is only effective on content made after that point, with the revocation message in it. When asked Laren said, "No, this is not the same as fingerprinting or watermarking. When you generate a fingerprint you are making each copy that is sold, slightly different and that has some cost implications when stamping disks. Our forensic information is being created by the player's virtual machine at the time it is played (copied) so all the disks can be identical." The virtual machine players create movie outputs that are artistically identical but each one is altered if some minor way. This alteration is just the changing of a few bits of data every few seconds, so every 50 frames or so. And the CR system works such that if ten separate players are used in collusion in a copying process, taking samples of frames from each, it will not only identify one of the players, but all of them and they can be revoked from all future content. "The big problem for studios is piracy based on film copies that have no digital identifiers. Because they can be sent around the internet with no chance of catching the original copier and then you have to go after the P2P user." "The problem now is that everything in this market has accelerated. There are time constraints in that all the studios want to move to better protection as soon as the new disk formats come out and that is set for the end of next year. This means that AACS has to get its skates on if the players for this market are not to be launched ahead of its choice of security system. By that time, if the CR system, or any other system, is to be used, the virtual machine players need to be integrated onto the two format in time for testing and studio acceptance to take place prior to the end of 2005. CR has in fact dropped any attempt to have its actual encryption technologies used in this process. The disk formats will accept RSA or AES 128 bit encryption or both, but CR says this doesn't matter. "The cryptographic portion of this is pretty easy to solve and any cryptographer that knows what he is doing can do a good job of that. So we have withdrawn from that part of the spec and we're just putting forward the binding process to our virtual machine," said Laren. The virtual machine is based on a stripped down DLX processor. CR has taken out the floating point arithmetic and we've made a few changes for the sake of extra security. The DLX is a 32-bit pipelined embedded RISC CPU architecture that has come out of academia and was originally designed for teaching, but is not too unlike the ARM or any other RISC device. It can be built in hardware, expressed in a hardware language like the Verilog Hardware Description Language and CR has a reference implementation in the C programming language. As for the business model of CR, it plans to charge no royalty to the consumer electronics manufacturers, and adheres to the principle of charging the businesses whose security problems it solves, in this case the studios. So it plans to charge, perhaps as little as a couple of cents, for each HD disk that is pressed using the technology. What if only one of the two disk formats agrees to install the player in their HD DVD players? "Well if one format gets its security broken, then that is a basis for suppliers to switch to the other format isn't it," says Laren in a clearly rehearsed sales pitch. But in the end, Self Protecting Digital Content remain only a speed bump. For real pirates, buying a new player every time they get a set of keys revoked is just an inconvenience, but for someone that is casually taking content and placing it on the internet, the loss of function on their personal devices will certainly reduce the activity to only the seriously committed. "We realize that all we are doing is enabling the game that goes on between the pirate and the content owners. We see revocation of keys through this system as taking last mover advantage away from the pirates, and giving it back to the content owners," concludes Laren. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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DaimlerChrysler's Chief Has Armored Mercedes Stolen
by R.A. Hettinga 15 Dec '04

15 Dec '04

<http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000085&sid=aRaEXeRubjHc> Bloomberg DaimlerChrysler's Chief Has Armored Mercedes Stolen Nov. 22 (Bloomberg) -- DaimlerChrysler AG Chief Executive Officer Juergen Schrempp had his S600 Mercedes-Benz armored limousine stolen while it was parked on a street in Stuttgart, the German city in which the carmaker is based. The black company car, which is worth about 800,000 euros ($1 million), disappeared on the night of Oct. 26, police spokesman Klaus-Peter Arand said in a telephone interview. The limousine, which sports a 12-cylinder engine and is equipped with a broadcasting device to help retrieve the car, hasn't yet been found, the police said. Schrempp, 60, has been CEO of DaimlerChrysler since 1995. Hartmut Schick, a spokesman for the world's fifth-largest carmaker, confirmed the theft without giving details. The S600 is the top limousine with the Mercedes brand. The cheapest version of the car costs 129,398 euros, according to the company's Web site. The stolen vehicle had bullet-proof windows, ``finger-thick'' steel plates as part of its chassis as well as tires designed to keep it running even when flat, Bild-Zeitung reported today. The car was probably stolen by the ``Russian mafia,'' the German newspaper said, citing an unidentified investigator. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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