Forwarded From: Simon Taplin <sticker@icon.co.za>
Tricks of the trade obscure hacker tracks and make anonymity easily
attainable
Ever wonder how hackers can spend so much time online and rarely
get caught? After all, everything they do on the Internet should be
logged, right? Web hits, FTP sessions, Telnet connections, newsgroup
postings, burps, and coughs should all be traceable, right? Then how do
they pillage and plunder with such ease?
In the good old days, compromising university or government
accounts and using them to bounce around the Internet was widespread.
Hackers still use these techniques, but they cover their tracks. Temporary
guest accounts, unrestricted proxy servers, buggy Wingate servers, and
anonymous accounts can keep hackers carefree.
Hackers can become invisible on the Internet by obtaining a test
account from an ISP. A hacker can call a small ISP, profess interest, and
open a guest account for a couple of weeks by giving false information.
Then, using Telnet, the unwanted guest can connect to any other
compromised account.
University computers are notorious for their easy accessibility to
the public. Hackers can take advantage of the lack of monitoring to store
the majority of their scripts and tools on the university system. And many
universities give out free shell or Internet accounts to "students"
supplying little more than a valid name and student registration number.
From there they can exploit old Wingate servers (www.wingate.com)
that allow Telnet redirection by default. Discovered in early 1998, this
bug permits unfettered Telnet access to anyone on the Internet through a
Wingate proxy server. The bug has been fixed, but many sites have not yet
applied the fix. Scanning a list of Wingate servers discovered at a
popular hacker Web site, we found at least five (out of 127) machines
still vulnerable to this bug. If you use Wingate, be sure to download
Version 3.0, which fixes this and other problems.
Anonymous surfing
Proxy servers let small organizations protect their internal
systems. But an improperly configured system can be vulnerable. Be sure to
scan the external interface of your proxy servers. Check for open ports,
especially ports 80 (unless you are Web publishing), 3128, 8080, and
10080. Out of 282 systems we scanned, more than one half (151) provide
proxy services to the world. All Internet users have to do is change proxy
settings in their Web browsers to an available proxy server, and it's
clear sailing.
Some Web sites offer free anonymous Web surfing, which is a boon
for all of us privacy paranoids out there, but a nightmare for law
enforcement. Both CyberArmy (www.cyberarmy.com) and Anonymizer
(www.anonymizer.com) offer free, albeit slow, anonymous Web surfing.
Connecting to a Web page through their free services will mask your
identity. Connecting through Anonymizer's ISP you get the following
identity:
Connect from sol.infonex.com [209.75.196.2] (Mozilla /4.5 [en]
(TuringOS; Turing Machine; 0.0))logged.
And from CyberArmy's redirector server you get this identity:
Connect from s214-50.9natmp [216.22.214.50] (Mozilla/4.01 (compatible;
NORAD National Defence Network))logged.
TuringOS and NORAD National Defence are spoofed origins that mask
the originating system.
Lucent also has a proxy server meant to protect your privacy
(www.lpwa.com). Like the others, the Lucent Personalized Web Assistant can
make you anonymous by tunneling all of your Web traffic through its proxy
server. The only difference with Lucent is you must provide your e-mail
address to sign in.
Anonymous service providers such as Anonymizer and Lucent have the
right intentions -- protecting your privacy -- but like any umbrella they
can be abused. Services such as these can be a hacker's dream. Anonymizer
offers Internet security and privacy for corporate customers and
individuals, and effectively makes them invisible. They don't store
cookies, they block Java and JavaScript access, and they remove all
identifier strings.
To its credit, Anonymizer severely limits to whom they give shell
accounts. But at $7 a month, anyone with a good story should be able to
obtain one. They keep logs for 48 hours but don't record the source IP
address. To guard against abuse, Anonymizer will shut down service to a
particular Web site if abuse is reported. But with no source IP logging,
it must shut down service to that site for all customers.
Privacy cheerleading
Don't get us wrong, we are the first to jump on the privacy
bandwagon whenever it rolls by, but at what cost? Even if all of the
software bugs contributing to anonymous connections are fixed, more and
more ISPs will inevitably offer anonymous connectivity. How will you
defend your site against the possible onslaught of phantom hack attempts?
Will logged IP addresses quickly turn into ghosts offering little more
than a place to begin?
-o-
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Received on Thu Mar 11 17:07:00 1999