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We don't cover a lot of security issues here, simply because they're not usually funny. But sometimes, they are. So here's a quick hit about some recent ones.
We start with a very bad month for the Danish social security system, the Central Register of Persons (CPR). Last week, they detected a breach which exposed the personal details of 8.8m people. Per the Register article, a cybersecurity specialist correctly pointed out that treating your ID number as if it were a secret was a terrible idea in the first place, but unfortunately, so many systems have grown up around the idea that full knowledge of your state issued ID number as proof of identity, that the security expert is screaming into the wind. They're right, but it's going to take a lot to change.
Okay, Denmark's social security service was hacked. What's so funny about that?
Well, the mechanism of the hack appears to go thusly. First, third party companies have access to the database, which they can use to send notifications to their customers via CPR. That connection is secured with a password, and one of those third parties secured their account with the kind of password you'd use to protect the precious air of the planet Arboria. Also known as the kind of password some idiot would put on their luggage: "123456". (paywalled, Danish article).
The hacker accessed the system on September 10th, and spent ten days searching through the system. The intrusion wasn't detected until October 2nd, when CPR went to send an invoice to the third party company and noticed, "Boy, that's more searches than they have customers." Now, obviously, CPR should have never even allowed such a low complexity password, but also, the third party company shouldn't have used such a low security password.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to change the combination on my luggage.
In other news, I'm not particularly fond of blockchain stuff. Mostly, the whole distributed ledger seems like a solution in search of problems, and "trading tokens as if they're money" is the best thing anybody's been able to come up with. Back in my consulting days, when blockchains were all over the news, I was consulting with a large retailer, and they were exploring using blockchain in their supply chain. "How does that work?" I asked innocently. "It'll have blockchain in it." "Sure, but what does the blockchain get you?" "We'll be using blockchain. If there's like, an e. coli outbreak, we can trace where it came from." "Couldn't you get that out of a regular database?" "But this'll have blockchain."
In any case, blockchain companies getting hacked and having all their users' assets stolen is practically a daily occurrence. Not really notable. But a recent hack is legitimately interesting.
A company, called Ledger, sells "hardware wallets". Instead of storing your keys on some third party's servers (where it'll get hacked and you'll lose all your "money"), you store them on a hardware device that you put in a safe. It's not connected to the internet, and thus is unhackable. Or so you'd think. But if enough people are buying those devices, a supply chain attack becomes potentially very lucrative. And that's exactly what happened. Someone in the supply chain cracked a bunch of these devices open, and inserted new hardware. They attached a microcontroller to the screen leads, that allowed it to read what was on the screen (and thus detect when the screen was displaying a recovery code that could be used to access the wallet), and a cellular modem that allowed it to literally phone home with that information.
In total, these hackers walked away with the equivalent of nearly $100M in cryptocurrency.
All the devices passed through Ledger, where they were inspected before being sold. Presumably, they were sealed with tamper-resistant packaging. It's plausible that the tamperer was downstream from here and the customers didn't fully inspect the packaging. Even your most savvy user generally doesn't check that kind of thing, and I suspect a lot of these customers aren't actually all that savvy. But also, companies in the crypto space tend to be... we'll say, more eager than cautious, so I wouldn't be surprised if the tampering happened upstream and didn't get caught by their inspection process.
Security is hard in the best case. It's much harder when you're putting the final onus of security on end users who may have thousands or even millions of dollars locked behind a single key. Or when passwords are hard, so you pick an easy one to remember.
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