Sign up for our Technology Newsletter 
Was Dropbox Really Hacked?
January 24, 2014 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
Comments Off on Was Dropbox Really Hacked?
Dropbox suffered a major outage over the weekend.
In one of the more bizarre recent incidents, after the service went down on Friday evening a group of hackers claimed to have infiltrated the service and compromised its servers.
However, on the Dropbox blog, Dropbox VP of engineering Ardita Ardwarl told users that hackers were not to blame.
Ardwari said, “On Friday evening we began a routine server upgrade. Unfortunately, a bug installed this upgrade on several active servers, which brought down the entire service. Your files were always safe, and despite some reports, no hacking or DDOS attack was involved.”
The fault occurred when a bug in an upgrade script caused an operating system upgrade to be triggered on several live machines, rendering them inoperative. Although the fault was rectified in three hours, the knock-on effects led to problems that lasted through the weekend for some users.
Dropbox has assured users that there are no further problems and that all users should now be back online. It said that at no point were files in danger, adding that the affected machines didn’t host any user data. In other words, the “hackers” weren’t hackers at all, but attention seeking trolls.
Dropbox claims to have over 200 million users, many of which it has acquired through strategic partnerships with device manufacturers offering free storage with purchases.
The company is looking forward to an initial public offering (IPO) on the stock market, so the timing of such a major outage could not be worse. Dropbox, which includes Bono and The Edge from U2 amongst its investors, has recently enhanced its business offering to appeal to enterprise clients, and such a loss of uptime could affect its ability to attract customers.
Developers Hack Dropbox
Two developers have penetrated Dropbox’s security, even intercepting SSL data from its servers and bypassing the cloud storage provider’s two-factor authentication, according to a paper they published at USENIX 2013.
“These techniques are generic enough and we believe would aid in future software development, testing and security research,” the paper says in its abstract.
Dropbox, which claims more than 100 million users upload more than a billion files daily, said the research didn’t actually represent a vulnerability in its servers.
“We appreciate the contributions of these researchers and everyone who helps keep Dropbox safe,” a spokesperson said in an email to Computerworld. “In the case outlined here, the user’s computer would first need to have been compromised in such a way that it would leave the entire computer, not just the user’s Dropbox, open to attacks across the board.”
The two developers, Dhiru Kholia, with the Openwall open source project , and Przemyslaw Wegrzyn, with CodePainters, said they reverse-engineered Dropbox, an application written in Python.
“Our work reveals the internal API used by Dropbox client and makes it straightforward to write a portable open-source Dropbox client,” the paper states. “Additionally, we show how to bypass Dropbox’s two-factor authentication and gain access to users’ data.”
The paper presents “new and generic techniques to reverse engineer frozen Python applications, which are not limited to just the Dropbox world,” the developers wrote.
The researchers described in detail how they were able to unpack, decrypt and decompile Dropbox from scratch. And, once someone has de-compiled its source code, how “it is possible to study how Dropbox works in detail.
“We describe a method to bypass Dropbox’s two-factor authentication and hijack Dropbox accounts. Additionally, generic techniques to intercept SSL data using code injection techniques and monkey patching are presented,” the developers wrote in the paper.
The process they used included various code injection techniques and monkey-patching to intercept SSL data in a Dropbox client. They also used the techniques successfully to snoop on SSL data in other commercial products as well, they said.
The developers are hoping their white hat hacking prompts Dropbox to open source its platform so that it is no longer a “black box.”
Google Updates It’s SSL Certificate
Google has announced plans to upgrade its Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates to 2048-bit keys by the end of 2013 to strengthen its SSL implementation.
Announcing the news on a blog post today, Google’s director of information security engineering Stephen McHenry said it will begin switching to the new 2048-bit certificates on 1 August to ensure adequate time for a careful rollout before the end of the year.
“We’re also going to change the root certificate that signs all of our SSL certificates because it has a 1024-bit key,” McHenry said.
“Most client software won’t have any problems with either of these changes, but we know that some configurations will require some extra steps to avoid complications. This is more often true of client software embedded in devices such as certain types of phones, printers, set-top boxes, gaming consoles, and cameras.”
McHenry advised that for a smooth upgrade, client software that makes SSL connections to Google, for example, HTTPS must: “perform normal validation of the certificate chain; include a properly extensive set of root certificates contained […]; and support Subject Alternative Names (SANs)”.
He also recommended that clients support the Server Name Indication (SNI) extension because they might need to make an extra API call to set the hostname on an SSL connection.
He pointed out some of the problems that the change might trigger, and pointed to a FAQ addressing certificate changes, as well as instructions for developers on how to adapt to certificate changes.
F-secure’s security researcher Sean Sullivan advised, “By updating its SSL standards, Google will make it easier to spot forged certificates.
“Certificate authorities have been abused and/or hacked in the past. I imagine it will be more difficult to forge one of these upgraded certs. Therefore, users can have more confidence.”
Google Search To Add Default Encryption
October 25, 2011 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
Comments Off on Google Search To Add Default Encryption
Google is implementing over the next few weeks default encryption using SSL on searches for users signing in with their accounts, the company said Tuesday.
The move comes over a year after Google made SSL the default setting for Gmail, and also unveiled an encrypted search service.
“As search becomes an increasingly customized experience, we recognize the growing importance of protecting the personalized search results we deliver,” Google’s product manager, Evelyn Kao said in a blog post on Tuesday.
The encryption is expected to be particularly useful for people using an unsecured Internet connection, such as a Wi-Fi hotspot in an Internet cafe, Kao added.
With Google search over SSL, users get an end-to-end encrypted search channel between their computer and Google. The secured channel helps protect search terms and search results pages from being intercepted by a third party, Google said in a description of SSL search.
Over the next few weeks, users will be redirected to a secure search site when they are signed in with their Google Account. The change encrypts search queries and Google’s
results page.
Users can also navigate directly to the secure search site if they are signed out or don’t have a Google Account.
Microsoft: Stolen SSL Certs No Good
Comments Off on Microsoft: Stolen SSL Certs No Good
Microsoft has officially stated that a digital certificate stolen from a Dutch company could not be used to force-feed customers malware through its Windows Update service.
The company’s assertion came after a massive theft of more than 500 SSL (secure socket layer) certificates, including several that could be used to impersonate Microsoft’s update services, was revealed by Dutch authorities and several other affected developers.
“Attackers are not able to leverage a fraudulent Windows Update certificate to install malware via the Windows Update servers,” said Jonathan Ness, an engineer with the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC), in a Sunday blog post. “The Windows Update client will only install binary payloads signed by the actual Microsoft root certificate, which is issued
and secured by Microsoft.”
Seven of the 531 certificates now known to have been fraudulently obtained by hackers in July were for the domains update.microsoft.com and windowsupdate.com, while another six were for *.microsoft.com.
Google SEARCH Goes SSL
Google is finally taking privacy seriously to a degree by offering its users a secure form of searching while using Google Search. Moving forward users will have the opportunity to enable SSL (Secure Socket Layer) for added security. Be advised, the service will only cover the Google search and clicks made through Google to other non-secured sites will be visible.