For some years I have been peripherally involved (hired to research prior art, etc.) in some of the submarine patent/patent troll cases in the AV world.

I’ve got plenty of prior art.  Programs demonstrating and using technologies that were granted patents years after those programs were available.  Email discussions showing that concepts were obvious and well-known years before patent applications were filed.

Of course, as the “expert” I’m not privy to the legal strategy.  Bt I can figure it out.  US patent office issues patent that never should have been granted.  Troll sues Big Firm for $100M.  BF’s lawyers go to IP law firm.  IP lawyers find me.  IP lawyers ask me for the weirdest (and generally weakest) evidence.  IP lawyers go back to BF’s lawyers.  BF’s lawyers go back to BF.  (At this point I’m not privy to the discussions, so I’m guessing.  But I suspect that …)  IP and BF lawyers advise that evidence available, but patent fight expensive.  BF offers troll $100K to go away.  Troll happy with $100K, which is all he wanted anyway.  BF lawyers happy with large (and now more secure) salaries.  IP lawyers happy with $1M fees.  BF happy to have “saved” $99M.  The only person not happy is me.

Well, Kaspersky got sued.  Kaspersky fought.  Kaspersky won.

So, today I’m happy.  (I just wish I’d been part of *this* fight …)

(By the way, patent trolls cost money …)

I have been using Skype ever since it came out, so I know my stuff.

I know how to write strong passwords, how to use smart security questions and how to – most importantly – avoid Phishing attempts on my Skype account.

But all that didn’t help me avoid a Skype mishap (or more bluntly as a friend said – Skype f*ckup).

It all started Saturday late at night (about 2am GMT), when I started receiving emails in Mandarin from Skype, my immediate thought was fraud, a phishing attempt, so I ignored it. But then I noticed I got also emails from Paypal with charges from Skype for 100$ 200$ 300$, and I was worried, was my account hacked?

I immediately went to PayPal and disconnected my authorization to Skype, called in Transaction Dispute on PayPal and then went on to look at my Skype account.

I looked into the recent logons to my account – nothing.

I looked into email changes, or passwords – nothing.

I couldn’t figure out how the thing got to where it was, and then I noticed, I have become a Skype Manager – wow I was promoted and I didn’t even send in my CV.

Yeah, joke aside, Skype Manager, is a service Skype gives to businesses to allow one person to buy Skype Credit and other people to use that Credit to make calls. A great idea, but the execution is poor.

The service appears to have been launched in 2012, and a few weeks after that, fraud started popping up. The how is very simple and so stupid it shameful for Skype to not have fixed this, since it was first reported (which I found) on the 21st of Jan 2012 on the Skype forum.

Apparently having this very common combinations of:
1) Auto-charge PayPal
2) Never used Skype Manager
3) Never setup a Work email for Skype

Makes it possible for someone to:
1) Setup you as a Skype Manager
2) Setup a new work email on some obscure service (mailinator was used in my case), and have all Skype emails for confirmations sent there

Yes, they don’t need to know anything BESIDE the Skype Call name of your account – which is easy to get using Skype Search.

Once you have become a Skype Manager, “you” can add users to the group you are managing – they don’t need to logon as all they need to do is use the (email) link you get to the newly assigned Work Email, yes, it doesn’t confirm the password – smart ha?

The users added to your Skype Manager can now take the Credit (its not money, it just call credits) and call anywhere they want.

Why this bug / feature not been fixed/addressed since the first time it was made public on the Skype Forum (probably was exploited before then), is anyone’s guess, talking to the Fraud department of Skype – he mainly stated that I should:
1) Change my password for Skype – yes, that would have helped nothing in this case
2) Make sure I authorize Skype only on trustworthy devices

The bottom line, Skype users, make sure:
1) You have configured your Skype Manager – if you are using Auto-Charge feature – I have disabled my Auto-Charge and PayPal authorization since then, and don’t plan on enabling it anytime (ever)
2) You have configured your Skype Work email – yes, if its unset, anyone can change it – without needing to know your current password – is this company a PCI authorized company?

If you have more insight on the matter, let me know

- Noam

Apple has obtained a patent for “identity pollution,” according to the Atlantic.

I am of not just two, but a great many minds about this.  (OK, admit it: you always knew I was schizophrenic.)

First off, I wonder how in the world they got a patent for this.  OK, maybe there isn’t much in the way of prior art, but the idea can’t possibly be called “non-obvious.”  Even before the rise of “social networking” I was prompting friends to use my “loyalty” shopping cards, even the ones that just gave discounts and didn’t get you points.  I have no idea what those stores think I buy, and I don’t much care, but I do know that they have very little about my actual shopping patterns.

In our advice to the general population in regard to Internet and online safety in general, we have frequently suggested a) don’t say too much about yourself, and b) lie.  Isn’t this (the lying part) exactly what Apple is doing?

In similar fashion, I have created numerous socmed accounts which I never intended to use.  A number of them are simply unpopulated, but some contain false information.  I haven’t yet gone to the point of automating the process, but many others have.  So, yet another example of the US patent office being asleep (Rip-Van-Winkle-level asleep) at the technological switch.

Then there is the utility of the process.  Yes, OK, we can see that this might (we’ll come back to the “might”) help protect your confidentiality.  How can people find the “you” in all the garbage?  But what is true for advertisers, spammers, phishers, and APTers is also true for your friends.  How will the people who you actually *want* to find you, find the true you among all the false positives?

(Here is yet another example of the thre “legs” of the security triad fighting with each other.  We have endless examples of confidentiality and availability working against each other: now we have confidentiality and integrity at war.  How do you feel, in general, about Apple recommending that we creating even more garbage on the Internet than is already there?)

(Or is the fact that it is Apple that is doing this somehow appropriate?)

OK, then, will this work?  Can you protect the confidentiality of your real information with automated false information?  I can see this becoming yet another spam/anti-spam, CAPTCHA/CAPTCHA recognition, virus/anti-virus arms race.  An automated process will have identifiable signs, and those will be detected and used to ferret out the trash.  And then the “identity pollution” (a new kind of “IP”?) will be modified, and then the detection will be modified …

In th meantime, masses of bandwidth and storage will be consumed.  Socnet sites will be filled with meaningless accounts.  Users of socmed sites will be forced to spend even more time winnowing out those accounts not worth following.  Socnet companies will be forced to spend more on storage and determination of false accounts.  Also, their revenues will be cut as advertises realize that “targetted” ads will be less targetted.

Of course, Apple will be free to create a social networking site.  They already have created pieces of such.  And Apple can guarantee that Apple product users can use the site without impedance of identity pollution.  And, since Apple owns the patent, nobody else will be able to pollute identities on the Apple socnet site.

(And if Apple believes that, I have a bridge to sell them …)

OK, as some of you may be aware, LinkeDin had a semi-massive leak of passwords that came to light yesterday.

How are the markets taking it?

Well, today the stock is up, slightly.

That’s because ad revenues are up.  Since everyone is loggin on today, in order to change passwords …

Sometimes I wonder why we bother …

Many people around the world are hoping for clear skies to view the transit of Venus across the face of the sun, an event which will not occur again for more than a century. [1]

However, public safety officials are concerned that people may endanger their eyes by looking directly at the sun without eye protection.  Not only will they not be able to see any indications of the transit, but this can, of course, burn the retina of the eye, causing permanent damage, and possibly complete blindness.

However, I have confirmed that ordinary sunglasses are sufficient protection, as long as used correctly. [2]

And the great thing is, this works no matter what “Venus transit” webcam you view, and no matter how brightly you have your monitor cranked up.

(In the spring, generally we would have at least some clear skies for viewing.  However, typically Vancouver, it’s pretty much completely overcast here for the entire run of the transit.)

So, thank goodness for NASA …

[1] It’s rather interesting that the transits occur in pairs, eight years apart, and then more than a century between the eight year pairs.

[2] I hope I don’t have to point out that this is just a joke, and that staring into the sun with only sunglasses as protection is no protection at all.  If anyone doesn’t get it, at least I have a hundred and five years before I get sued.

No!  I’m *not* asking for validation to join a security group on LinkedIn!

Apparently several million passwords have been leaked in an unsalted file, and multiple entities are working on cracking them, even as we speak.  (Type?)

So, odds are “low but significant” that your LinkedIn account password may have been cracked.  (Assuming you have a LinkedIn account.)  So you’d better change it.

And you might think about changing the password on any other accounts you have that use the same password.  (But you’re all security people, right?  You’d *never* use the same password on multiple accounts …)

Today is Tuesday for me, but it’s not “second Tuesday,” so it shouldn’t be patch Tuesday.  But today my little netbook, which is set just to inform me when updates are available, informed me that it had updated, but I needed to reboot to complete the task, and, if I didn’t do anything in the next little while it was going to reboot anyway.

Yesterday, of course, wasn’t patch Tuesday, but all my machines set to “go ahead and update” all wanted to update on shutdown last night.

This is, of course, because of Flame (aka Flamer, aka sKyWIper) has an “infection” module that messes with Windows/Microsoft Update.  As I understand it, there is some weakness in the update process itself, but the major problem is that Flame “contains” and uses a fake Microsoft digital certificate.

You can get some, but not very much, information about this from Microsoft’s Security Response Center blog.  (Early mention.  Later.)

You can get more detailed information from F-Secure.

It’s easy to see that Microsoft is extremely concerned about this situation.  Not necessarily because of Flame: Flame uses pretty old technology, only targets a select subset of systems, and doesn’t even run on Win7 64-bit.  But the fake cert could be a major issue.  Once that cert is out in the open it can be used not only for Windows Update, but for “validating” all kinds of malware.  And, even though Flame only targets certain systems, and seems to be limited in geographic extent, I have pretty much no confidence at all that the blackhat community hasn’t already got copies of it.  (The cert doesn’t necessarily have to be contained in the Flame codebase, but the structure of the attack seems to imply that it is.)  So, the only safe bet is that the cert is “in the wild,” and can be used at any time.

(Just before I go on with this, I might say that the authors of Flame, whoever they may be, did no particularly bad thing in packaging up a bunch of old trojans into one massive kit.  But putting that fake cert out there was simply asking for trouble, and it’s kind of amazing that it hasn’t been used in an attack beofre now.)

The first thing Microsoft is doing is patching MS software so that it doesn’t trust that particular cert.  They aren’t giving away a lot of detail, but I imagine that much midnight oil is being burned in Redmond redoing the validation process so that a fake cert is harder to use.  Stay tuned to your Windows Update channel for further deve