The RISKS Digest
Volume 31 Issue 20

Tuesday, 23rd April 2019

Forum on Risks to the Public in Computers and Related Systems

ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy, Peter G. Neumann, moderator

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Contents

“A Marriage Made in Hell”: The growing partnership between Russia's government and cybercriminals
CBS
The Mueller Report includes lots of information on Russian election interference
PGN
Sometimes Bitcoin makes you easier to trace …
CNN
How the Boeing 737 Max Disaster Looks to a Software Developer
IEEE Spectrum
A video showed a parked Tesla Model S exploding in Shanghai
qz.com
Roman Mars Mazda virus
Jeremy Epstein
Nokia 9 buggy update lets anyone bypass fingerprint scanner with a pack of gum
Catalin Cimpanu
How sovereign citizens helped swindle $1 billion from the government they disavow
NYTimes
How not to kill a news cycle …
Rob Slade
“Can Facebook be trusted with a virtual assistant?”
Computerworld
The trouble with tech unicorns Tech's new stars have it all —
????
Silicon Valley Came to Kansas Schools. That Started a Rebellion
NYTimes
Domain transfer at gunpoint …
CNN via Rob Slade
Battle for .amazon Domain Pits Retailer Against South American Nations
E-Week
Should AI be used to catch shoplifters?
cnn.com
Facebook Uses Mueller Report to Distract from Security Breach
The Register
Facial Recognition in NYC
NYTimes
An Interesting Juxtaposition in RISKS 31.18
Gene Wirchenko
Info on RISKS (comp.risks)

“A Marriage Made in Hell”: The growing partnership between Russia's government and cybercriminals (CBS)

the keyboard of geoff goodfellow <geoff@iconia.com>
Tue, 23 Apr 2019 07:27:27 -1000

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/evgeniy-mikhailovich-bogachev-the-growing-partnership-between-russia-government-and-cybercriminals-60-minutes/

Assessing the threats in the new “code war”:

A new war is taking place online—and the former head of national security at the Justice Department says Russia is the biggest threat

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/assessing-the-threats-in-the-new-code-war-60-minutes-2019-04-21/ https://www.cbs.com/shows/60_minutes/


The Mueller Report includes lots of information on Russian election interference (various sources)

“Peter G. Neumann” <neumann@csl.sri.com>
Mon, 22 Apr 2019 9:31:14 PDT

Here are just three recent items:

National: Mueller report highlights scope of election security challenge (The Washington Post) https://www.ccn.com/mueller-report-russian-bitcoin-use-2016-election-manipulation

Mueller Report: Russia Funded US Election Snooping, Manipulation with Bitcoin (CCN) https://www.ccn.com/mueller-report-russian-bitcoin-use-2016-election-manipulation

Mueller report says Russian hacking once went through Arizona server (Cronkite News) https://cronkitenews.azpbs.org/2019/04/19/mueller-report-says-russian-hacking-once-went-through-arizona-server/


Sometimes Bitcoin makes you easier to trace … (CNN)

Rob Slade <rmslade@shaw.ca>
Sat, 20 Apr 2019 12:10:16 -0700

Bitcoin, and cryptocurrencies in general, are seen as being anonymous, like cash transactions.

Not quite.

Bitcoin, and the blockchain, may be encrypted, but, once you've identified an account of note, you can get all kinds of information about transactions.

https://lite.cnn.io/en/article/h_4257e917945d6897b59d5e2b5d6fbb3c


How the Boeing 737 Max Disaster Looks to a Software Developer (IEEE Spectrum)

Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
Tue, 23 Apr 2019 01:06:56 -0400

https://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/aviation/how-the-boeing-737-max-disaster-looks-to-a-software-developer


A video showed a parked Tesla Model S exploding in Shanghai (qz.com)

Richard Stein <rmstein@ieee.org>
Mon, 22 Apr 2019 14:06:19 +0800

https://qz.com/1601177/a-video-showed-a-parked-tesla-model-s-exploding-in-shanghai/

From the video, the vehicle appears to be in a quiescent state.

Henry Baker noted the vehicle fire risk at home while charging in http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/30/76#subj14.1

The energy density of aiLithium storage battery, per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_air_battery

In the same table, TNT (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinitrotoluene) is 4.1 MJ/kg.

Risk: Fire via electric-vehicle battery thermal runaway.


Roman Mars Mazda virus

Jeremy Epstein <jeremy.j.epstein@gmail.com>
Fri, 19 Apr 2019 09:53:23 -0400

A flaw in the MP3 player in some Mazda cars causes the MP3 player to lock up when playing a particular podcast. The problem appears to be the use of the string “%I” in the name of the podcast, which (based on discussions with the author of the software) seems to be causing problems with the URI interpretation software. Unfortunately, the podcast doesn't explore a step further, looking at whether the flaw can be exploited to take control of vehicle systems, for example.

The podcast is interesting listening even for geeks (although the answer was fairly obvious from the beginning), simply to understand how a non-technical person tries to solve a technical problem. I'd imagine it's the same as a doctor watching a parent trying to figure out why a baby is crying, without having much data on how to distinguish the trivial (wet diaper, hungry) from a serious illness.

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-roman-mars-mazda-virus/


Nokia 9 buggy update lets anyone bypass fingerprint scanner with a pack of gum (Catalin Cimpanu)

Gene Wirchenko <gene@shaw.ca>
Tue, 23 Apr 2019 10:43:41 -0700

Catalin Cimpanu for Zero Day | 22 Apr 2019 Only Nokia 9 PureView handsets appear to be impacted. https://www.zdnet.com/article/nokia-9-buggy-update-lets-anyone-bypass-fingerprint-scanner-with-a-pack-of-gum/

selected text:

A buggy update for Nokia 9 PureView handsets has apparently impacted the smartphone model's in-screen fingerprint scanner, which can now be bypassed using unregistered fingerprints or even with something as banal as a pack of gum.

The update was meant to improve the phone's in-screen fingerprint scanner module —so that users won't have to press their fingers too hard on the screen before the phone unlocks— yet it had the exact opposite effect the company hoped for.

While initially, the reported issues appeared to be new, a video recorded by another user showed the same problem (unlocking phones with unregistered fingerprints) even before the v4.22 update, meaning that the update just made the unlocking bug worse than it already was.

This means that rolling back the faulty v4.22 firmware update, or waiting on v4.21, won't fix the fingerprint scanner problems, as even before this patch, the scanner appeared to have a pretty high false negatives rate, allowing strangers to bypass the phone's screenlock.

In the meantime, users are advised to switched to another mode of authentication, such as using facial recognition, a PIN code, or a password.


How sovereign citizens helped swindle $1 billion from the government they disavow (NYTimes)

Gabe Goldberg <gabe@gabegold.com>
Fri, 19 Apr 2019 15:15:44 -0400

Sovereigns, who sometimes call themselves ‘freemen’ or ‘state citizens’, have no foundational document, but broadly they subscribe to an alternate version of American history. The tale can vary from sovereign to sovereign, but it goes roughly like this: At some point, a corporation secretly usurped the United States government, then went bankrupt and sought aid from international bankers. As collateral, the corporation offered the financiers … us. As sovereigns tell it, your birth certificate and Social Security card are not benign documents, but contracts that enslave you.

There is, they believe, a pathway to freedom: Renounce these contracts or otherwise assert your sovereignty. (Mr. Morton said he once told the Social Security Administration, “I don't want this number.” Then no one—not the taxman, not the police—can tell you what to do. Not all sovereigns are con men, but their belief system lends itself to deceit. You might declare yourself a ‘diplomat’ from a nonexistent country. (Mr. Morton represented the Republic of New Lemuria and the Dominion of Melchizedek.) Or start a fake Native American tribe. Or blow off a court case because the American flag in the courtroom has gold fringe. Some sovereigns have even lashed out violently at law enforcement officers, which is why they're considered a domestic terrorism threat.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/business/sovereign-citizens-financial-crime.html

The risk? Crooks, fools, and an IRS starved for funds.


How not to kill a news cycle …

Rob Slade <rmslade@shaw.ca>
Tue, 23 Apr 2019 12:15:09 -0700

OK, now, I don't want to get accused of “controversial political statements” so I'm not naming any names, all right?

But lets, hypothetically and purely for the sake of argument, say that some document or piece of news is going to come out, and you want to minimize the attention paid to it. (Lets call it the Miller Time Report, just for illustrative purposes.)

Now, the right way to ensure that bad news is buried is to release but distract. For example, if you are a company called “Fact”book, and you have yet another egregious failure of security and privacy to report, you do it an hour after the release of the Miller Time Report, which you know lots of people are interested in. In fact, if you have two pieces of bad news, release them both at the same time, just after the Miller Time Report, and that way lots of people don't actually realize that you made two mistakes, since they are all mostly interested in the Miller Time Report and won't read yours in any detail.

Now, if you are responsible for releasing the Miller Time Report, and it's a huge report (say, something along the lines of 400 pages), you might think it clever to release it in a difficult format, like an unsearchable PDF. This means that people can't go searching for details they think might be in it. People, even reporters, are basically lazy, and you might think that this will discourage them from actually having to read the whole report.

That's actually a bad idea, on two counts. First, it's not that hard for technically adept people to run the document through OCR (optical character recognition) and create a searchable document, and release that themselves.

The second issue is that, while most people are basically lazy, when a whole bunch of people are interested in something, then, even if you make it difficult, they will put in the work. And, if you make it hard for them to find the highlights, then, by forcing them to read the whole thing, you risk the fact that they will, over time, find all kinds of interesting bits and pieces. And, because it's taking them time to read the whole thing, the bits and pieces get released as they are found, and that extends the “news cycle” for the Miller Time Report. A kind kind of corollary of the Streisand Effect takes over, and what you tried to minimize gets extended, instead.


“Can Facebook be trusted with a virtual assistant?” (Computerworld)

Gene Wirchenko <gene@shaw.ca>
Sun, 21 Apr 2019 18:56:51 -0700

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3390540/can-facebook-be-trusted-with-a-virtual-assistant.html

Mike Elgan, Computerworld, A look at recent news has a lot to tell us about Facebook's trustworthiness.

[Given the list of offenses, the author's answer is no.]


The trouble with tech unicorns Tech's new stars have it all—except a path to high profits (The Economist)

geoff goodfellow <geoff@iconia.com>
Sun, 21 Apr 2019 07:26:36 -1000

Millions of users, cool brands and charismatic bosses are not enough

EXCERPT:

Investors often describe the world of business in terms of animals, such as bears, bulls, hawks, doves and dogs. Right now, mere ponies are being presented as unicorns: privately held tech firms worth over $1bn that are supposedly strong and world-beating—miraculous almost. Next month Uber will raise some $10bn in what may turn out to be this year's biggest initial public offering (ipo). It will be America's third-biggest-ever tech ipo, after Alibaba and Facebook. Airbnb and WeWork could follow Lyft, which has already floated, and Pinterest, which was set to do so as The Economist went to press. In China, an ipo wave that began last year rumbles on. Thanks to fashionable products and armies of users, these firms have a total valuation in the hundreds of billions of dollars. They and their venture-capital (vc) backers are rushing to sell shares at high prices to mutual funds and pension schemes run for ordinary people. There is, however, a problem with the unicorns: their business models.

As we report this week, a dozen unicorns that have listed, or are likely to, posted combined losses of $14bn last year. Their cumulative losses are $47bn (see Briefing). Their services, from ride-hailing to office rental, are often deeply discounted in order to supercharge revenue growth. The justification for this is the Silicon Valley doctrine of ‘blitz-scaling’ in order to conquer ‘winner-takes-all’ markets—or in plain English, conducting a high-speed land grab in the hope of finding gold.

Yet some unicorns lack the economies of scale and barriers to entry that their promoters proclaim. At the same time, tighter regulation will constrain their freedom to move fast and break things. Investors should demand lower prices in the ipos, or stay away. Tech entrepreneurs and their backers need to rethink what has become an unsustainable approach to building firms and commercialising ideas.

Today's unicorn-breeding industry would not have been possible 25 years ago. In 1994 only $6bn flowed into vc funds, which doled out cheques in the single-digit millions. Before Amazon staged its ipo in 1997 it had raised a total of only $10m. Three things changed. Growing fast became easier thanks to cloud computing, smartphones and social media, which let startups spread rapidly around the world. Low interest rates left investors chasing returns. And a tiny elite of superstar firms, including Google, Facebook and China's Alibaba and Tencent, proved that huge markets, high profits and natural monopolies, along with limited physical assets and light regulation, were the secret to untold riches. Suddenly tech became all about applying this magic formula to as many industries as possible, using piles of money to speed up the process.

Make no mistake, the unicorns are more substantial than the turkeys of the 2000 tech bubble, such as Pets.com, which went bust ten months after its ipo. Ride apps are more convenient than taxis, food delivery is lightning quick, and streaming music is better than downloading files. Like Google and Alibaba, the unicorns have large user bases. Their core businesses can avoid owning physical assets by outsourcing their it to cloud providers. As ipo documents point out, their sales are growing fast…

[…] https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/04/17/techs-new-stars-have-it-all-except-a-path-to-high-profits


Silicon Valley Came to Kansas Schools. That Started a Rebellion (NYTimes)

Gabe Goldberg <gabe@gabegold.com>
Mon, 22 Apr 2019 13:39:58 -0400

“We're allowing the computers to teach and the kids all looked like zombies,” said Tyson Koenig, a factory supervisor in McPherson, who visited his son's fourth-grade class. In October, he pulled the 10-year-old out of the school.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/21/technology/silicon-valley-kansas-schools.html


Domain transfer at gunpoint … (CNN)

Rob Slade <rmslade@shaw.ca>
Mon, 22 Apr 2019 12:17:12 -0700

No, this is not the way to do a domain transfer … https://lite.cnn.io/en/article/h_f12d9a252633c427e47b1109a0af7d85


Battle for .amazon Domain Pits Retailer Against South American Nations (E-Week)

Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
Fri, 19 Apr 2019 02:18:13 -0400

https://www.eweek.com/security/oracle-patches-3-year-old-java-deserialization-flaw-in-april-update


Should AI be used to catch shoplifters? (cnn.com)

Richard Stein <rmstein@ieee.org>
Fri, 19 Apr 2019 11:51:36 +0800

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/04/18/business/ai-vaak-shoplifting/index.html

New artificial intelligence software is being used in Japan to monitor the body language of shoppers and look for signs that they are planning to shoplift. “The software, which is made by a Tokyo startup called Vaak, differs from similar products that work by matching faces to criminal records. Instead, VaakEye uses behavior to predict criminal action.”

Perhaps a more effective use of AI would be to deter its own deployment? Wait…that means AI needs common sense and contextual awareness to ethically perceive and judge its own actions. No sense holding back the kitchen sink from being thrown—throw that too!

Risk: AI interpolation of human intent to shoplift.

Do these bits automatically summon authorities for a Slurpee takedown?


Facebook Uses Mueller Report to Distract from Security Breach (The Register)

Charles Dunlop <cdunlop@umich.edu>
Sat, 20 Apr 2019 11:28:54 -0400

It's common practice for organizations to release bad news at the end of a week, hoping that it will be buried. But Facebook hit a bonanza, when at the end of this week the news focus was on the Muller report. See

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/04/18/facebook_instagram_passwords/


Facial Recognition in NYC (NYTimes)

Gabe Goldberg <gabe@gabegold.com>
Fri, 19 Apr 2019 01:04:40 -0400

Most people pass through some type of public space in their daily routine ”- sidewalks, roads, train stations. Thousands walk through Bryant Park every day. But we generally think that a detailed log of our location, and a list of the people we're with, is private. Facial recognition, applied to the web of cameras that already exists in most cities, is a threat to that privacy.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/16/opinion/facial-recognition-new-york-city.html

Privacy? How quaint.


An Interesting Juxtaposition in RISKS-31.18

Gene Wirchenko <gene@shaw.ca>
Thu, 18 Apr 2019 21:40:21 -0700

RISKS-31.18 has interesting juxtaposition of articles: “Not a burglar after all” and “Computers Turn an Ear on New York City (Scientific American)”. In the second article, what is going to be the authority for what sounds represent? The first article has a case of police officers not being able to identify what sights and sounds represented. They were concerned, and it could have been a serious situation.

Misidentification could have severe consequences. This could be similar to GPSs. Some are meant for general use and some for specific areas. (An example of this is truckers going through villages with roads ill-suited for this because of the trucker using a run-of-the-garden GPS. Or is that run-through-the-garden?)

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