CyberWire Daily - Daily: Anonymous hits Belgium & Cincinnati. Twitter vs. jihad? MouseJack. Apple, FBI dispute updates.

Episode Date: February 23, 2016

Anonymous hits Belgium & Cincinnati. Twitter vs. jihad? MouseJack. Apple, FBI dispute updates. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to the Cyber Wire Network, powered by N2K. Air Transat presents two friends traveling in Europe for the first time and feeling some pretty big emotions. This coffee is so good. How do they make it so rich and tasty? Those paintings we saw today weren't prints. They were the actual paintings. I have never seen tomatoes like this. How are they so red? With flight deals starting at just $589, it's time for you to see what Europe has to offer.

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Two Damascus-based jihadist groups have sworn fealty to Abu Muhammad al-Julani, leader of the al-Nusra Front. Al-Nusra is an al-Qaeda affiliate, and thus a rival as opposed to an ally of ISIS. Nonetheless, the fact that al-Nusra has official Twitter accounts should give one pause before clapping Twitter on the back, as the social media company claims it's making significant inroads against extremism. Twitter's in a tough position. It's a business, not the U.S. government, so its relationship with the First Amendment is a lot more nuanced,

but it doesn't particularly want to be perceived as a censor. But Twitter's getting a lot of stick in the blogosphere for what many see as tenditious and ill-focused shuttering of accounts that, objectionable on some grounds or not, really have nothing to do with the nominal main enemy. Hacktivists associated with Anonymous hit the Belgian government in a widespread denial of service effort apparently intended to protest the sad suicide of a girl who was cyberbullied. And a North American Anonymous cell releases personal information on some 52 Cincinnati, Ohio, police officers and employees. In this case, the cause of action is last week's death of Paul Gaston in a police shooting.

We've seen no recent reports of attacks on electrical grids, but the threat continues to worry utilities. Late last week, security experts warned state utility regulators in the U.S. not to expect cyberattacks on their installations to be sudden, splashy, or otherwise obvious. There won't necessarily be obvious catastrophes, they say, and attackers can be expected to remain sly and discreet. Bastille Networks reports a new threat which has given the snappy name MouseJack. MouseJack is a set of nine vulnerabilities that affect non-Bluetooth wireless keyboards and mice

used by PCs, Macs, and Linux machines. Bastille says that devices manufactured by Logitech, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft, Gigabyte, and Amazon Basics share the vulnerabilities. Attackers could use a wireless dongle to spoof a mouse It was disclosed yesterday that Virginia-based company YouKnowKids.com, whose stock-in-trade is giving parents tools to monitor their children's online activity, suffered from a misconfigured MongoDB installation that exposed nearly 2,000 children's information online. The exposure appears to have lasted about two days. An upward trend in Facebook scams and LinkedIn fraud highlight social media users' continued vulnerability to social engineering.

The annual RSA conference opens in San Francisco next week, and several publications offer previews of the event. We're seeing the customary surge in new product announcements during the run-up. And by the way, if you're planning to attend RSA, be sure to stop by and say hello to the Cyber Wire. We'll be in the South Hall at booth 1145. In other industry news, BAE offers more details on its plans for a major push into the U.S. commercial cybersecurity market. This comes at a time when other large defense and aerospace integrators, notably Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman, seem to be exiting the field. Raytheon, like BAE, is an exception to this trend. BAE's new COO and prospective CEO

-in-waiting is widely expected to shape the company's cybersecurity efforts. The dispute between Apple and the U.S. Department of Justice over a San Bernardino County-issued iPhone used by one of the shooters in the recent California Jihad massacre continues. There's growing consensus that San Bernardino County, which we do well to remember owns the phone in question, could have avoided a great deal of trouble had it used the mobile device management tools available to it. The FBI disputes with some discernible heat that changing the iCloud credentials associated with the phone was a screw-up. Rather, it was a step taken to preserve whatever data might have been on the phone against, for example, the possibility of wiping by some

surviving accomplice. Several outlets, Dark Reading and Krebs on Security prominently among them, are offering rundowns on the case. Essentially, the FBI wants access to the phone's data to determine if there's any evidence therein that could point to a broader conspiracy or plans for further attacks. And a federal magistrate has directed Apple to provide a software image file that would override the device's auto-erase and enforce delay security features. Such software would make it easier for the Bureau to brute-force the phone. Security expert Bruce Schneier has pointed out that various intelligence and security agencies have almost certainly produced this kind of software on their own,

and that time, labor, and expense are the principal obstacles to the FBI doing so in this case. And tenable CEO Ron Gula speculates that if the dispute with Apple has become so public, this has happened because the Department of Justice wants it to be public. Apple continues to resist the order. Reactions remain mixed, with industry somewhat favoring Apple, the general public inclining to take the FBI's view of things, and both Apple and the FBI avowing their belief in the other party's good, if in their view misguided, intentions.

You'll find a useful guide to iOS encryption linked in today's Cyber Wire daily news brief. We also had the opportunity to speak with University of Maryland's Jonathan Katz about the details of iPhone encryption. We'll hear from him after the break. Whatever the outcome of the case may be, it's affecting the conversation on privacy and security in Europe as well as the United States. And we note that European law enforcement agencies are looking to their own investigative tools. Reports from Germany say that country's interior ministry has developed and is preparing to deploy its own spyware, Bundestroyan, the federal Trojan. They're also rumored to be in the market for lawful intercept tools similar to the well-known finfisher.

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He's a professor of computer science and the director of the Maryland Cybersecurity Center at the University of Maryland. Jonathan, obviously Apple has been a hot topic these past few days, specifically the encryption on the Apple iPhone. Apple has gone to great lengths to make sure that the iPhone is secure. Tell us about security on iPhones. Well, the truth is Apple have done a pretty good job of securing the iPhone, and you can see that

by the fact that the FBI essentially has been required to go to Apple in order to get help to unlock the phone. What's interesting about the way that Apple protects the data on the phone is that the data is encrypted now by default, and it's encrypted using a key that's actually stored in hardware and that's inaccessible by any software running on the device. And so the only way to unlock that key and gain access to it is via the passcode on the device, and that's what things are coming down to in the current case is that the FBI is asking Apple for help

in allowing it to repeatedly guess different passcodes in an attempt to unlock the key and get access to the data. So interestingly, Apple does have access to your data if you back it up on iCloud. Apple retains the keys to iCloud. Why would Apple choose to do that? Well, that's an interesting question, actually, because we've seen that Apple has already provided the FBI

with the backed-up data from this phone that was present on the iCloud. But unfortunately for the FBI, that data only went up to a certain date, and the FBI is therefore looking to get access to the phone in order to gain access to the data that had been collected on that phone from that date going forward. And it's interesting that Apple was willing to give the FBI access to that data that was stored on the cloud, but is putting up such a fight with regard to access to the data on the phone.

And what Apple is claiming is that if they provide access to the data on the phone, then they're potentially creating a trap door or a back door that could then enable people to access people's phones worldwide. But we see already that by having the data stored in the cloud and that Apple has the key to, that back door, as it were, is already present for any backed up data. And the FBI is claiming that all they're asking for is the access to this particular phone, that they are not trying to set a precedent. Does that sound reasonable to you, or is that disingenuous? Well, it sounds reasonable.

I think you have to separate two issues. I mean, the first issue is about whether the software that Apple creates in response to this request would work only on that phone. And it seems to me that that is feasible, actually, that Apple could create software that would be able to be run only on this phone and would not be a general-purpose trapdoor. But nevertheless, I do think that the FBI is looking to set a precedent here, and they're hoping to make it easier the next time around

that they request access to data on somebody's phone. So from that point of view, it does make sense that Apple would at least put up a fight here to at least show that they're serious about protecting user privacy. All right, Jonathan Katz, thanks for joining us. And now, a message from Black Cloak. Did you know the easiest way for cybercriminals to bypass your company's defenses is by targeting your executives and their families at home? Black Cloak's award-winning digital executive protection platform secures their personal devices, home networks, and connected lives. Because when executives are compromised at home, your company is at risk. In fact, over one-third of new members discover they've already been breached.

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