Seagate ships world’s most secure hard drive

March 8, 2008 – 6:45 PM

Two years after first being announced by Seagate, the world?s most secure hard drive is finally to go on sale in a laptop from system vendor ASI.

The groundbreaking 2.5 inch Momentus 5400 FDE.2 (full disk encryption) has had a long and winding gestation, but is now set to be put on sale at the end of March in a real laptop, ASI?s C8015+, costing $2,150 (?1,100).

As well as on-the-fly encryption integrated into the drive itself using chip acceleration, the laptop also features a trusted platform module (TPM), and fingerprint reader, security add-ons that have added roughly 20 percent to the cost of what is otherwise a mainstream Intel Core 2 Duo laptop.

The drive to ship in the ASI machine will be the 80GB version, but 100Gb, 120Gb and 160Gb versions are also waiting in the wings, all based on a 3Gb/sec SATA interface and spinning at 5400 RPM.

The main cleverness of the Momentus FDE.2 lies in the way the drive reads and writes have been tightly entwined with 128-bit AES-based encryption right down to DriveTrust firmware level. The user has the power to set a password to access the drive during system boot, but is otherwise unaware that all data at rest is being encrypted and unencrypted transparently. Data is never in clear text except when it is being used by an application.

Putting encryption into a hard drive is no mere security window-dressing. According to Seagate, any US company that loses a laptop using the Seagate drive in conjunction with the launch security management system from Wave Systems, will not have to give public notification of the loss, even if the data is of a highly confidential nature. This alone guarantees that the technology will find a market given the increasingly costly and embarrassing repercussions of laptop thefts.

Seagate claims the performance hit for what is usually a CPU-intensive process is only a couple of percent thanks to onboard processing, and that the user would not be aware of any read or write drag.

The Wave Systems management software ? used standalone or in conjunction with a management server ? can access other admin-pleasing features that have been included in the design. If a user forgets his or her password, a master password can be applied to give access to the drive as a last resort. It also comes with pre-boot authentication, which restricts access to the drive during boot-up, fully hashed passwords, and a crypto-erase feature which wipes the drive for re-use or disposal.

The drives themselves can be managed in a structured way by setting security policies, adding and deleting user accounts, enabling remote management, and carrying out conformance checking and logging.

?It is longer than five years that we?ve known that security in storage was going to be necessary,? said Seagate?s notebook marketing manager, Joni Clark. ?This product has been in development for two years and the technology for five years or more,? she said.

The company has drip-released details of the drive over a long period, presumably to prepare the market for what is a radical concept that looks certain to make its way into all drives sooner or later. But Seagate trod carefully in its roll-out, concerned that full disk encryption might be seen as overkill. The company even developed a version 1 FDE drive last year as a concept product to prove the technology could be made to work without introducing expensive and unwieldy management hassle.

http://www.techworld.com/security/news/index.cfm?newsid=8227

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Drive-by Web Attack Could Hit Home Routers

March 8, 2008 – 6:44 PM

If you haven’t changed the default password on your home router, do so now.

That’s what researchers at Symantec and Indiana University are saying, after publishing the results of tests that show how attackers could take over your home router using malicious JavaScript code.

For the attack to work, the bad guys would need a couple of things to go their way. First, the victim would have to visit a malicious Web site that served up the JavaScript. Second, the victim’s router would have to still use the default password that it’s pre-configured with it out of the box.

In tests, the researchers were able to do things like change firmware and redirect a D-Link Systems Inc. DI-524 wireless router to look up Web sites from a DNS (Domain Name System) server of their choosing. They describe these attacks in a paper, authored by Sid Stamm and Markus Jakobsson of Indiana University, and Symantec’s Zulfikar Ramzan.

Erik Larkin, one of PC World’s security experts, gives some tips on how to protect yourself.

Here’s How It Works“By visiting a malicious Web page, a person can inadvertently open up his router for attack,” the researchers write. “A Web site can attack home routers from the inside and mount sophisticated… attacks that may result in denial of service, malware infection, or identity theft.”

Once the router has been compromised, victims can be redirected to fraudulent Web sites, the researchers say. So instead of downloading legitimate Microsoft Corp. software updates, for example, they could be tricked into downloading malware. Instead of online banking, they could be giving up sensitive information to phishers.

At the heart of the problem is the fact that consumer routers ship with simple, well-known default passwords, like “admin,” which could be exploited by attackers.

“Owners of home routers who set a moderately secure password — one that is non-default and non-trivial to guess — are immune to router manipulation via JavaScript,” the paper states.

Makers BlamesThe researchers blame router makers for shipping products with “poorly secure default settings.”

Vendors like D-Link and Cisco Systems are aware of the problem. “It’s a concern to us,” said Karen Sohl, a spokeswoman with Cisco’s Linksys group. “We’ve shipped about 30 million routers and we want those 30 million customers to understand why it’s so important to change [the default password].”

Both Cisco and D-Link said they’ve taken steps to avoid this type of security problem. Over the past few years they’ve introduced step-by-step “wizard” software to configure their routers, and these products always suggest that the user come up with a unique password.

The problem is that the routers still work if the password is left as default. And that’s not likely to change anytime soon, according to Michael Scott, D-Link’s technical media manager.

Users wouldn’t buy routers that forced them to enter unique passwords, he said. “That would only result in returned products, and then they would buy one of our competitors products,” he said.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/129064-1/article.html?tk=nl_dnxnws

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Half of pirated Vista is malware

March 8, 2008 – 6:44 PM

About half of the downloads claiming to be free versions of?Microsoft’s Vista operating system are actually malicious Trojan horse software, security vendor DriveSentry warned Thursday.

With Vista’s consumer launch just days away, hackers have been bombarding discussion boards with offers of “cracked” versions of Windows Vista, which are typically being distributed on peer-to-peer networks, said John Lynch, vice president of sales and marketing for DriveSentry.

These posts offer downloads of the operating system that skip Vista’s activation process, created by Microsoft to prevent users from running illegal copies.

Users who fall for the scam can end up with some pretty nasty problems, according to Lynch. DriveSentry researchers have found malicious key-logging software and spyware on about half of the downloads it has examined recently, he said.

Pirated versions of Vista have been in circulation for several months now, and one Vista “crack,” called “Windows Vista All Versions Activation 21.11.06,” has already been identified as a Trojan. Trojan horses are malicious programs that present themselves as harmless or useful software.

DriveSentry has also seen criminals disguise Trojans as free versions of Windows XP in the past, Lynch said.

It’s an effective technique, he added. “Someone that’s stealing the software to begin with is not going to raise a fuss if the software turns out to be malicious.”

http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/01/25/HNpiratedvista_1.html

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Microsoft develops new tunneling protocol

March 8, 2008 – 6:43 PM

Microsoft is working on a new tunneling protocol for Vista and Longhorn that will provide secure network access from anywhere on the Net.

The Secure Socket Tunneling Protocol (SSTP) creates a VPN tunnel that travels over Secure-HTTP, eliminating issues associated VPN connections based on the Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol (PPTP) or Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol (L2TP) that can be blocked by some Web proxies, firewalls and Network Address Translation (NAT) routers that sit between clients and servers.

The protocol, however, is only for remote access and will not support site-to-site VPN tunnels.

Microsoft hopes SSTP will help reduced help desk support calls associated with IPSec VPNs when those connections get blocked by firewalls or routers. The protocol will also use the same controls as previously so retraining shouldn’t be needed. The SSTP-based VPN tunnel plugs directly into current interfaces for Microsoft VPN client and server software.

Microsoft plans to ship SSTP support in Vista Service Pack 1 and in Longhorn Server. The ship date for Vista SP1 has not been set, but Longhorn is expected to ship in the second half of this year. SSTP will be included in Longhorn Server Beta 3, which will available in the first half of this year.

Despite incorporating the SSL 3.0 and HTTP 1.1 with 64 -it content length encoding standards, Microsoft does not plan to seek standardisation of SSTP, according to officials. Because SSTP is only a tunneling protocol it cannot be directly compared to SSL VPNs, the company said.

“However, since SSTP provides full-network VPN access over SSL, RRAS can provide customers with a baseline SSL VPN solution or be a building block in a more comprehensive SSL VPN solution by providing a generic SSL tunnel,” said Samir Jain, lead program manager for RRAS at Microsoft. “SSTP also provides support in the server to block specific IPs and subnets.”

On his blog , Jain has provided a step-by-step description of how SSTP works , and how to configure it on the client side. In general, he says SSTP creates a thin layer to “allow Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) traffic, which is datagram oriented to be encapsulated over an SSL session, which is stream oriented — hence giving firewall traversal. The encryption is done over SSL and user authentication is done using PPP.”

http://www.techworld.com/security/news/index.cfm?RSS&NewsID=7814

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New PayPal key to help thwart phishers

March 8, 2008 – 6:42 PM

The https://www.paypal.com/eBay/securitykey is actually a small electronic device, designed to clip on to a keychain, that calculates a new numeric password every 30 seconds. PayPal users who sign up to use the device will need to enter their regular passwords as well as the number displayed on the key whenever they log in to the online payment service.

“The key is really going to give users one more layer of security for their accounts,” said Sara Bettencourt, a PayPal spokeswoman.

Because the numeric password changes so frequently, even successful phishers will end up with obsolete numeric passwords and will be unable to empty PayPal accounts.

“If you fall for a phishing scam and give away your user name and password … if you used the PayPal Security Key, a third party couldn’t get to your account because they wouldn’t have this dynamic digit,” Bettencourt said.

The Security Key could be an important tool for PayPal, whose Web site is frequently spoofed by phishers looking to steal user account information.

The PayPal Security Key is being tested by PayPal employees right now, and the test will be opened up to beta users in the U.S., Germany, and Australia “in the next month or so,” Bettencourt said. Later this year, the company plans to begin promoting the devices to all PayPal users. News of the new PayPal system was first reported on AuctionBytes.com

PayPal users who want this extra level of security will be able to buy the devices for $5, but this fee will be waived for PayPal business accounts.

PayPal’s device is based on VeriSign Inc.’s One-Time Password Token product, which is also being tested by Charles Schwab & Co. Inc. and U.S. Bancorp.

ETrade Financial Corp. also uses a similar system, based on RSA Security’s SecurID tokens.

Over the past year, online financial companies have paid more attention to authentication technologies such as the VeriSign tokens, which add a second layer of authentication to online transactions. Adoption of these “two-factor” authentication techniques has been further boosted by new federal guidelines, which require stronger authentication for online transactions.

Still, phishing attacks are becoming increasingly lucrative for criminals.

Research company Gartner Inc. estimates that phishers cost U.S. financial institutions about $2.8 billion last year. The average loss per phishing attack was $1,244, up from $256 in 2005.

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/011107-new-paypal-key-to-help.html?fsrc=rss-security

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