Hacker Chronicles 1/HACKER1.ISO/miscpub1/tj3_11.txt

Text File | 1992-09-26 | 27KB | 501 lines

The LOD/H Technical Journal, Issue #3: File 11 of 11

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    Comp.Risks Digest is a USENET distributed newsletter on risks to the
public from computer-related systems.  It is frequently one of the first
places that bugs in operating systems show up.  These are some of the more
interesting posts that have appeared in the past month.

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Date:   Wed, 5 Oct 88 12:35:37 EDT
From: Dave Wortman <[e-mail]>
Subject: Emergency Access to Unlisted Telephone Numbers

The article below was originally posted to misc.consumers.  I thought it might
be of interest to RISKS readers as an example of a well-thought-out set of
administrative procedures designed to balance the needs of protection of
privacy and response to emergency situations.

   =======================================================================

All examples in this message pertain to Illinois Bell Telephone Company, which
covers the Chicago metropolitan area, and quite a bit of the rest of Illinois.

There are three types of phone numbers which do not appear in the printed and
publicly available directory: (1) Too new to list (2) Non-listed (3) Non-pub.
[discussion of types (1) and (2) deleted.]

The third category of numbers not in the phone book or available from the
Directory Assistance Bureau are non-published numbers. Non-pub numbers are NOT
available at the Directory Assistance level. Inquiries about same which are
input into a DA terminal simply come up with a message that 'at the customer's
request, the number is not listed in our records; the number is non-published.'

Well, who does keep non-pub records then? The Business Office has no handy way
to retrieve them, since they depend on an actual phone number when they pull up
a record to discuss an account. Once a service order is processed, the number
and associated name are no longer available to the average worker in the
central office.

There was for several years a small group known as the 'NonPub Number Bureau'
which at the time was located in Hinsdale, IL. Needless to say, the phone
number to the NonPub Number Bureau was itself non-published, and was only
available to specified employees at Bell who were deemed to have a 'need to
know'. Now I think with all the records being highly computerized, the keepers
of the non-pub phone numbers are themselves scattered around from one phone
office to another.

When there is some specific need for an employee at the phone company to
acquire the non-published number of a subscriber, then certain security
precautions kick into place. Only a tiny percentage of telephone company
employees are deemed to have a 'need to know' in the first place; among
these would be the GCO's (Grup Chef Operators), certain management people
in the central offices, certain people in the Treasury/Accounting office,
andof course, security representatives both from Illinois Bell and the
various long distance carriers, such as AT&T/Sprint/MCI.

Let us have a hypothetical example for our Correspondent: Your mother has taken
seriously ill, and is on her deathbed. Your brother is unable to reach you to
notify you of this because you have a non-pub number. When his request for the
number has been turned down by Directory Assistance, simply because they do not
have it, he asks to speak with a supervisor, and he explains the problem. He
provides his own name and telephone number, and the supervisor states he will
be called back at a later time. The supervisor does not question if in fact an
emergency exists, which is the only valid reason for breaking security. The
supervisor may, if they are doing their job correctly, ask the inquirer point
blank, "Are you stating there is an emergency situation?".

Please bear inmind tat the law in Illinois and in many other states says that
if a person claims that an emergency exists in order to influence the use (or
discontinuance of use) of the telephone when in fact there is no emergency is
guilty of a misdemeanor crime. You say yes this is an emergency and I need to
contact my brother/sister/etc right away. The supervisor will then talk to
his/her supervisor, who is generally of the rank of Chief Operator for that
particular facility.

The Chief Operator will call the NonPub people, will identify herself, and
*leave her own call back number*. The NonPub people will call back to verify
the origin of the call, and only then will there be information given out
regards your brother's telephone number. It helps if you know the *exact* way
the name appears in the records, and the *exact* address; if there is more than
one of that name with non-pub service, they may tell you they are unable to
figure out who it is you want.

The NonPub person will then call the subscriber with the nn-published number
and explain to tem what has occurred: So and so has contacted one of our
operators and asked for assistance in reaching you. The party states that it is
a family emergency which requires your immediate attention. Would it be alright
if we give him/her your number, *or would you prefer to call them back
yourself?*

Based on the answer given, the number is either relayed back to the Chief
Operator, or a message is rlaedback saying the non-pub customer has been
notified. If the customer says it is okay to pass his number, then the Chief
Operator will call you back, ask who YOU are, rather than saying WHO she wants,
and satisfied with your identification will give you the number you are seeking
or will advise you that your brother has been given the message by someone from
our office, and has said he will contact you.

Before the NonPub people will even talk to you, your 'call back number' has to
be on their list of approved numbers for that purpose. A clerk n the Business
Office cannot imitate a Chief Operator for example, simply because NonPub would
say that the number you are asking us to call back to is not on our list. "Tell
your supervisor what it is you are seeking and have them call us..."

Other emergency type requests for non-pub numbers would be a big fire at some
business place in the middle of the night, and the owners of the company must
be notified at their home; or a child is found wandering by the police and
the child is too young to know his parent's (non-pub) number.

They will also handle non-emergency requests, but only if they are of some
importance and not frivolous in nature. You have just come to our city to visit
and are seeking a long lost friend who has a non-pub number; you are compiling
the invitations to your high school class fiftieth re-union and find a class
member is non-pub. Within certain reasonable limits, they will pass along your
request to the desired party and let them make the choice of whether to return
the call or not. But always, you leave your phone number with them, and in due
time someone will call yo back to report what has been said or done.

You would be surprised -- or maybe you wouldn't -- at the numerous scams and
[........] stories people tell the phone company to get the non-pub number of
someone else. Fortunately, Bell takes a great deal of pride in their efforts to
protect the privacy of their subscribers.

Patrick Townson, The Portal Syse(TM)
uunet!portal!cup.portal.com!Patrick_A_Townson

-----------------------

Date: Tue, 4 Oct 88 18:01:58 CDT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: More on monitoring Cellular Phones

Alan Kaminsky ([e-mail]) writes:

> When a phone detects a paging message with
> its own address, it broadcasts a page response message.  This response is
> received by all the cells in the system, and the signal strength is measured.
> The cell receiving the strongest response is assumed to be the cell in which
> the phone is located, an unused frequency in that cell is assigned, and the
> phone call is switched to a transceiver in that cell.

Ah, but could the phone company send out a page without a following
"ring them" message?  If they could, then they could periodically
poll your position, and your faithful cellular phone would report
it without your knowledge.

> As for business competitors monitoring calls you place on your cellular
> telephone, to find out your clients' phone numbers:  This is perfectly
> possible.... One hopes the FCC, police, etc.
> would prevent anyone from offering such a product commercially.

Well, the communication privacy act recently passed prevents you from
intercepting the audio side of the cellular phone conversation, but I doubt
if it prevents you from picking up the dialing info. I think such a device
might be considered in the same class as a "pen register." Pen registers
record the numbers called on a telephone circuit. I believe the Supreme
Court doesn't even require a search warrant to place a pen register on a
phone. It may be quite legal to record the phone numbers dialed by a
cellular phone. Someone with a law background want to comment?

        Mike Linnig,
        Texas Instruments

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 7 Oct 88 09:00:08 edt
From: Henry Cox  <[e-mail]>
Subject: Reach Out and Touch Someone...

TEENS RUN UP TELEPHONE BILL OF $650,000

[From the Montreal Gazette, 7 October 1988]

LAS VEGAS (AP) - Ten teenage hackers may have run up $650 000 in
telephone calls by tricking phone company computers, and their parents
could be liable for the tab, authorities said.

"They reached out, all right," assistant U.S. Attorney Russel Mayer said
of the hackers, nine 14-year-olds and one 17-year-old.  "They reached
out and touched the world."

Tom Spurlock, resident agent in charge of the Las Vegas Secret Service
office, said the teen agers engaged in "blue boxing," a technique that
enabled them to talk to fellow hackers throughout Europe.

"They were calling numbers that were in the ATT system, and their
(computer) programs would allow them to `jump' ATT's circuits, allowing
them to call anywhere in the world."

The expensive shenanigans came to light when local phone company
officials discovered unusual activity on nine Las Vegas phone lines,
Spurlock said.  He said federal agents obtained warrants and searched
the nine homes.

The teenagers weren't taken into custody or charged, but their computers
were seized.

                                        Henry Cox

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 07 Oct 88 13:35:03 -0400
From: [e-mail]
Subject: Computer Security and Voice Mail

From the Oct 6 Washington Post.
From a news item "Hackers Find New Way to Tap Long-Distance Phone Lines".

Zotos International Co. received two consecutive $75,000 phone bills,
due to use of their automated answering system by hackers.

Zotos' switchboard automatically routes incoming calls to the proper
department.  Hackers found a way to circumvent the system to place outgoing
long-distance calls, in some cases to Pakistan and Senegal.  In this case the
calls were traced to Pakistani businesses in New York.  However, police
officials told Zotos that they must catch the hackers in the act in order to
prosecute.  The telephone company informed Zotos' mangement to pay the bills,
and collect from the susspected hackers via the civil courts.

In the same article, a related Los Angeles case of misuse of an electronic
switchboard system by outsiders described 'capture' of 200 of a company's
password-secured voice mail accounts.  Outsiders, in this cases a dope ring and
a prostitution ring, gained access by guessing the 4-digit passwords and
changing them.  The hackers backed off only when 'Federal authorities' began
tracing calls.

The article quotes security experts as recommending systems including several
access codes.  Also, major companies are adding software to detect changes in
calling patterns.

------------------------------

Date: 6 Oct 88 09:45
From: [e-mail] (Wes Plouff)
Subject: Re: Risks of Cellular Phones

Recent writers to RISKS, starting with Chuck Weinstock in issue 7.57, have
focused on the risk of vehicle location by cellular telephone systems.  In my
opinion, they exaggerate this risk and underestimate another risk of mobile
phones, the complete lack of privacy in radio transmissions.

Roughly 10 years ago I designed vehicle location controller hardware and
firmware used in the Washington-Baltimore cellular demonstration system.
That system led directly to products sold at least through the first
waves of cellular system construction a few years ago.

Since cellular base stations have intentionally limited geographic
coverage, vehicle location is a requirement. This limitation is used to
conserve radio channels; one cell's frequencies can be re-used by others
far enough away in the same metropolitan area.  The cell system must
determine which cell a mobile user is located in when he begins a call,
and when during a conversation a vehicle crosses from one cell into
another.  Cells are set up perhaps 3 to 20 miles in diameter and range
from circular to very irregular shapes.  Cellular phone systems are
designed with ample margins so that statistically very few calls will be
lost or have degraded voice quality.

Making this system work does not require anything so fancy as
triangulation.  Vehicle location needs to be only good enough to keep
signal quality acceptably high.  John Gilmore explained in RISKS 7.58
how this works while the mobile phone is on-hook.  During a
conversation, the base station periodically measures the signal strength
of an active mobile in its cell.  When the signal strength goes below a
threshold, adjacent cells measure the mobile's signal strength.  This
'handoff trial' procedure requires no interaction with the mobile.  If
the mobile was stronger by some margin in an adjacent cell, both the mobile
phone and the cellular exchange switch are ordered to switch to a channel and
corresponding phone line in the new cell.  Since base stations commonly use
directional antennas to cover a full circle, mobiles could be reliably located
in one third of the cell area at best.  Distance-measuring techniques advocated
by AT&T were not adopted because the added cost was too high for the modest
performance gain.

Certainly a cellular phone system can locate a mobile at any time, and always
locates a mobile during a conversation.  But the information is not
fine-grained enough to implement some of the schemes imagined by previous
writers.

A more important risk is the risk of conversations being intercepted.  The
public airwaves are simply that: public.  Scanner radios can easily be found or
modified to cover the cellular band, and listeners will tolerate lower signal
quality than cellular providers, hence one scanner can listen to cell base
stations over a wide area.  The communications privacy law is no shield because
listeners are undetectable.  To bring this back to risks of computers,
automated monitoring and recording of selected mobile phones is probably beyond
the reach of the average computer hobbyist, but easily feasible for a
commercial or government organization using no part of the infrastructure
whatever, just the control messages available on the air.

Wes Plouff, Digital Equipment Corp, Littleton, Mass.
[e-mail]

------------------------------

Date: Wed, 12 Oct 88 20:34:01 -0700
From: [e-mail]  <David A. Curry>
Subject: 100 digit primes no longer safe in crypto

Taken from the San Jose Mercury News, Oct. 12, 1988, Page 8A:

Computers able to make light work of cracking code (Los Angeles Times)

  Some secret codes intended to restrict access to military secrets and Swiss
bank accounts may not be as safe as had been presumed, a team of computer
experts demonstrated Tuesday.
  The team succeeded in doing what security experts thought could not be done:
using ordinary computers to break down a 100-digit number into the components
that produce it when multiplied together.
  That process, called factoring, holds the key to many security codes.
  Before Tuesday, experts had believed that if the number was large enough -
up to 100 digits - its factoring would take about 10 months with a Cray super-
computer, one of the most powerful computers in the world.
  But computer experts across the United States, Europe and Australia solved
the problem more quickly by using 400 processors simultaneously.  They linked
their computers electronically and factored a 100-digit number in just 26 days.
  The number has two factors, one 41 digits long and the other 60 digits long.
  And that, according to Arjen Lenstra, professor of computer science at the
University of Chicago, should be quite sobering to experts who believe they
are secure with codes based on numbers that large.  Lenstra headed the project,
along with Mark S. Manasse of the Digital Equipment Corp.'s Systems Research
Center in Palo Alto.

        [ quotes from experts ]

  Rodney M. Goodman, associate professor of electrical engineering and an
expert on cryptography at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena,
described the achievement as "significant," because it means that some systems
may not be as secure as had been thought.  But he said it did not mean that
security experts around the world would have to rebuild their systems.
  "All the cryptographers will do is increase the length of the number by a
few more digits," he said, "because the problem gets exponentially worse as
you increase the size of the number."  A larger number is more cumbersome, and
cryptographers had tried to kep the number as small as possible.

        [ explanation of the idea behind using large numbers with
          prime factors in cryptography ]

  Last year, Lenstra decided to tackle the problem on "a small scale, just to
see if he could do it," according to Larry Arbeiter, spokesman for the Univ-
ersity of Chicago.  "It was a pure science type of effort."
  Several months ago, Lenstra presented his idea to Manasse, a computer re-
search scientist with Digital.  Manasse became so intrigued with the problem
that his company agreed to fund much of the cost, including the use of more
than 300 computer processors at the Palo Alto company during off-duty hours.
The company manufactures DEC computers.
  "I was interested in the general problem of taking a program and breaking it
up into small pieces" so that many could work simultaneously toward the sol-
ution, Manasse said.
  Other computer enthusiasts from the "factoring community" clamored aboard
and this fall more than 400 computers around the globe were ready to give it a
try.
  The computers ranged in size from microcomputers to a Cray supercomputer,
but even personal computers with large memories could have been used, Lenstra
said.  Each of the participating computers was given a different part of the
problem to solve, and success came early Tuesday morning.

------------------------------

Date: 12 Oct 88 19:14:22 GMT
From: [e-mail] (Gene Spafford)
Subject: NSFnet Backbone Shot

The following mail was forwarded to me a few minutes ago.  This refers to
the MCI fiber used to carry the NSFnet backbone.  No wonder some of my mail
has disappeared recently!                  [From: field inadvertently deleted?]

=> Date: Wed, 12 Oct 88 12:47:00 EDT
=> To: [e-mail], [e-mail]
=> Subject: A bit of trivia
=>
=> The fiber that goes from Houston to Pittsburgh was broken due
=> to a gun blast....that is right, a gun blast.
=> Somewhere in the swamps of the Bayou (between Alabama and New Orleans)
=> the fiber cables are suspended above the swamps and a good ol'
=> boy was apparently target practicing on the cable.
=>
=> Traffic has been rerouted and when the investigation has taken place
=> and the cable fixed we will be put back on the original circuit.

Gene Spafford
NSF/Purdue/U of Florida  Software Engineering Research Center,
Dept. of Computer Sciences, Purdue University, W. Lafayette IN 47907-2004
Internet:  [e-mail]   uucp:   ...!{decwrl,gatech,ucbvax}!purdue!spaf

------------------------------

Date: Tue, 11 Oct 88 00:14 MDT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: Intersection of ANI and Voice Mail Risks

   Recent reports in RISKS of nefarious deeds committed by hackers who
entered a system via voice mail prompted me to inquire about the voice mail
security of my university's system.  A year ago the U bought its own fancy
switch for on-campus communications.  Some of the goodies include voice
mail and ANI.  I tried the voice mail once but since I much prefer e-mail
I long ago forgot my voice mail password (yep, only 4 digits if the
hackers want to start guessing).  I called the telecommunications office
to determine where I needed to go in person and with how many photo ID's
to get my voice mail password.  Even though I hadn't identified myself,
the clerk said, "Oh that won't be necessary, Mr. McClelland, I'll just
change your password back to the default password and you can then change
it to whatever you want."  I said, "But how do you know that I'm
McClelland?"  He replies, "Because it shows on the digital display on my
phone both the phone number and name of the caller."  [Most phones are in
private offices so a unique name can be attached to each number.]  I tried
to explain that all he really knew was that I was someone calling from the
phone in McClelland's office and that I could be the janitor, a grad
student, or almost anyone.  But security wasn't his problem so he wasn't
very concerned.  I was afraid to ask how many folks never bother to change
their default password.  As I was about to hang up, he said, "By the way, if
you check your voice mail from your own extension you don't even need to enter
your password."  I said , "Thanks, that's reassuring" but I don't think he
caught the sarcasm.
  Gary McClelland

------------------------------

Date:    28 Sep 88 10:10:47 +0100 (Wednesday)
From: Peter Robinson <[e-mail]@NSS.Cs.Ucl.AC.UK>
Subject: Re: Risks of cellular telephones

As a radio amateur, I have always been taught that using mobile transmitters
near petrol stations is bad form - the radiation from the transmitter can
induce currents in nearby metalwork and perhaps cause a spark.  The thought of
a cellular telephone being able to transmit without the operator's consent (in
response to a paging call) is, therefore, slightly RISKy.

Tis cold even get worse as technology progesses.  As the sunspot cycle
advances, it sees plausible that transmissions will carry further and
interfere with those in nearby cells (not the adjacent ones, they usually have
distinct frequencies).  Before long the manufacturers will introduce adaptive
control where the transmitter power is adjusted dynamically to compensate for
variations in the signal path between the mobile and base stations.  So then
when you pull into a petrol station and receive a call, the system will notice
that all the surrounding metal is impairing your signal and will increase the
transmitter power accordingly...

Incidentally, I am not sure what power these radios use, but I would be
slightly nervous about using a hand-held telephone with the antenna anywhere
near my eyes if it is more than a few Watts.

------------------------------

Date: Sat, 8 Oct 88 15:59:56 MET
From: "Walter Doerr" <[e-mail]>
Subject: Risks of cellulr phnes

Chuck Weistock <[e-mail]> writes in RISKS 7.57:

> Subjec: Rsks of Cellular Phones?
>
> While discussing radio triangulation last nigh, the question came up:
> If I dial a phone number attached to a cellular phone, how does the
> cellular system know which cell should send the ring signal to the
> phone?  Is it a system wide broadcast, or does the cellular phone
> periodically broadcast a "here I am" signal?

In the 'C-Net' here in Germany, all mobile phones send a "here I am" signal
whenever they move to a new cell. This information (the cell where the phone
can be reached) is stored in the database of the phone's "home" base.  Calls to
mobile phones are routed to a computer in Frankfurt which contacts the home
base computer (based on the first few digits of the mobile phonenumber), which,
in turn, knows the cell the phone is currently in.

> If the latter, a less than benevolent government (or phone company for
> that matter) could use that information to track its citizens' cars'
> whereabouts.

According to an article in an electronics magazine, the German PTT was
approached by a police agency, who expressed interest in the data stored in the
networks computers.  The article quotes a Siemens mobile telephone specialist
as saying that it isn't possible topipoint the current location of a mobile
phone because:

        - the phone must be switched on for the network to recognize it
        - the cells use omnidirectional antennas, so it isn't possible
          to determine the direction from where the mobile phone's signal came.

While this is true, it is certainly possible to determine the location of a
phone with an accuracy of a few miles (the size of the cell the phone is in)
without using any additional direction finding methods (radio triangulation).

Walter Doerr

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                    End of the LOD/H Technical Journal #3
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