A DEMO ON HOW TO HACK SSL

A researcher has found a convincing way to hack the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol used to secure logins to a range of Websites, including e-commerce and banking sites.
Using a specially-created app, 'SSLstrip', a researcher calling himself Moxie Marlinspike demonstrated to Black Hat Arlington, Va attendees at last weekend's conference how vulnerable many SSL connections were to an involved but clever man-in-the-middle (MitM) attack where a hacker could proxy traffic from users accessing genuine secure https:// website logins.
To prove the usefulness of the attack to a hypothetical criminal, he claimed the hack had given him access to 117 e-mail accounts, 16 credit card numbers, 7 PayPal log-ins and over 300 other "miscellaneous secure logins" in a 24-hour period. Sites involved included Ticketmaster, Paypal, LinkedIn, Hotmail, and Gmail.
The clever bit is that the attack didn't need to touch the encrypted SSL traffic at all, simply exploit the fact that users almost never call https directly, instead accessing that by calling a conventional http web page first. That fact makes it possible to monitor and map the traffic between the browser and website before the SSL is set up securely, putting itself between the two so that neither site is aware that anything is amiss.
According to Marlinspike, the hack is also able to overcome the possibility that the browser will generate invalid certificate warnings from the fake proxy site, even passing back convincing if bogus favicons such as the traditional https padlock. The only signal that something is wrong would be the lack of the https:// address in the toolbar, something few users would likely notice, he said.

"Lots of times the security of HTTPS comes down to the security of HTTP, and HTTP is not secure," says Marlinspike in his presentation summary . "If we want to avoid the dialogs of death, start with HTTP not HTTPS."
Importantly, the visual indicators that help ordinary users detect such attacks should once again be emphasised, overturning some years in which developers, including browser developers, had downplayed such reinforcement.
"Once we've got control of that, we can do all kinds of stuff to re-introduce the positive indicators people might miss," he says.
An indirect hack on the secure web infrastructure was reported some weeks ago, whereby a flaw in the MD5 encryption algorithm was used to fool certificate authorities into accepting a bogus certificate as the real thing.

'GOOGLE HACKING' POSSIBLE . . . WARNS SECURITY ANALYST

Search engines such as Google are increasingly being used by hackers against Web applications that hold sensitive data, according to a security expert.
Even with rising awareness about data security, it takes all of a few seconds to pluck Social Security numbers from Web sites using targeted search terms, said Amichai Shulman, founder and chief technology officer for database and application security company Imperva.
The fact that Social Security numbers are even on the Web is a human error; the information should never be published in the first place. But hackers are using Google in more sophisticated ways to automate attacks against Web sites, Shulman said.
Shulman said Imperva recently discovered a way to execute a SQL injection attack that comes from an IP (Internet Protocol) address that belongs to Google.
In a SQL injection attack, a malicious instruction is entered on a Web-based form and answered by a Web application. It often can yield sensitive information from a backend database or be used to plant malicious code on the Web page.
Shulman declined to give details on how the attack works during his presentation at the RSA Conference on Monday, but said it involves Google's advertising system. Google has been notified, he said.
Manipulating Google is particularly useful since it offers anonymity for a hacker plus an automated attack engine, Shulman said.
Tools such as Goolag and Gooscan can execute broad searches across the Web for specific vulnerabilities and return lists of Web sites that have those problems.
"This is no more a script kiddy game -- this is a business," Shulman said. "This is a very powerful hacking capability."
Another attack method is so-called Google worms, which use the search engine to find specific vulnerabilities. With the inclusion of additional code, the vulnerability can be exploited, Shulman said.
"In 2004, this was science fiction," Shulman said. "In 2008, this is a painful reality."
Google and other search engines are taking steps to stop the abuse. For example, Google has stopped certain kinds of searches that could yield a trove of Social Security numbers in a single swoop. It also puts limits on the number of search requests sent per minute, which can slow down mass searches for vulnerable Web sites.
In reality, it just forces hackers to be a bit more patient. Putting limits on search also hurts security professionals who want to do automated daily searches of their Web sites for problems, Shulman said.
Shulman said he's seen another kind of attack called "site masking," which causes a legitimate Web site to simply disappear from search results.
Google's search engine penalizes sites that have duplicate content and will drop one from its index. Hackers can take advantage of this by creating a Web site that has a link to a competitor's Web page but is filtered through a proxy server.
Google indexes the content under the proxy's domain. If this is done enough times with more proxy servers, Google will consider the targeted Web page a duplicate and drop it from its index.
"This is quite a business hassle," Shulman said.
One way Web site administrators can defend against this is barring their Web site from being indexed by anything other than the legitimate IP address of a search engine, Shulman said.