Black Hat fires shots at Apple and net neutrality

SECURITY FIRMS have amassed in the city that never rests, Las Vegas, to flex their muscles and kick sand in the face of software.

No stone is being left unturned and no backdoors are being spared from a good kicking, and topics at hand range from how weak Apple security is, how badly ISP's are violating Net Neutrality, and why cyber attacks are the new kind of terrorism.

Security firm Isec Partners annoyed fanbois with its declaration that Apple's OS X Server gear is not good enough for business use, thanks to its bear-to-honey like threat of targeted advanced persistent threat (APT) attacks on Mac systems.

"Run your Macs as little islands on a hostile network. Once you turn on the administrator stuff, once you install OS X Server, you are toast," said Isec's Alex Stamo, while his colleague researcher Paul Youn, added, "Mac users have been trained to feel safe for a very long time, and Apple's marketing isn't really helping. If Stuxnet has taught us anything it is that any system can be infected with malware."

The researchers said that there was an inherent problem with the way that OS X networks handled authentication protocols that meant that they could be attacked with brute force methods. Isec said that it was able, in tests, to run a local DNS attack and gain admin access to a network.

Speaking of Stuxnet, the former director of the CIA's counter-terror office took a break from the soothing Las Vegas air to tell attendees that governments are still struggling to understand its implications, never mind deal with it.

Ambassador Cofer Black compared the attack to those seen in New York on 11 September in 2001, and warned that anyone working in cyber security had to take the risk as seriously as that claim deserved.

"There is almost a transference from what I experienced to what you are doing now and what you are doing in the future," he said. "The counter-terrorism era started in much the same way."

Net Neutrality was discussed by network security expert Dan Kaminsky, who, to our delight, showed off n00ter, his tool for identifying where and when ISPs are filtering network traffic.

N00ter, he said, is designed to catch subtle filtering that might otherwise get lost, and would be particularly useful for researchers looking at the issue. We think it should be included in any "what ISP should I use?" decision, but maybe that is just us.

"I'm not out to bust anybody. At this point I'm simply putting out the word that you should not be doing anything you do not want on the front page of the newspaper tomorrow morning," he said.

"If bad things are going to happen, let them happen visibly and transparently. I am just here to provide the data." µ