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Latest activity

It’s been a while since my last entry. A few things was happening, my blog engine went kaput a few weeks ago and it actually affected my Google ranking. 🙁 I saw a significant drop search engine directed traffic.

Recently I discovered some malicious activity on my other web host. I was going through my gallery, http://jiehong.net/gallery when after a few clicks, I got re-directed to ask.com. I thought I haven’t renew my subscription or my domain hosting.

After checking my subscriptions, all is fine. I went into cPanel to poke around. What can cause re-directions, I check the re-directions settings, sub-domains etc. Finally I discover some re-directing codes in some of my .htaccess.

Sample:

ErrorDocument 400 http://ake.kz/in.cgi?8
ErrorDocument 401 http://ake.kz/in.cgi?8
ErrorDocument 403 http://ake.kz/in.cgi?8
ErrorDocument 404 http://ake.kz/in.cgi?8
ErrorDocument 500 http://ake.kz/in.cgi?8

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*google.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*ask.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*yahoo.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*excite.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*altavista.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*msn.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*netscape.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*aol.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*hotbot.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*goto.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*infoseek.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*mamma.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*alltheweb.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*lycos.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*search.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*metacrawler.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*bing.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*dogpile.*
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://ake.kz/in.cgi?7 [R=301,L]

I discovered a folder was created in my public_html, “coming10/almost”. What’s almost, the hacking is almost done ?
I found the following files inside
– .htaccess
– doing83.html
– er404.php
– everyting40php
– thanks28.html

They all contain encoded javascript to redirect visitors to some site. MY VISITORS ! I reported to my web host, I wonder how much action can they take. They are using ClamAV to scan the /home. Oh well… I’m expecting somebody eye-balling the logs to determine the source of entry.

Now I still do not know how they got in, so I need to monitor my site very closely.

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Cold Boot Attacks on Encryption Keys

I just read this article on using compressed air to cool a memory chip so it will retain data even power is been cut off.

A video can be found here on the process and on why colder memory chip will retain data longer. By retaining the data, you can do a dump of the data and extract the cryptographic keys. They were able to extract keys for BitLocker, TrueCrypt, FileVault and dm-crypt.

The attack is not exploiting weakness of the encryption software but due to the fact that the keys have to be stored in memory.  Encrypting the key in memory don’t really help, you still need to store that key that encrypts somewhere !

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Modifying Microsoft Exchange Security Policy on Windows Mobile

My story on why I decided to change the phone lock timeout.

When I first power on my HTC Touch Pro, I went through the start up wizard, it prompt me to set a phone lock pin and a timeout for activating the lock. I decided to go with 15mins, since I can change it later.

I decided to configure an Exchange profile on my Touch Pro for my office emails, since I have a Mobile Broadband plan with a 50GB data limit.

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