Yousif Yalda Part 2: Script Kiddies in the Mist

…in which, our intrepid security geek finds out that there is a $400 bounty on his head.

Posts like this don’t have much technical content, but they’re fun, and the last one has been a wildly popular part of the site.  While you’re laughing your butt off, I hope you take away the real message here: do some background research on who you’re dealing with in the computer security scene.  If you got here by googling up information on this particular skiddie, then you’re already one step ahead of the game.  Just because someone has a legit-looking website and blog doesn’t mean they’re on the up-and-up :)

Since my first post about Yousif’s activities, I’ve had the pleasure of many late-night phone calls from him, being DOS’d for about a half hour, and having his friend threaten to hack my coffee maker.  I was promised a beat-down at Black Hat, although I unfortunately could not make it.  I am, however, sort of disappointed that I don’t warrant being stabbed, like Yousif has threatened to do to Lee Hinman over at the excellent writequit.org blog.  He is, however, willing to pay someone else to do the dirty work.

In the meantime, he hasn’t let up in his activities.  He has been hanging out on an Internet marketing forum, although his taste for script-kiddie hacking has not subsided.  He still has a penchant for attacking sites outside of well-defined pen-tests, still loves to threaten people who correct him, and runs his own small botnet.

Apparently looking to supplement his vapt-sec.com income with some cost-per-action fraud, he’s been hunting around for cohorts to develop software to fill out forms and offers on CPA advertisers, and to come in through his referral links from multiple IP addresses to fill out forms.  I took this as an opportunity to form my own “black hat” alter-ego, and have a good heart-to-heart chat with Yousif.  After a couple of boring evening chat sessions building up my “black hat” cred with him, he began to open up.

The following are some choice excerpts and quotes.  I’ve censored both his language and mine.  I do swear in-person, occasionally on IRC, and rarely on the blog, however I did ratchet it up about 12 notches with “elite yousif”, to build rapport.

Since he gets others to write his software for him, he occasionally gets his languages confused:

11:03:05 PM elite yousif: So
11:03:12 PM elite yousif: You know anyone who has botnets
11:03:39 PM bhb: i have a couple friends who might.  have a need?
11:03:50 PM elite yousif: Yeah
11:04:37 PM elite yousif: It’s quite helpful in CPA
11:05:16 PM bhb: yeah i was thinking of writing some code to work through a botnet, filling stuff and using the random ID generator
11:05:27 PM elite yousif: No need, lol.
11:05:35 PM elite yousif: I’m making something like that as we speak.
11:05:39 PM bhb: nice
11:05:50 PM bhb: what language do you code in
11:06:01 PM elite yousif: What language did I code this in?
11:06:11 PM bhb: yah
11:06:41 PM elite yousif: Net
11:06:54 PM bhb: c#
11:06:55 PM bhb: ?
11:07:21 PM elite yousif: nope
11:07:22 PM elite yousif: .NET <
11:07:29 PM elite yousif: Microsoft, ya know?
11:08:01 PM bhb: .net’s a platform, theres lots of languages you can code targeting .net
11:08:06 PM bhb: vb.net maybe?
11:08:13 PM elite yousif: Yeah, that’s right.
11:08:21 PM elite yousif: Vb.NET <

Don’t mess with this guy.  Especially in school:

11:56:56 PM elite yousif: No one ***** w/ me..
11:56:59 PM elite yousif: No one @ all.
11:57:02 PM elite yousif: Not even in school
11:57:03 PM elite yousif: They know
11:57:05 PM elite yousif: I can change their grade
11:57:09 PM elite yousif: expell them
11:57:10 PM elite yousif: frame them
11:57:11 PM elite yousif: etc
11:57:17 PM elite yousif: I can drop your docs too
11:57:21 PM elite yousif: know what shoe size you wear
11:57:23 PM bhb: heh nice
11:57:25 PM elite yousif: know your fam history
11:57:27 PM elite yousif: CC
11:57:29 PM elite yousif: S#
11:57:30 PM elite yousif: where u live
11:57:30 PM elite yousif: etc
11:57:59 PM bhb: knock some kiddies on their ***** online lol
11:58:18 PM elite yousif: lol
11:58:59 PM bhb: ***** haters lol
11:59:09 PM elite yousif: I know AOL internals too
11:59:11 PM elite yousif: ppl who work there
11:59:13 PM elite yousif: with high privs.
11:59:14 PM elite yousif: can easily
11:59:16 PM elite yousif: hi jack
11:59:19 PM elite yousif: any AOL/AIM account
11:59:22 PM elite yousif: and get info behind it
11:59:23 PM elite yousif: =D
11:59:31 PM elite yousif: i social engineer as well
12:00:08 AM bhb: hah that’s useful

A social engineering mastermind, to be sure.

Here, he’s a little sore that his affiliate program dropped him after figuring out his referrals weren’t legitimate:

12:03:12 AM elite yousif: you haven’t made any money in CPA yet?
12:03:43 AM bhb: haven’t even started.  just been reading up on it on the side, besides coding and work
12:04:30 AM elite yousif: ah
12:04:40 AM bhb: you made much?
12:04:42 AM elite yousif: I got my account terminated
12:04:45 AM elite yousif: 2 days ago
12:04:48 AM elite yousif: from a network
12:04:52 AM elite yousif: ***** bro, i swear
12:04:52 AM bhb: haters
12:04:53 AM elite yousif: I lost
12:04:56 AM elite yousif: 2000+ dollars
12:04:59 AM elite yousif: I better get my ***** back
12:05:00 AM elite yousif: OR
12:05:08 AM elite yousif: I’m gonna make my affiliate managers life a living HELL
12:05:14 AM elite yousif: I have access to her AIM account
12:05:15 AM elite yousif: verizon
12:05:17 AM elite yousif: photobucket
12:05:19 AM elite yousif: paypal
12:05:20 AM elite yousif: blogger
12:05:23 AM elite yousif: and some other *****
12:05:25 AM elite yousif: and facebook
12:05:29 AM elite yousif: she doesn’t know it yet
12:05:31 AM elite yousif: but I phished that *****

Bragging about taking down RSnake’s site (note: there’s an excellent chance this never really happened):

3:00:44 AM elite yousif: you know rsnake?
3:00:46 AM elite yousif: robert hansen
3:00:48 AM elite yousif: famous as *****..
3:00:49 AM bhb: yeah
3:00:51 AM elite yousif: k
3:00:51 AM elite yousif: well
3:00:53 AM elite yousif: his site
3:00:54 AM elite yousif: let me find it
3:01:03 AM bhb: ha.ckers.org or something
3:01:22 AM elite yousif: nah
3:01:23 AM elite yousif: his company
3:01:29 AM bhb: oh i dunno
3:02:26 AM bhb: sectheory?
3:02:58 AM elite yousif: yeah
3:02:59 AM elite yousif: rofol
3:03:02 AM elite yousif: i ddosed that
3:03:03 AM elite yousif: with my friend
3:03:04 AM elite yousif: in like
3:03:05 AM elite yousif: what
3:03:06 AM elite yousif: maybe
3:03:09 AM elite yousif: 3 mins
3:03:10 AM elite yousif: it was down
3:03:14 AM elite yousif: some security expert eh?

If there were any doubts about how he’s taking part in CPA fraud:

4:44:10 PM bhb: how are you supposed to make any money at it if you arent botting it anyways lol
4:44:25 PM elite yousif: what do you mean?
4:44:48 PM bhb: like automating it through a bunch of proxies/bots
4:45:02 PM bhb: how can you find that many people wanting to do it legit to keep making money
4:45:14 PM elite yousif: lol
4:45:17 PM elite yousif: u infect more victims
4:45:22 PM elite yousif: you market your trojan or w.e.
4:45:27 PM elite yousif: and more ppl open it
4:45:37 PM bhb: heh yeah so a loose definition of “legit” lol :D
4:45:48 PM elite yousif: yep
4:45:48 PM elite yousif: lol
4:45:59 PM elite yousif: you know what company is cool though?
4:46:03 PM bhb: you have nice custom trojans for it?
4:46:03 PM elite yousif: ******
4:46:10 PM elite yousif: i talked to the owner
4:46:10 PM bhb: cool you work with them too?
4:46:12 PM elite yousif: really cool guy
4:46:14 PM elite yousif: says
4:46:18 PM elite yousif: i can do black hat if i want
4:46:21 PM elite yousif: and he wont term. my account

Then, I managed to get him on the subject of yours truly :):

5:02:12 PM elite yousif: LOL
5:02:19 PM elite yousif: http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/fulldisclosure/2008-08/0545.html
5:02:21 PM elite yousif: that link u sent me
5:02:25 PM elite yousif: i know the guy who wrote that
5:02:27 PM elite yousif: wesley mcgrew
5:02:30 PM elite yousif: that dude is such a *****
5:02:36 PM bhb: he talks like one
5:03:01 PM elite yousif: he started talking ***** about my business and me because he claims that i hack around sites without permission and that i gave him access to my computer, WTF..
5:03:25 PM elite yousif: so i told him to go to black hat in vegas, and he said hes not going this year — i told him if i saw him id tackle him

I’m not really sure if the following about the director of Black Hat contacting him is true (I never contacted the Black Hat folks about it, since it’s not really a credible threat).  He probably just made it up after he found out how much Black Hat costs:

5:05:11 PM elite yousif: u know what he did
5:05:11 PM elite yousif: he spoke with teh director of black hat
5:05:11 PM elite yousif: and he told him that i would beat his ***** if i saw him
5:05:11 PM elite yousif: so he got scared
5:05:11 PM elite yousif: so the director listened to him
5:05:20 PM elite yousif: and said i cant attend black hat this yea
5:05:20 PM elite yousif: year*
5:05:38 PM bhb: lol that’s hilarious did the director email you or something
5:05:44 PM elite yousif: no he IM’d me
5:05:51 PM bhb: ahah
5:05:52 PM elite yousif: then i followed his profile and he actually WAS the director of black hat
5:05:54 PM elite yousif: oh well
5:05:59 PM elite yousif: he knew i wasn’t kidding

This did happen, although he and his friends would usually get bored and give up after a few calls:

5:06:00 PM elite yousif: i called him
5:06:03 PM elite yousif: 1000 times
5:06:07 PM elite yousif: i cussed him out badly
5:06:12 PM elite yousif: and i demanded to talk to his wife
5:06:14 PM elite yousif: so i can cuss her outtoo
5:06:17 PM elite yousif: her out too*
5:06:18 PM elite yousif: but he wouldn’t elt
5:06:20 PM elite yousif: let*

Remember kids, don’t DDOS on a school night:

5:14:51 PM elite yousif: ask him if i DDoSed his *****
5:15:03 PM elite yousif: he’ll either lie and say ‘it’s server issues @ night” or he’ll admit like a ***** i owned him
5:15:25 PM bhb: hah what an idiot.  how long did you ddos him for
5:15:36 PM elite yousif: for about 2-3 hrs
5:15:42 PM elite yousif: i was bored and it was late
5:15:45 PM elite yousif: i had school next morninig
5:15:47 PM elite yousif: so i let him go
5:15:48 PM elite yousif: lol

There’s a $400 bounty on my head.  My wife, a friend, and I considered faking some photos and video to claim it, but I guess we’re just too nice:

5:33:36 PM elite yousif: can you go to missipi?
5:33:39 PM elite yousif: ill pay you like
5:33:42 PM elite yousif: 400
5:33:44 PM elite yousif: to beat his ***** for me
5:33:46 PM elite yousif: no joke
5:34:03 PM bhb: lol maybe if im hard up for some money one day
5:34:14 PM bhb: you should definitely go though, that ***** would be classic
5:34:28 PM elite yousif: do u know anyone would do it?
5:34:34 PM bhb: show all the whitehats that you dont ***** with the blackhats cause they take it into RL
5:34:36 PM elite yousif: i seriously will pay $400 for it
5:35:06 PM bhb: i dont know anyone up for that but it shouldnt be too hard to find
5:35:20 PM bhb: lol craigslist, i bet theres tons of local rednecks there that would do it
5:35:27 PM elite yousif: lol
5:35:35 PM elite yousif: id rather talk to someone i already know
5:36:03 PM bhb: hah just tell them the money transfers when you see a jpg of his bloody nose lol
5:36:33 PM elite yousif: rofl
5:36:35 PM elite yousif: good idea
5:37:28 PM bhb: http://northmiss.craigslist.org/
5:38:10 PM bhb: i dunno what category lol
5:38:15 PM elite yousif: lol
5:38:17 PM elite yousif: murder
5:38:20 PM bhb: loool
5:39:57 PM bhb: services – labor & moving, that probably has the most steroid pumped rednecks
5:40:15 PM elite yousif: lol
5:40:21 PM elite yousif: bro i would never do it off tehre
5:40:27 PM elite yousif: ***** u know feds just hang out there
5:40:30 PM elite yousif: waiting for somone to ***** up

I’ll leave you with the last words he had to say to my dummy AIM account:

7:28:14 PM elite yousif: yo
7:28:30 PM elite yousif: is there a way to make your cd burner recognize dvd-r’s?

Brilliant.

LOL’ing my LOL’er off at the Syngress IDA Pro Book

I ran across this after I finished reading back-to-back reviews by Phn1x and Ilfak Guilfanov of the sounds-like-it’s-excellent “The IDA Pro Book“ by Chris Eagle, from No Starch Press.  Excellent reviews, and the book looks really good.  Please don’t confuse it’s coolness with the lameness I’m about to copy-paste about. I’ll probably wind up buying a copy of Eagle’s book.

The Syngress IDA book, though?  Not so much.

I didn’t know Syngress had an IDA Pro book when I went to Amazon to look at No Starch’s.  There’s a reason for that:  It’s awful.  I can say this, with certainty, without ever having picked it up.  I don’t normally feel this strongly without at least reading the book, but the universally bad reviews of “Reverse Engineering Code with IDA Pro” are quite damning…

…and hilarious :).  Which is why I’m pasting select comments from the various reviews here, as they tickle my funny-bone:

ZT says:

Do we really need half a page to print a table that does nothing but list every possible form a MOV instruction can take?

..and:

For heaven’s sake, the book was published FOUR MONTHS AGO, and already the repository for the book’s source and binaries has disappeared?!  Come on, this is unacceptable. Every time the book dedicates an entire chapter to disassembling a binary, you have to pretty much skip the entire chapter, because the binary isn’t available for you to disassemble. You can’t follow along.

magicmac2000 chimes in with:

And finally, there is information in the index of a chapter, but the pages are not there! It is not a problem of my book, it is a problem of the edition itself!

Hah what?  There’s entire chunks of the book missing:

(Chapter 4) claims to have this items:
Understanding Execution Flow, Tracing Functions, Recovering Hard Coded Password, Finding Vulnerable Functions, Backtracing Execution, Crafting a Buffer Overflow.
The problem is that the editors (Syngress) forgot to include the latest three. Yes, exactly as you hear it: the editors forgot to place those pages on the book.

Even one of the authors, Justin Ferguson, gave it a negative review:

This is my second attempt at reviewing the book I helped write, Amazon continues to censor me probably because my encouragement is not to buy this book (after dealing with syngress, I wouldn’t advise buying anything that comes from them). I don’t know how to say this other than I apologize to everyone who purchased this book, it really was supposed to be much more. However the corporate world being what it is, it was rushed from deadline to deadline without any regard for quality, the editors actually introduced errors, many of the diagrams are unreadable and theres parts of the book just flat out missing. DO NOT BUY.

Ouch!  You can check out the reviews for yourself here.  I think I’ll be getting Chris Eagle’s book instead.

Audio and video of Kaminsky’s DNS talk now available

The kind folks who run Black Hat have gone ahead and released the audio and video of Dan Kaminsky’s talk at Black Hat USA 2008, entitled “Black Ops 2008: It’s The End Of The Cache As We Know It”, or “64K Should Be Good Enough For Anyone”.  This is the talk where he discusses the DNS flaw that has been big news lately, and even if you’re already familiar with the details, Kaminsky is a very entertaining speaker.

• Video (.m4v)
• Audio (.mp3)

Thanks to blackhat.com.

The greatest hacker media archive on the net needs a home.

Darkoz is a great guy for having maintained the archive of security/hacker conference audio and video at mirrors.easynews.com for several years.  It was a place you could find presentations from just about any conference that had been recorded.  It contained years of talks from Defcon, Blackhat, Shmoocon, HOPE, and more.  I have linked to it several times in the past on my blog, I recommend it to everyone I talk to that’s getting started out in the field, and I have personally used it as a sort of reference/tutorial library for learning various topics.  It was fast, too.  Basically I have nothing but good things to say about it.

The undoing of it, however, is that it is enormous.  For this reason, it has outgrown the hosting kindly provided by easynews, and is in search for a new home.  If you or anyone you know has a redonkulous amount of space available (around 1 terabyte for the entire thing), the bandwidth needed to serve it up, and a desire to help out the security community, please check out Darkoz’s post over on his blog.

If you don’t have the abiility to do that, but you have a blog that you can use to draw some attention Darkoz’s way, please link to him.  The more eyes that hit his request, the better chance he has of finding someone kind enough to host the archive.

This archive is a great resource for the community, and I hope that it’s able to find a new home soon.

Leaner, meaner mcgrewsecurity.com

Switching the site over to the new theme didn’t go as quickly as I had hoped, but it seems to be working now.  I’ve changed how things are organized too, so it should be easier to find things.  Most of my readers seem to be those interested in the technical guts of security, so I’ve done my best to set the ratio of content to fluff as high as possible.

Video of msramdmp being demonstrated by Intelguardians Liston and Davidoff

I was searching for something completely different on Google’s video search and ran across this video of Tom Liston and Sherri Davidoff demonstrating cold-boot memory attacks at CanSecWest.  As I have covered before, they used my msramdmp tool to make an image of RAM:

Beaten to the punch: DNS spoofing Ruby’s Resolv library

On the 6th, I posted hashes of a file, “the_dirt.txt”, to titillate my readership while I was busy shopping the information contained within it to TippingPoint and iDefense (in case I had a shot at monetizing it :) ).  Here are the contents of “the_dirt.txt”:

• the_dirt.txt

The idea here is that Ruby implements its own threading model that’s independent of the operating system’s implementation of threads.  While you can have several Ruby threads rolling at once, it’ll all show up as one process to the OS.  A nice effect of this is that Ruby threads can work the same way on multiple operating systems that may not have the same native threading model.

One problem with this, is that if Ruby has to ask the operating system to do something, and that function is blocking (the thread cannot continue until the function returns), all of the Ruby threads run by that process have to wait.  Making an operating system call to do a DNS query will block all of the Ruby threads of a multithreaded application until the result is returned.  This is sub-optimal.  Ruby’s solution in this case is to carry around it’s own DNS resolver (called “Resolv”) that plays nicely with Ruby threads, since it’s written in Ruby itself.  It can even be used as a drop-in replacement for normal DNS resolution simply by doing a “require ‘resolv-replace’”.

The problem with this DNS resolver is that it’s probably the worst you’ve seen since Windows 95 when it comes to random transaction IDs and source ports.  I noticed this when I was working out a bug in my MITM DNS Metasploit module.  Take a look at the TIDs and source ports for the first 8 requests to come out of a test script:

1. TID = 0 , SOURCE = 53571
2. TID = 1 , SOURCE = 53571
3. TID = 2 , SOURCE = 53571
4. TID = 3 , SOURCE = 53571
5. TID = 4 , SOURCE = 53571
6. TID = 5 , SOURCE = 53571
7. TID = 6 , SOURCE = 53571
8. TID = 7 , SOURCE = 53571

Anyone posting a comment pointing out the subtle pattern in these requests gets to become a charter member of the Little Kaminsky Urban Achievers.

Congrats to Keita Yamaguchi, Christian Neukirchen, sheepman, and Tanaka Akira (according to the ruby-lang.org announcement) for beating me to the punch on it :):

• Multiple Vulnerabilities in Ruby (search for “DNS spoofing”)

There’s a patch now, but I’ll bet pentesters will be seeing applications vulnerable to this for quite some time.

Not even GTD can save me now…

…I’d spend a fair amount of time cleaning this inbox:

Thankfully, it’s just a glitch.  Probably something to do with GMail being a little messed up today.

2**32 minus 2, strangely enough :).

Edit: It decrements by 2 each time I click to another folder and then back to Inbox.

“I’m sorry Wesley, I can’t let you do that…”

These are not words that I often let my own computers tell me (for long).

When it comes to controlling resources, it’s relatively easy to keep people from reading things (access controls, authentication, cryptography, etc).  We’re pretty good at that.  If we own the medium, it’s even fairly easy to keep people from writing things to it.  We can’t, however prevent people from writing to their own media.

So what does this mean?  We have security mechanisms that work (more or less) for reading and writing, but controlling someone’s ability to copy is a Problem.

I ran into this the other day, in OS X’s Preview app, when I tried to copy and paste a quote out of a PDF :

Right.  So, given:

• An environment that I could conceivably control, instrument, or log every aspect of
• A file format that’s typically friendly towards copying text (Highlighted the quote with a text tool, so it’s being represented as glyphs, not images I’d have to OCR or curves I’d have to put back together).
• Permission to read

…there’s no way this kind of protection can work.  If someone has the ability to write to some media, including their own (out of your control!) then giving them read access to some data is tantamount to granting them the ability to copy as well.  Error messages like this are nothing more than polite requests.

I’d have put a tutorial on how to get around this on here, but there’s really just one step:

1. Use Skim.  It’s nicer anyways.

Splunk FAIL

Thanks to HD Moore for this via twitter.  Splunk ad versus linkedin profile found via google:

I can’t stop giggling.