Embassy password hacker reveals his technique

A Swedish hacker calling himself "DEranged" attracted media attention over the past couple weeks by posting a list of 100 government email usernames and passwords. His list included email accounts used by embassy officials from India, Russia, Iran, Hong Kong, and others. A few journalists verified that these credentials could indeed be used to access private email.

At the time of his original disclosure DEranged (his real name is Dan Egerstad) withheld details on how he came into possession of the passwords, instead writing that "there is no exploit to publish, no vendor to contact". Today he posted an entry on his blog describing how he used newer software to exploit an older problem.

Egerstad established several computers as nodes in the Tor network. As a part of this network, these computers would act as intermediary routers in the delivery of Internet traffic. By routing this traffic Egerstad also gained the capacity to capture and analyze any unencrypted packets sent through his systems. He then used this access to collect thousands of usernames and passwords transmitted to email servers in the clear.

I will not praise Egerstad due to his poor ethics in disclosing passwords in the manner that he did, but ultimately he is right in pointing out the serious shortcomings of protocols that still transmit unencrypted passwords.

There have been secure alternatives to POP3, such as POP3 over SSL, for some time. However, many companies and service providers fail to offer them, let alone make them the default setting. Organizations can only justify this continued practice because of the difficulty in detecting password capturing attacks. IT personnel can avoid responsibility by dismissing password thefts as a user problem resulting from phishing attacks or software trojans. This is an unacceptable response.

With the growing number of mobile users and wireless networks, the opportunities for password capture attacks will increase. If you are using POP3, Telnet, HTTP, FTP, or any other unencrypted protocol for transmitting passwords, look into alternatives today. People with more dangerous agendas than Egerstad will be watching to see if you do.

My advice to users on storing written passwords

Giving blanket advice on creating, using, and securing passwords is always a worry of mine. Life has taught me that advice is sometimes interpreted or adapted in such a way that it is, at best, rendered less useful or, at worse, made downright dangerous. This is more likely to happen as the subject knowledge gap expands between the advice giver and advice receiver.

So, it was with some hesitancy that I shared my advice on writing down passwords with a reporter a few weeks ago. To his credit, the quote he included in his article was intact and hadn't fallen victim to creative rephrasing. However, I knew that some of his readers would be absorbing my advice from a non-technical perspective and I worried about their interpretation. I would like to use this blog post to explain this advice beyond the few lines available to me in his column.

Let's start with the quote: "This is controversial advice in some circles, but I advise people to write down their passwords. If it is a password you are going to use every day, keep it on a slip of paper in your wallet. Don't write anything else down on the paper that could identify where you are using the password or your username."

I believe this is sound advice, although I want to emphasize the importance of writing passwords on a blank piece of paper with no other identifying information. Once during an introduction I was handed a business card which included a string of characters written on the back. The string struck me as particularly password-like. I can only assume the person had written it down and forgotten that this particular card wasn't meant to be given away.

What didn't make it into the article was my subsequent comment that a password in your wallet should serve only as a temporary memory aid. Within a week or two of use, a password should be committed to long term memory, reducing the likelihood of it being forgotten. This is when the wallet copy should be destroyed and the password archived in a more secure location.

I will avoid getting into specific password storage software in this post. There are good open source and commercial alternatives available. There are also Trojans horses posing as password managers that would love nothing more than to capture your secrets and relay them back across the Internet to their criminal masters. Take time to check out the reputation of any password software before installing it.

I recommend writing down passwords to improve their usability and affordability by reducing the number of times a forgotten password results in an IT support call. However, the biggest benefit is the chance to encourage better password selection.

One of the major factors that impede good password choices is a user's fear that they won't remember a well constructed password. Nobody wants to be stuck staring at a password prompt and cursing their decision to finally come up with a good password. Even worse is the feeling of stupidity they experience when they have to call someone and admit to forgetting their password.

When a person has a reliable written record of a password it takes away a lot of this fear by letting them serve as their own first line of support.

If you are willing to publicly support this practice in your organization, I encourage you to associate this freedom with a requirement for stronger password security. Educate users on how to construct hard-to-guess passwords. Implement technical controls that force new passwords to meet minimum requirements. Make sure that passwords are changed on a regular basis. Finally, emphasize that these written or stored passwords must be very well protected.

Does this practice seem practical for the people you work with, or am I only encouraging a new generation of people to sticky-note passwords by their computers?