[FRIAM] 5 agencies compromised

[Marcus Daniels]

The main alarming thing, I guess, is that there is a large part of the world that is more easily motivated than me.   I mean, it seems kind of boring to sort through all that.  Impressive in sort of an autistic savant sort of way.   I wonder if they were paid well by U.S. standards.

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Roger Critchlow
Sent: Wednesday, December 16, 2020 2:14 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] 5 agencies compromised

pwntastic, even.

-- rec --


On Wed, Dec 16, 2020 at 11:07 AM Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com<mailto:marcus at snoutfarm.com>> wrote:
Yes, it sounds like they were methodical and patient.   Impressive work.

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com<mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>> On Behalf Of u?l? ???
Sent: Wednesday, December 16, 2020 7:06 AM
To: FriAM <friam at redfish.com<mailto:friam at redfish.com>>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] 5 agencies compromised

Well, it's one thing to simply screw up a dependency. Any programmer whose participated in a large project has done that at one point or another. But the interesting quote is this:

"Multiple trojanzied updates were digitally signed from March - May 2020 and posted to the SolarWinds updates website, ..."

They were digitally signed. Either they were legitimately signed and the vector is the typical one (humans [ptouie]) or the bad actor (not necessarily human) harvested a secret key and illegitimately signed them. And that's just the signing part. They also had to *post* them, which may well be the easier part. But it still had to be done.

How did they 1) sign the packages and 2) post the packages?


On 12/15/20 12:23 PM, Prof David West wrote:
> Web-based (most software) systems are a complicated Jenga tower of
> dependencies, each one of which provides an access point for
> introducing malware, trojans, viruses, etc. The story of Azer Koçulu
> and how his removal of eight lines of code (left-pad) brought down
> major Web actors and sites
>
>
> https://qz.com/646467/how-one-programmer-broke-the-internet-by-deletin
> g-a-tiny-piece-of-code/


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