James Lyne: Everyday cybercrime -- and what you can do about it

411,877 views ・ 2013-09-16

TED


Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

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I'm going to be showing some of the cybercriminals'
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latest and nastiest creations.
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So basically, please don't go and download
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any of the viruses that I show you.
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Some of you might be wondering what a cybersecurity specialist looks like,
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and I thought I'd give you a quick insight
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into my career so far.
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It's a pretty accurate description.
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This is what someone that specializes
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in malware and hacking looks like.
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So today, computer viruses and trojans,
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designed to do everything from stealing data
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to watching you in your webcam
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to the theft of billions of dollars.
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Some malicious code today goes as far
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as targeting power, utilities and infrastructure.
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Let me give you a quick snapshot
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of what malicious code is capable of today.
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Right now, every second, eight new users
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are joining the Internet.
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Today, we will see 250,000 individual new computer viruses.
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We will see 30,000 new infected websites.
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And, just to kind of tear down a myth here,
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lots of people think that when you get infected
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with a computer virus, it's because you went to a porn site.
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Right? Well, actually, statistically speaking,
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if you only visit porn sites, you're safer.
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People normally write that down, by the way. (Laughter)
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Actually, about 80 percent of these
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are small business websites getting infected.
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Today's cybercriminal, what do they look like?
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Well, many of you have the image, don't you,
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of the spotty teenager sitting in a basement,
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hacking away for notoriety.
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But actually today, cybercriminals
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are wonderfully professional and organized.
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In fact, they have product adverts.
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You can go online and buy a hacking service
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to knock your business competitor offline.
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Check out this one I found.
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(Video) Man: So you're here for one reason,
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and that reason is
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because you need your business competitors,
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rivals, haters, or whatever the reason is, or who,
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they are to go down.
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Well you, my friend, you've came to the right place.
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If you want your business competitors to go down,
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well, they can.
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If you want your rivals to go offline, well, they will.
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Not only that, we are providing a short-term-to-long-term
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DDOS service or scheduled attack,
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starting five dollars per hour for small personal websites
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to 10 to 50 dollars per hour.
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James Lyne: Now, I did actually pay
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one of these cybercriminals to attack my own website.
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Things got a bit tricky when I tried to expense it at the company.
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Turns out that's not cool.
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But regardless, it's amazing how many products
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and services are available now to cybercriminals.
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For example, this testing platform,
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which enables the cybercriminals
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to test the quality of their viruses
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before they release them on the world.
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For a small fee, they can upload it
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and make sure everything is good.
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But it goes further.
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Cybercriminals now have crime packs
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with business intelligence reporting dashboards
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to manage the distribution of their malicious code.
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This is the market leader in malware distribution,
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the Black Hole Exploit Pack,
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responsible for nearly one third of malware distribution
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in the last couple of quarters.
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It comes with technical installation guides,
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video setup routines,
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and get this, technical support.
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You can email the cybercriminals and they'll tell you
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how to set up your illegal hacking server.
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So let me show you what malicious code looks like today.
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What I've got here is two systems,
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an attacker, which I've made look all Matrix-y and scary,
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and a victim, which you might recognize from home or work.
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Now normally, these would be on different sides
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of the planet or of the Internet,
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but I've put them side by side
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because it makes things much more interesting.
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Now, there are many ways you can get infected.
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You will have come in contact with some of them.
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Maybe some of you have received an email
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that says something like, "Hi, I'm a Nigerian banker,
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and I'd like to give you 53 billion dollars
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because I like your face."
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Or funnycats.exe, which rumor has it
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was quite successful in China's recent campaign against America.
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Now there are many ways you can get infected.
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I want to show you a couple of my favorites.
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This is a little USB key.
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Now how do you get a USB key to run in a business?
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Well, you could try looking really cute.
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Awww.
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Or, in my case, awkward and pathetic.
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So imagine this scenario: I walk into one of your businesses,
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looking very awkward and pathetic, with a copy of my C.V.
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which I've covered in coffee,
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and I ask the receptionist to plug in this USB key
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and print me a new one.
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So let's have a look here on my victim computer.
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What I'm going to do is plug in the USB key.
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After a couple of seconds,
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things start to happen on the computer on their own,
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usually a bad sign.
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This would, of course, normally happen
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in a couple of seconds, really, really quickly,
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but I've kind of slowed it down
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so you can actually see the attack occurring.
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Malware is very boring otherwise.
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So this is writing out the malicious code,
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and a few seconds later, on the left-hand side,
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you'll see the attacker's screen get some interesting new text.
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Now if I place the mouse cursor over it,
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this is what we call a command prompt,
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and using this we can navigate around the computer.
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We can access your documents, your data.
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You can turn on the webcam.
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That can be very embarrassing.
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Or just to really prove a point,
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we can launch programs like my personal favorite,
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the Windows Calculator.
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So isn't it amazing how much control
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the attackers can get with such a simple operation?
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Let me show you how most malware
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is now distributed today.
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What I'm going to do is open up a website
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that I wrote.
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It's a terrible website. It's got really awful graphics.
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And it's got a comments section here
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where we can submit comments to the website.
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Many of you will have used something a bit like this before.
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Unfortunately, when this was implemented,
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the developer was slightly inebriated
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and managed to forget
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all of the secure coding practices he had learned.
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So let's imagine that our attacker,
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called Evil Hacker just for comedy value,
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inserts something a little nasty.
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This is a script.
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It's code which will be interpreted on the webpage.
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So I'm going to submit this post,
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and then, on my victim computer,
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I'm going to open up the web browser
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and browse to my website,
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www.incrediblyhacked.com.
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Notice that after a couple of seconds,
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I get redirected.
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That website address at the top there,
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which you can just about see, microshaft.com,
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the browser crashes as it hits one of these exploit packs,
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and up pops fake antivirus.
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This is a virus pretending to look like antivirus software,
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and it will go through and it will scan the system,
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have a look at what its popping up here.
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It creates some very serious alerts.
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Oh look, a child porn proxy server.
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We really should clean that up.
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What's really insulting about this is
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not only does it provide the attackers with access to your data,
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but when the scan finishes, they tell you
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in order to clean up the fake viruses,
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you have to register the product.
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Now I liked it better when viruses were free.
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(Laughter)
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People now pay cybercriminals money
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to run viruses,
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which I find utterly bizarre.
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So anyway, let me change pace a little bit.
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Chasing 250,000 pieces of malware a day
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is a massive challenge,
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and those numbers are only growing
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directly in proportion to the length of my stress line, you'll note here.
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So I want to talk to you briefly
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about a group of hackers we tracked for a year
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and actually found --
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and this is a rare treat in our job.
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Now this was a cross-industry collaboration,
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people from Facebook, independent researchers,
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guys from Sophos.
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So here we have a couple of documents
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which our cybercriminals had uploaded
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to a cloud service, kind of like Dropbox or SkyDrive,
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like many of you might use.
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At the top, you'll notice a section of source code.
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What this would do is send the cybercriminals
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a text message every day telling them how much money
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they'd made that day,
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so a kind of cybercriminal billings report, if you will.
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If you look closely, you'll notice a series
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of what are Russian telephone numbers.
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Now that's obviously interesting,
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because that gives us a way of finding our cybercriminals.
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Down below, highlighted in red,
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in the other section of source code,
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is this bit "leded:leded."
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That's a username,
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kind of like you might have on Twitter.
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So let's take this a little further.
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There are a few other interesting pieces
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the cybercriminals had uploaded.
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Lots of you here will use smartphones
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to take photos and post them from the conference.
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An interesting feature of lots of modern smartphones
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is that when you take a photo,
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it embeds GPS data about where that photo was taken.
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In fact, I've been spending a lot of time
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on Internet dating sites recently,
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obviously for research purposes,
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and I've noticed that about 60 percent
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of the profile pictures on Internet dating sites
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contain the GPS coordinates of where the photo was taken,
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which is kind of scary
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because you wouldn't give out your home address
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to lots of strangers,
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but we're happy to give away our GPS coordinates
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to plus or minus 15 meters.
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And our cybercriminals had done the same thing.
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So here's a photo which resolves to St. Petersburg.
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We then deploy the incredibly advanced hacking tool.
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We used Google.
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Using the email address, the telephone number
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and the GPS data, on the left you see an advert
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for a BMW that one of our cybercriminals is selling,
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on the other side an advert for the sale of sphynx kittens.
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One of these was more stereotypical for me.
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A little more searching, and here's our cybercriminal.
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Imagine, these are hardened cybercriminals
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sharing information scarcely.
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Imagine what you could find
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about each of the people in this room.
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A bit more searching through the profile
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and there's a photo of their office.
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They were working on the third floor.
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And you can also see some photos
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from his business companion
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where he has a taste in a certain kind of image.
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It turns out he's a member of the Russian Adult Webmasters Federation.
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But this is where our investigation starts to slow down.
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The cybercriminals have locked down their profiles quite well.
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And herein is the greatest lesson
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of social media and mobile devices for all of us right now.
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Our friends, our families and our colleagues
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can break our security even when we do the right things.
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This is MobSoft, one of the companies
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that this cybercriminal gang owned,
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and an interesting thing about MobSoft
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is the 50-percent owner of this
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posted a job advert,
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and this job advert matched one of the telephone numbers
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from the code earlier.
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This woman was Maria,
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and Maria is the wife of one of our cybercriminals.
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And it's kind of like she went into her social media settings
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and clicked on every option imaginable
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to make herself really, really insecure.
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By the end of the investigation,
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where you can read the full 27-page report at that link,
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we had photos of the cybercriminals,
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even the office Christmas party
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when they were out on an outing.
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That's right, cybercriminals do have Christmas parties,
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as it turns out.
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Now you're probably wondering what happened to these guys.
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Let me come back to that in just a minute.
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I want to change pace to one last little demonstration,
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a technique that is wonderfully simple and basic,
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but is interesting in exposing how much information
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we're all giving away,
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and it's relevant because it applies to us as a TED audience.
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This is normally when people start kind of shuffling in their pockets
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trying to turn their phones onto airplane mode desperately.
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Many of you all know about the concept
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of scanning for wireless networks.
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You do it every time you take out your iPhone or your Blackberry
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and connect to something like TEDAttendees.
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But what you might not know
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is that you're also beaming out a list of networks
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you've previously connected to,
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even when you're not using wireless actively.
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So I ran a little scan.
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I was relatively inhibited compared to the cybercriminals,
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who wouldn't be so concerned by law,
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and here you can see my mobile device.
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Okay? So you can see a list of wireless networks.
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TEDAttendees, HyattLB. Where do you think I'm staying?
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My home network, PrettyFlyForAWifi,
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which I think is a great name.
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Sophos_Visitors, SANSEMEA, companies I work with.
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Loganwifi, that's in Boston. HiltonLondon.
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CIASurveillanceVan.
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We called it that at one of our conferences
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because we thought that would freak people out,
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which is quite fun.
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This is how geeks party.
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So let's make this a little bit more interesting.
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Let's talk about you.
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Twenty-three percent of you have been to Starbucks
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recently and used the wireless network.
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Things get more interesting.
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Forty-six percent of you I could link to a business,
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XYZ Employee network.
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This isn't an exact science, but it gets pretty accurate.
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Seven hundred and sixty-one of you I could identify a hotel you'd been to recently,
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14:12
absolutely with pinpoint precision somewhere on the globe.
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14:16
Two hundred and thirty-four of you, well, I know where you live.
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Your wireless network name is so unique
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that I was able to pinpoint it
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using data available openly on the Internet
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with no hacking or clever, clever tricks.
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14:30
And I should mention as well that
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some of you do use your names,
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"James Lyne's iPhone," for example.
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And two percent of you have a tendency to extreme profanity.
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So something for you to think about:
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As we adopt these new applications and mobile devices,
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as we play with these shiny new toys,
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how much are we trading off convenience
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for privacy and security?
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Next time you install something,
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look at the settings and ask yourself,
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"Is this information that I want to share?
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Would someone be able to abuse it?"
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15:06
We also need to think very carefully
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about how we develop our future talent pool.
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You see, technology's changing at a staggering rate,
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15:16
and that 250,000 pieces of malware
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won't stay the same for long.
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There's a very concerning trend
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that whilst many people coming out of schools now
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are much more technology-savvy, they know how to use technology,
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fewer and fewer people are following the feeder subjects
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to know how that technology works under the covers.
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In the U.K., a 60 percent reduction since 2003,
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and there are similar statistics all over the world.
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We also need to think about the legal issues in this area.
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The cybercriminals I talked about,
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despite theft of millions of dollars,
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actually still haven't been arrested,
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and at this point possibly never will.
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Most laws are national in their implementation,
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despite cybercrime conventions, where the Internet
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is borderless and international by definition.
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Countries do not agree, which makes this area
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exceptionally challenging from a legal perspective.
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But my biggest ask is this:
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You see, you're going to leave here
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and you're going to see some astonishing stories in the news.
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You're going to read about malware doing incredible
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and terrifying, scary things.
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However, 99 percent of it works
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because people fail to do the basics.
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So my ask is this: Go online,
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find these simple best practices,
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find out how to update and patch your computer.
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16:50
Get a secure password.
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16:51
Make sure you use a different password
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16:53
on each of your sites and services online.
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16:56
Find these resources. Apply them.
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The Internet is a fantastic resource
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for business, for political expression,
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for art and for learning.
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Help me and the security community
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make life much, much more difficult
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for cybercriminals.
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Thank you.
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17:16
(Applause)
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About this website

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