Apple has inadvertently made it easy for spammers to create a database of MobileMe email addresses.

The issue points to a future of more junk mail for Mac heads. They are already being targetted by MobileMe phishing scams.

The email harvesting issue arises because every MobileMe user gets a public idisk file-sharing site. These sites have an address tied into a user’s email username. A user can’t hide or delete their public folder and there’s no way to choose what the name will be.

As a result spammers only need to map the iDisk domain using web crawler tools to extract the entire MobileMe user name list. Taking this username list and simply adding either @me.com or @mac.com will give an email list, Techcrunch reports.

Apple doesn’t see a problem with its system, essentially because it hasn’t received any complaints – yet.

Apple tech support said: “We’ve never had a complaint from a customer about people spamming them because of their iDisk public folder name. There is no way to remove your account name from the iDisk folders. I’m very sorry,”.

The consumer electronics giant’s response smacks of complacency, especially as it comes little over a week after the emergence of a phishing scam targeting MobileMe users. Personal data belonging to hundreds of punters with @mac.com email addresses is being traded in underground forums, credit card protection service CardCops reported. Punters were tricked into handing over these details for phishing emails whose plausibility was increased by earlier problems with the MobileMe service.

MobileMe has ploughed through a field of snafus since its launch on 9 July. Users were blocked from accessing email accounts for more than a week at the end of July and there have been syncing and billing problems, with some European users charged before their trial came to an end, forcing Apple to issue refunds.

Apple responded to these problems by adding 60 days onto the end of every MobileMe subscription.

MobileMe provides an online synchronisation service which includes a bundle of storage, calendar, mail and photo services. It adds support for Outlook and push email to the iPhone to Apple’s previous .Mac services. ®

When the new iPhone 3G went on sale last week, I was sorely tempted to wait in line for one. (I didn’t – no patience.)

One of the features of Apple’s device that appeals to me is the new MobileMe service, where you can “access and manage your email, contacts, calendar, photos, and files at me.com,” according to Apple. More companies, among them Microsoft and Google, already allow people to store information and use common services online – or “in the cloud” – leading analysts to refer to the entire trend as “cloud computing”.

This iteration of “cloud computing” puts your personal data on an accessible server held by a third party, which you replicate on multiple machines and access from virtually anywhere. Putting aside the security, data storage, data retention, data destruction and other pesky issues associated with doing business in the cloud, one fundamental issue remains: Your data is being hosted, stored and transmitted through a third party. As far as the law is concerned then, that third party has control of your data and may therefore be subject to a subpoena for your data, often without your knowledge or ability to object.

On July 11, 2008, Steven Warshak, the president of a nutrition supplement company, learned the hard way (pdf) about the dangers of using web-based email. On May 6, 2005, the government got such an order for the contents of his emails.

Generally, the internet service provider (ISP) is required to give the subscriber notice of the subpoena, but the statute allows a delay of up to 90 days if the government just asks for the data and the court finds that “there is reason to believe that notification of the existence of the court order may have an adverse result”, like endangering the life or physical safety of an individual, flight from prosecution, destruction of or tampering with evidence, intimidation of potential witnesses, or otherwise seriously jeopardizing an investigation or unduly delaying a trial. Using this provision the government got an order allowing it to delay telling Warshak of its access for 90 days, until early July 2006.

July came and went, as did August, September, October, November, December, January, February, March, April and May of 2007 before the government finally got around to telling Warshak that it had been reading his mail.

Warshak, like many others, used web-based or third-party provided email services like Yahoo! mail and NuVox communications. Thus, his inbox and outbox were literally out of his hands. If Warshak had used an internal email service that he controlled and the government wanted to get access to the contents of his email, they would have had to do it the old-fashioned way: Obtain a search warrant supported by probable cause, issued by a neutral and detached magistrate, specifying the place to be searched and the items to be seized. In fact, those are the precise words of the Fourth Amendment.

Now the government could have issued a grand jury subpoena to Warshak ordering him to pony up his emails. Warshak could then have challenged the scope and breadth of the subpoena, argued that it called for production of irrelevant or privileged materials, challenged the jurisdiction of the grand jury to issue the subpoena, or raised a series of other defenses to the subpoena itself.

But the government didn’t want Warshak to know it was investigating him and his company. It wanted to be able to read his emails without him knowing about it. So it used a statute called the Stored Communications Act, which allows the government to require an ISP to hand over the contents of your emails that have been in storage for more than 180 days even without a warrant, as long as it has a court order showing “reasonable grounds to believe that the contents of a wire or electronic communication, or the records or other information sought, are relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation”.

Networks left open to SNMP scans

Minority of networks leave out welcome mat for hackers

Some sysadmins are leaving their networks open to hacking attack by allowing Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) configurations to be read across the internet.

Using SNMP scans, a range of devices including Windows servers, BT Voyager 2000 routers, and HP JetDirect printers might be prompted to cough up username credentials and passwords, according to Adrian Pastor of GNUCitizen.

SNMP is a core component of the internet management architecture and is used in tools such as HP Openview and Cisco Works. The protocol is unsecured, but defending against attacks is a simple matter of blocking external SNMP requests at the firewall.

However, a scan of 2.5 million random IP addresses by GNUCitizen revealed that 5,320 (about one in 500) responded to the submitted SNMP requests. Read access to SNMP configuration lets hackers spy on targeted networks.

The security weakness might easily enable hackers to change device configurations using a spoofed IP address – if a valid write community string is identified or cracked. This invasive hacking attack was not tested by the GNUCitizen scan.

Read-only access might be bad news, Pastor notes. “Even if a cracker only gained read access to a device or server via a SNMP community string, sometimes it would be possible to extract sensitive information such as user names and passwords which would eventually lead to a compromise of the targeted systems.” ®

Most home routers ‘vulnerable to remote take-over’

Universal plug and prey

Security mavens have uncovered a design flaw in most home routers that allows attackers to remotely control the devices by luring an attached computer to a booby-trapped website.

The weakness could allow attackers to redirect victims to fraudulent destinations that masquerade as trusted sites belonging to banks, ecommerce companies or health care organizations. The exploit works even if a user has changed the default password of the router. And it works regardless the operating system or browser the computer connected to the device is running, as long as it has a recent version of Adobe Flash installed.

“This is a huge problem,” Adrian Pastor, of the prolific hacking organization GNUCitizen, said in an instant message.

The problem resides in Universal Plug and Play, a feature built in to most routers used for home networks so machines running games, instant messaging programs and other applications will work seamlessly with the devices. By exposing an end user to a malicious Flash file lurking on a website, attackers can use UPnP, as the technology is usually called, to make significant modifications to the router.

The most serious change that’s possible is changing the the server PCs connected to the router use to access websites. That might cause a victim trying to access eBay or Bank of America to see spoofed pages that steal their login credentials.

The hack could also allow attackers to open ports on a victim’s router. That would be useful in turning a router into what would amount to a zombie machine by forwarding ports to an external server.

The weakness, which works using the navigatetoURL function and URLRequest object specified in Flash, isn’t a security flaw within Flash, the researches say. Rather they are design flaws in UPnP, which doesn’t use authentication. PCs using virtually any platform and browser will change router settings, as long as they run version 8 or higher of Flash.

Routers made by Linksys, Dlink and SpeedTouch have been confirmed to be vulnerable, and other manufacturers’ products are also likely susceptible to attack, the researchers said. Most routers have UPnP turned on by default. The only way to prevent the attack is to turn the feature off, something that is possible with some, but not all, devices.

The vulnerability, which was also discovered by Petko D. Petkov, is explained further here. A FAQ is here. ®

Read the story from the original publisher

A Chinese writer who published essays questioning the Beijing regime online has been sentenced to six years imprisonment.

Zhang Jianhong, who wrote under the pen name Li Hong, was arrested and charged with “incitement to subvert state power” last September in a crackdown on cyber-dissidents. The punishment was handed down on Monday by a court in Ningbo, in the eastern province of Zhejiang.

Zhang, 48, was founder and editor-in-chief of Chinese language humanitarian website aiqinhai.org, and a frequent contributor to The Epoch Times, a New York-based news organisation which publishes independent reports from inside China in multiple languages. He spent two years in prison for his part in the 1989 student democracy movement which was crushed by the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

The Epoch Times reports that authorities cited 63 articles written by Zhang, many highlighting the plight of jailed lawyer Gao Zhisheng, who had spoken out against Beijing’s treatment of followers of the outlawed spritual movement Falun Gong. Campaigners accuse authorities of harvesting organs from imprisoned Falun Gong followers.

Confirming that he will appeal the conviction, Zhang’s lawyer told Reuters: “The accusations that Li Hong attacked the government through his essays is total nonsense. All he did was to exercise his freedom of speech guaranteed in China’s constitution.”

September’s arrests included Zhang’s fellow dissident writers Yang Maodong and Chen Shuqing, whose fates are unknown.

According to government-controlled news agency Xinhua, via free journalism campaign Reporters Without Borders, the court “showed clemency” in sentencing Zhang to six years because he “expressed remorse” for his writings. The Paris-based charity says China abuses free speech more than any other nation, with at least 32 journalists and 50 other internet dissenters in custody.

In the last year, Reporters Without Borders has been a vocal critic of Yahoo!’s actions in China, which have included handing over details of users critical of the regime. ®

<A HREF=”http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03/20/zhang_jailed_china/”>Click Here</A> to visit the original publisher of this story

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