Security, surveillance, and privacy

What does it mean to be hacked? Can you hack yourself? Social engineering, phishing, cross-site scripting, trolling, authenticity.

Intro

• Ghost Writer
• Hacking in 1903
• Perception of privacy

Class links

Work

• Early Work
  • Vito Acconci
    • Following Piece
    • Seedbed
  • Steve Mann
  • Jill Magid
    • Evidence Locker
    • System Azure
    • Lincoln Ocean Victor Eddy, exhibition and book
    • Lobby 7
    • Surveillance Shoe | Legoland
  • Sophie Calle
    • Suite Venitienne
    • Address Book
    • The Shadow
    • The Hotel
  • Surveillance Camera Players
• Recent Work
  • supervillainizer
  • keytweeter inspired by Thoughts on Total Openness of Information
  • Default To Public
  • "$", A Document
  • two point four
  • Newstweek and video and Critical Engineering Manifesto
  • Men in Grey
  • thegreathatsby
    • Angus Fairhurst
  • Ai Weiwei surveillance camera blocker
  • Surveillance Chess
  • Stranger Visions
  • Drone Shadows
  • Trevor Paglen
  • Street Ghosts
    • [TSA Communication] (http://www.evan-roth.com/photos/tsa_communication)
• Surveillance culture
  • We Live In Public and trailer
  • Quantified spouse movement
  • Cloze
  • Raytheon social media
  • DDOS from Anonymous and as protest
  • Ellen Page Is Naked In The Uncanny Valley

Intro to Computer Security / Hacking

• There’s a lot of information you can get from people without them realizing it. Some of it can be totally passive, like probe request frames: sudo tcpdump -e -I -i en0 'type mgt subtype probe-req' and databases like http://wigle.net/ that keep track of SSID locations or OUI lookup tools for looking up MAC addresses. Also check out airport for wireless monitoring and nshey for sniffing.
• If someone visits a website that you have control over, there’s a lot more you can do. One tool that extracts some of this info available by default is made by the EFF https://panopticlick.eff.org/ Try clicking on “Show full results for fingerprinting”
• Another tool that show some of the same, and some different information (like which social networks you’re logged into, or what your battery life is) http://webkay.robinlinus.com/
• Your browser leaks some things automatically when it goes to a website, most of these pieces of info are used by the server to figure out what to send back http://headers.cloxy.net/request.php
• Besides getting info, you can also trick people into doing things. Phishing is one of the classic examples https://getgophish.com/
• But sometimes it’s even more insidious or unexpected. Clickjacking will trick people into clicking one thing when they think they’re clicking on another thing. For example, getting people to click a like button: http://webkay.robinlinus.com/clickjacking/facebook.html
• Samy Kamkar has a great tool that makes clickjacking easy, and posted a video explaining how to do it.
• Historical (less common) exploits:
  • Firesheep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firesheep
  • Shellshock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shellshock_(software_bug)
    • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKShnpOXqn0
  • Heartbleed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartbleed
    • https://xkcd.com/1354/
• Some of these are still active, but not super common. For example, Heartbleed: https://zmap.io/heartbleed/ e.g., wm-seo.ru which you can test with https://gist.github.com/eelsivart/10174134
• After an exploit is well understood, one of the first places it ends up is inside Metasploit, a toolkit used by penetration testers and hackers all around the world:
  • https://www.metasploit.com/
• Or in databases like https://www.exploit-db.com/
• A little later, some of the most influential ones get turned into web based tools like https://pentest-tools.com/network-vulnerability-scanning/openssl-heartbleed-scanner and you can bet they are keeping track of which sites are vulnerable.
• There's a good chance the Panama Papers were the result of a Wordpress vulnerability along the lines of something Metasploit could handle: https://www.wordfence.com/blog/2016/04/mossack-fonseca-breach-vulnerable-slider-revolution/ Which means the Panama Papers could have been collected and released a while ago, but no one took the initiative.
• Sometimes hacking just means keeping your eyes open. If you see a link that has some numbers at the end, what happens if you change them? Can you find other peoples’ numbers?
  • https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q=trip-dc2.uber.com
  • http://www.bwtsw.com/share/189/95338/memories/email
  • http://www.bwtsw.com/share/188/95280/memories/email
  • https://www.google.com/#safe=off&q=%22http:%2F%2Fwww.bwtsw.com%2Fshare%2F%22
• Or if there’s a server that you find interesting, what happens if you change the last digit on the IP address?
  • aec.at → 90.146.8.3
  • http://angryip.org/download/#mac
  • http://90.146.8.239/view/index.shtml
  • ssh 90.146.8.24
• There are a lot of cameras out there:
  • http://kylemcdonald.net/traffic/ (just nyc)
  • http://www.seattle.gov/trafficcams/ (just seattle)
  • http://driesdepoorter.be/seattlecrimecams/
  • https://www.insecam.org/
• Poking at different numbers is the foundation of services like:
  • https://www.shodan.io/
• Types of hacking. Black hat vs white hat vs grey hat. Selling exploits.
• Social engineering - Social engineering is the art of manipulating people so they give up confidential information.
  • Appeal to vanity, appeal to authority, appeal to greed, appeal to willingness to be helpful.
  • Usually easier to exploit your natural inclination to trust than it is to discover ways to hack your software.
  • Types
    • Pretexting - the act of creating and using an invented scenario (the pretext) to engage a targeted victim.
    • Baiting - leave a malware-infected physical device in a place likely to be found, promise a download, great deal, etc.
    • Phishing - a fraudulent email disguised as a legitimate email, often purporting to be from a trusted source. Asks for help, information verification, notify you that you've "won", scareware.
    • Quid pro quo - offer help at random in exchange for information "verified".
    • Tailgating - An attacker, seeking entry to a restricted area secured by unattended, electronic access control, e.g. by RFID card, simply walks in behind a person who has legitimate access.
• Places to learn more
  • Alex Radocea - security, privacy, surveillance presentation notes
  • artsec bibliography and the artsec mailing list
  • http://www.securitytube.net
  • http://opensecuritytraining.info/
  • https://hackeracademy.com/
  • http://www.irongeek.com/
• Research
  • Firesheep
  • Immersion
  • ghostery
  • Graphing when your Facebook friends are awake

Readings

• With friends like these...
  • Unclaimed
• Art, Activism, and CCTV
  • Unclaimed
• To Infect and Protect +video
  • Unclaimed
• Social dark matter
  • Unclaimed
• Steve Mann
  • Unclaimed
• Living offline without being tracked
  • Osama Sehgol + Crystal Brusch
• What’s in a name? +video
  • Melanie + Leon
• Security vs privacy and Trading security for convenience
  • Skylar + Joy
• Privacy salience and social networking sites and Privacy and control
  • Unclaimed
• The flawed psychology of government mass surveillance
  • Unclaimed
• You don’t want your privacy: Disney and the meat space data race
  • Unclaimed
• The Male Gazed, Kate Losse
  • Yuan + Jen
• When does surveillance art cross the line?
  • Jamal + Izzy
• The Anxieties of Big Data
  • Zoe + Nicola + Rebecca

Retired readings:

• Quantified self