Networking in the Media

[deanwebb]

"They've detected the trojan and they're throwing up firewalls!" - </scorpion>

 

Normally, I don't correct the bad science and/or technology in shows that my wife enjoys. Tonight, I had to speak up.

A FIREWALL IS ALREADY ON. WE DO NOT TURN ON FIREWALLS WHEN INTRUSIONS ARE DETECTED. THEY ARE ALREADY ON TO STOP THOSE STUPID INTRUSIONS.

Also, I'm pretty sure that a military vessel would have a self-contained network that does NOT have an easily hackable back door.

Can't wait for CSI: Cyber to start in a few weeks... 

[Nerm]

I am not sure I am even going to try watching the CSI: Cyber show as I am sure it will be unbearable lol.

[Otanx]

OK. I thought you were joking about CSI: Cyber. Now I am horrified, and interested all at once.

-Otanx

[deanwebb]

I plan to watch at least one episode. Trolling it looks like it might be a fun way to do additional research into the field of network security.

I can't wait to see them bust down the door on a "Windows Technical Support" call center, guns a-blazing as they shut DOWN those haxxorz! Or see them swing into action against an INTERNATIONAL spammer... with a murderous secret!

HENCHMAN: I want out, boss. I'm tired of sending out spam about Oprah's latest weight loss secret.

SPAMMER: What do you mean? Am I not paying you enough?

HENCHMAN: It's not that, it's that I found out Oprah hasn't lost any weight. It's all a scam. I mean, if it were true, our spam would be a good thing, but... I just can't take the dishonesty!

SPAMMER: Well... all right... but you know my rules... total silence... I can't afford to have the authorities know my IP address.

HENCHMAN: I'll keep quiet, sure.

SPAMMER: Good.

(  HENCHMAN leaves...)

SPAMMER: (places call on cell phone) Hello, Guido? I have the name of someone that I want you to make sure maintains... total silence...

(Cue another The Who song for the theme...)

Because that's EXACTLY how spammers operate! Maybe!

I think it might be my new favorite show, for all the wrong reasons...

[deanwebb]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-WH14E3Wk0

I'm laughing quite heartily.

I know there's a push from the UK and US government to put an end to encryption by non-governmental entities, and I already see some of that in the preview. "Their money is untraceable!" Yeah, right... and 96% of the Internet being dark and mysterious? How about 96% of the internet being Cisco web pages I can never find when I need them...

Scene by scene...
"Facial recognition on our mystery woman" because all the facial recognition software looks like that and never has a blank screen while it calculates matches... and all the faces are really well-done, too, not a mug shot in them.

"You're not going to find her in any database" O RLY? How about Google Images? Did you try there? DID ANYONE USE GOOGLE BEFORE WRITING THIS EPISODE?

0:25, the fingerprint pattern match... more fast moving text on the side of a rapidly-developing image, when we all know it's more likely to see a "Processing..." progress bar. But that's standard CSI computer gee-whizzery. How about the new stuff?

"She opens their eyes to cyber-crime!" ZOMGWTFBBQ THERE IS A CYBER CRIME???  Which proves that police officers should not be hunkered down in dimly-lit bunkers all day long. They lose touch with reality. I remember 20 years ago, my very first Nigerian Prince scam. There has been a cyber crime going on every since then, I have internets to help me to prove it.

Quick side note: I really do like Patricia Arquette as an actress. It's not her fault that she got thrust into this travesty. She's got no certs, no experience, so she'll take all this as given and deliver the best acting job she can do with the material she's given.

But the knife scene and the arm slash? What? Last time I got a cut like that on my arm was when I tried to both clear a jam in the copier AND change a toner cartridge.

"You tap a few keys and then you reduce the motive to a few digital bits..." Dude, I bet there were a few mouse-clicks in there and a little playing of Candy Crush while the PC spent some cycles compiling...

"The world has changed..." and then a shot of a chat room next to a video feed/embedded movie/flash animation of a young lady. SIN! TEMPTATION! EEEEVIL! 
Except that there's a million sites out there that do online video chat with all kinds of targets of unfettered sexual desires. Or fettered, if need be. This is the Internet. If there is anything, there is porn of it.

Speaking of which, look at the screen at 1:17... I think the "Donate" link along the top is the funniest. Stay hopeful, website, stay hopeful... one day, people who feel guilty about getting all their porn for free will one day chip in a few bucks to keep the site going. Then the numbers for the categories, with "GAY" even sorted into "MALE" and "FEMALE".

OK, now for the part about the world only using 4% of the Internet. Is there some huge chunk of Internet that is being hidden somewhere? Is she referring to the IPv6 address space which, let's face it, hasn't really caught on? Is there an assumption that if a page doesn't have over a certain threshold of hits/day that it is not being "used"? What's the justification for the number here, because I would like to know...

"I work in the deep web, where the criminals are anonymous" Wait, anonymous as in members of the hacker group, anonymous as in people who frequent 4chan, or anonymous as in they don't use their actual name for an online persona? Because if it's the latter, there are a lot of non-criminals who are anonymous. Just sayin'.

"... money is untraceable..." Then go after the banks. Money laundering happens because of lax enforcement regimes at the high levels of finance, not because there is an Internet and SSL. If you want to trace the money, appoint someone to the SEC that actually *isn't* a tool of the big banks, and you'll bring their practices to light. Of course, it'll also shut down a lot of campaign contributions and may even deprive the world financial system of much-needed liquidity in times of crisis (the 2007-2008 liquidity crisis was eased considerably by money laundering transactions... criminal networks kept the global economy going during that time when interbank lending seized up). Or... is she talking about bitcoin? 'Cause that got hacked. It's totally traceable now.

"I think we need to assess your social vulnerability" IE, you idiot... you posted your phone number on your facebook page. Way to go, dumbass.

"There's a murder and a crime scene and there's a *virtual* suspect" Hold on there, ma'am... murders get committed by real people, so technically solving a murder by using a computer to track down clues isn't solving a cyber crime, it's more like using technology to solve a regular old-fashioned kind of crime.

"computer-animated chat bot" Have the writers never heard of Thailand, Morocco, Turkey, or other places in the world where many, many people in marginal financial circumstances will do literally ANYTHING to get enough money to keep from starving? My point being, who needs sophisticated coding when a ten dollar webcam in a Guatemala City apartment would do the same thing? Or maybe this goes to show how it's a twisted genius at work, seeing as how it's the same guy that wants people to donate for the porn after carefully sorting it into a variety of helpful categories.

Then we get the scene with the human lie detector business... that never works. Usually, the way someone knows that someone else is lying is because that first someone already has proof of some sort. If not, and that someone else is lying, the someone else usually gets very indignant, demands lawyers and the media, and throws up all kinds of verbal defenses to cover his ass. I taught for 16 years, believe me, I've seen liars in action.

"She shows you how the Internet can be so dangerous" Obviously, we need to put in traffic policing on all router interfaces.  That will keep us safe.

"some of the clues are coming from the real world and some are coming from the cyber world" Got news for you... the cyber world is the real world, just ask the RIAA and anyone that got one of their nastygrams after downloading a Britney Spears MP3.

2:44 - a shot of an actual Tableau TD3. Nice touch. You're gonna read a hard drive. So why are they using just the cream spinach interface when they can get a session pumped out to a tablet or video screen? Oh wait, take that back... looks like they're using an older model of the TD3.

"We think there are things that are private that are not private" Or you could have just said that the NSA records everything and shares it with all police entities, but then that doesn't make for good television... I mean, who wants a show where Big Brother is watching you, even if he does solve a few violent crimes here and there?

2:55 a press conference about someone whose image got used inappropriately and without permission on the Internet? Get in line, lady. And it's a very, very long line. Say hi to Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee while you're at it. Seriously, who would make such a thing press conference worthy?

3:05 - a heavily armed group of men swoop into a computer-laden lair... that is really scary. I'm not a fan of the militarization of the police in the USA. And if that guy was using young womens' images without permission, wouldn't he be using those of people under 18? If so, that's a federal crime, so those local cops best step aside for the Feds. I know a guy doing 10 years in federal prison because he slept with an underage student... and took a picture. That is child pornography, and it ain't no state or local crime.

And then they wrap things up.

My only question is, "Do I have enough time to spend on proper deconstruction of each one of these episodes?"

I think I want to make time, because the field of information security demands it.

[deanwebb]

The most recent "Fresh Off the Boat" featured a 1995 "Internet Computer" with a 28.8 modem that kept renegotiating speed. THAT is accuracy, I tell you!

Also, the show is like a Malcolm in the Middle with Asians. I'm having fun with it.

But, yeah, love that modem sound. A true classic.

[ChestHair]

Tonight is the big night! CSI-CYBER!

I can't wait see them show a visualization of data going across the wire. Sort of like when Brian Spilner hits the "NOS" button and we get to see it travel from the tank all the way out the exhaust...  [emoji106]

[deanwebb]

My wife says I have to keep it zipped when I watch it tonight. She doesn't want to know where the flaws are.

[deanwebb]

4 MARCH 2015
Pilot episode of CSI: Cyber 

OK, kid gets kidnapped and there's crazy noise on the baby monitor. Our Hero gets a text on the kidnapping while goofing off and that PDF file of the report opens up in a way that no PDF file has ever opened... quickly.

Why are foreign voices coming across the baby monitor? They got hacked. In the real world, there's a group of guys that hack them for sick fun, screaming obscenities across the Internet at the tots. In this world, they are much more... sinister!

Now we go to a poorly lit room with a zillion screens and some people in very casual clothes. Where are the cubicles? Dude, if I do any cyberinvestigating, I want at least three computers and between 6 and 9 monitors in my cube. All mine, not on some stupid wall where I can't make out details.

The big guy with a beard is socially awkward. Stereotype! Whee! And now we have a bad guy hacker that has to be a good guy, because that's how EVERY tiger team is formed!

Opening montage... lots of electricity looking stuff. Not one screen of PuTTY or a CMD prompt with a ping command running or even the ultra-slick graphics of ASDM or Orion... Now, as the commercials run, I have to wonder... let's assume that these guys can go all NSA on the US infrastructure and even dig into international routers and switches because of embedded holes in Cisco gear that they somehow have access to... let's also assume that they have such tight OPSEC that they don't tip the hand of the NSA to reveal the extent to which these network devices are compromised... even so, won't they hit the occasional glitch where a switch or circuit is down? Well, that does make for bad television so, OK, they won't get any "request timed out" problems.

Now Our Hero is doing old fashioned cop work, talking with the victims. Plenty of dramatic music tells us it's a sad situation. Now we have our Hackers doing forensic work... WHY are they allowed to touch the crime scene? At any rate, we get a plausible explanation that the baby cam was used to find a time to hit the joint, and we see the security system line was cut... so why didn't an alarm go off after the line got cut?

Now we see a kid playing games on a massive screen... CYBER GAMER!!! But, we ask him regular questions for regular cop work, although it's peppered with fade effects that are sure to be included in the next version of Microsoft Powerpoint.

The voices... Chinese, Japanese, German, Arabic... ALL THE BAD GUYS IN THE WORLD!!! because World War 2 isn't over, apparently... "the card could have recorded the kidnapping"... no duh, Sherlock! IT IS A RECORDER. Wow. Brilliant.

So we figure we have a team involved... brilliant stuff, that conclusion. But now all their stuff is confiscated and the mom is a suspect because she made a phone call and looked nervous about the DNA sample and breast feeding? Wow, way to send all kinds of subtle propaganda that resistance is futile and an admission of guilt...

The evidence room... all the devices are hooked up to hard drive forensics gear in a room that has massive cable runs to... nowhere? Where are all the server fans? There should be massive whirring and people making jokes about this being the best place to fart with cable runs like that... and direct sunlight coming into the otherwise dimly lit room? What, they want to die of severe screen glare? Onwards... let's look to see what we learn from all the devices on the backlit table... Personally, I'd have them all piled up in my cube or a laptop staging area, but that's just reality...

"All I got is green code here." Yes, because rapid beeps as the code dumps to the screen are a reason for all code to be green. The code is also listing in the wrong direction, scrolling *down* as it progresses, not *up*...  and then, hey presto, we got us some RED code!!! Now, why a * in a line of code is malware and worthy of redness, but the rest of the stuff around that operator is green... that makes no sense to me. It's like the code is randomly colored, getting redder with each line, still scrolling the wrong direction. I lol'd.

And then the zoom-in on text suddenly scrolling the correct way with a "release malworm" in red. OMG H4X!

And the text is now on 20 big screens, scrolling idiotically, and the family are now revealed to be complete idiots for not having an AV program. A brief scan of her phone records reveals an affair with someone from a place that was obviously cached and ready to be zoomed in on.

No waiting for backup, good idea. Real good idea when going against a GANG. No worries, it's just one guy and he's got a baby. Turns out, it's the wrong kid. The promo for the episode indicated we'd be going after a baby-selling ring. No idea why they wouldn't be going after a child porn ring or a money laundering ring or a corporate espionage ring, since those tend to be more widespread... no, we go after people doing old fashioned crimes near The Internet of Hacked Things.

Now the guy that had the kid is tied to a chair and is getting the third degree. Why is he not screaming for a lawyer? Why is he not begging to not be shot? Why does he have the utmost composure, as if he intimately trusts the people questioning him to do him no harm at all? But, he admits to being something of a stalker and a purchaser of foreign goods.

Now that we have to figure out why the kidnappers would sell the wrong kid to our calm lug, and we get treated to a MOBILE VIDEO CONFERENCE CALL!!! It's big enough for six jumbotron screens, even though they don't all line up... I want to know who their video guy is, because that's simply amazing. Our static gear is a tenth the size of that rig, and it has to be set up way in advance for it to even have a chance of being useful. And why doesn't the convo sound like it's on a phone? Huh...

Diaper change? Whaaa? OK, evidence collection. OK, that's clever. But not cyber. It's regular stuff.

But we get a print and a mobile app gets a 100% match. Scary. The lady saying "we have plenty of ways to catch guys like you" is even scarier. I mean... are we supposed to be assured by this benign-sounding assertion that Big Brother watching us is for our own good?

So the lady and the former bad hacker cruise facebook-looking sites for info and then Our Hero, through superior logic, figures out EXACTLY where the baddies are located because there's no way that they baddies would ever do anything random... and then things get very confusing as a motorcycle sniper prevents the baddies from ever getting to a lawyer to talk about how their 4th Amendment rights got violated. And then the FBI dude shoots the sniper... who has burned-off prints...

And then we see burner phones, which is how the baddies got tracked by the sniper dude... except if those phones are off, they have no GPS (that I know of), so they won't be reporting off of any cell towers... and if they were reporting off of cell towers, those things are NOT the most accurate ways to track people. But, somehow, these cheapo Tracfones have the ability to run apps. No way... I have one of those phones, and, believe me, they don't run no apps...

We see the source of the voices and they're bidding on a baby, each in a different language. OK, major BS here. When people do business, they do it in English. English is the second language of choice, the lingua franca of the business world. And what in the world are they using currencies other than dollars or euros for? Who can convert Saudi currency easily? The yuan itself is nonconvertible in most markets... or why aren't these guys using bitcoin, for that matter? And why are they TALKING instead of texting or placing bids by typing them in? Talking is a GREAT way to leave an identifying voice print... Not my cuppa joe, if I'm a criminal concerned about covering my tracks. And if I was a big and powerful dude of enormous means, I wouldn't have an auction audible to the outside world: How about a separate channel, audible only to earpieces in the ears of those that need to hear it?

Nine jumbo screens of baby as we talk about the horrible irony of surveillance devices being used against us. Then a ludicrous translation of voices in AUDIO, instead of written form, and even the currency is translated into dollars. I lol'd. And this guy targets desperate parents? So why not Detroit? Or where there's po' folk that don't even have baby cameras? Oh, wait, that wouldn't be CYBER!!!

Big white hat hacker inspects code in a data center? Really? Most people do that in a cubicle. And then there's an order to shut down the baby camera operation. Should be easy. There weren't any servers or devices on, from the sound of things.

3-D holographic projections to show how our dead baddies were drug mules. What was the cost of that? Wouldn't an email have been cheaper? And more portable?

Kid plays video games and then hears voices... turn the camera company servers back on or the baby dies!!! Got news for him, he might get a false positive when they melt from not having fans... and now we find exactly where the griefer is because consoles can pinpoint bullies? Whaaaaat? So why isn't this technology used to round up all the 13-year-olds that spew profanity in online games?

Now, as far as human trafficking goes, most of it goes on in areas of high distress, like war zones. UN peacekeeping officers tend to wind up time and again as suspects in trafficking, but they tend to have immunity from prosecution in areas where they're stationed. That seems like a nice place to round up some kiddos. Drug dealers in Afghanistan accept kids under 8 as equal to US $20,000, which is a fourth of what these baddies were charging. Why target kids in the USA, and all over the USA, from the look of things? Sounds like an amateur operation. But, then, picking off kids on their way from Nepal to Mumbai isn't CYBER!!! so that's bad television, right?

Next scene, the FBI stormtroopers move in. Sure hope they got the right house... they toss in a camera to confirm (nice touch, although most of these operations just assume they've got the right house and barge on in). Good guy hacker has to go break into the crime ring's network while Our Hero questions a Russian-sounding punk.

The crime ring's workbench looks a little more believable, but the password is ridonkulous. And the cracking thereof is high comedy. First try, the guy gets in. Such luck, that the 16-character password is ALL NUMBERS. One non-alphanumeric key, and we have a short, unsatisfying episode.

To make sure this episode satisfies, we have a car chase and a car goes into a lake for a heroic rescue. I won't comment on whether or not the rescue was possible, because that's not my area of expertise. I'll leave that to the Mythbusters. Kid gets rescued, CPR works, and it's all smiles, thanks to the fact that the crime ring was a bunch of idiots that never heard of characters, let alone uppercase ones.

Happy endings in the poorly lit 00010101 Jump Street nerve center that looks nothing at all like what IT people normally get to work in. Is there no ergonomic adjustments team where they work? And why did they unscrew all the fluorescents? So many questions, I'm sure I'll find out in later episodes...

[Mowery]

I didn't watch that show, but I'm pretty sure that this

Yeah, right... and 96% of the Internet being dark and mysterious? How about 96% of the internet being Cisco web pages I can never find when I need them...

Is one of the best things I have ever read.

[Nerm]

I knew it would be bad but I watched it anyway. Should have went with my gut and just went on to bed lol. Hey at least they weren't connecting an ethernet cable from a mid-air airplane to a laptop while driving a Ferrari 200MPH lol.

[ChestHair]

Hey at least they weren't connecting an ethernet cable from a mid-air airplane to a laptop while driving a Ferrari 200MPH lol.

After I saw that episode of scorpion, I ordered a fresh box of cat5e from monoprice to keep in the back of my car just in case.

[Nerm]

Hey at least they weren't connecting an ethernet cable from a mid-air airplane to a laptop while driving a Ferrari 200MPH lol.

After I saw that episode of scorpion, I ordered a fresh box of cat5e from monoprice to keep in the back of my car just in case.

[deanwebb]

OK, so here's how I imagine the real world would have dealt with the case...
911 call... cops head out to look things over... they probably find the existence of the boyfriend because of phone records... turns out, the affair guy is the culprit, they bring him in, get the baby back home, parents divorce.

Alternately, there is something skeezy going on with the baby monitors... the cyber guys use their 1337 5k!11z and trace it back to... China. Crap, there's nothing more we can do at this point, ma'am or sir, as appropriate.

[deanwebb]

I wasn't the only one that had a delicious time... http://threatpost.com/csi-cyber-we-watched-so-you-didnt-have-to/111440

I feel good that my reactions and observations match up with the above article. If I do this for all the episodes of the show this season, do I get a certification?