Four German military officials discussed what targets German-made Taurus missiles could potentially hit if Chancellor Olaf Scholz ever allowed them to be sent to Kyiv, and the call had been intercepted by Russian intelligence.
According to German authorities, the “data leak” was down to just one participant dialling in on an insecure line, either via his mobile or the hotel wi-fi.
The exact mode of dial-in is “still being clarified”, Germany has said.
“I think that’s a good lesson for everybody: never use hotel internet if you want to do a secure call,” Germany’s ambassador to the UK, Miguel Berger, told the BBC this week. Some may feel the advice came a little too late.
Eyebrows were raised when it emerged the call happened on the widely-used WebEx platform - but Berlin has insisted the officials used an especially secure, certified version.
Professor Alan Woodward from the Surrey Centre for Cyber Security says that WebEx does provide end-to-end encryption “if you use the app itself”.
But using a landline or open hotel wi-fi could mean security was no longer guaranteed - and Russian spies, it’s now supposed, were ready to pounce.
This doesnt add up… If the software was properly encrypted they shouldn’t have been able to carry out a man in the middle attack right?
Maybe he dialed in by telephone? It would be a complete boomer move, but I’ve seen people do it.
A researcher in cryptography in Berlin, Henning Seidler, believes the most likely theory is that the officer dialled in via his mobile phone and the call was picked up by spies’ antenna who can also “forward” the traffic onto the main, official antenna.
Seems like the more likely theory
That is an expensive way to lose your job!
“Intelligence” services cost taxpayers billions a year, so the billion dollar question is why is it possible to dial in to “official” military communications over insecure channels at all?
Why doesn’t the government run their own signal or matrix infra? Why are they paying Cisco, and introducing the numerous attack vectors of a proprietary optionally-encrypted service?
The threat of surveillance capitalism isn’t just in the dragnet surveillance of the population. It’s in the profiteering of “partnerships” between private and public — the drive of corrupt and incompetent political and military leadership to direct funds to sub-optimal proprietary services and protocols, instead of leveraging public funding to contribute to open-source and make hardened systems ubiquitous.
The funny thing is, that the Bundeswehr actually has a communications platform based on Matrix: bwMessenger goes live for Bundeswehr, element.io
Why they’re not using it? Who knows…
That’s what I’m getting at. This ultimately isn’t the fault of some technobozo who dialled in from hotel wifi. If the system were fit for purpose, technobozo could dial in over any network.
The is the fault of German politicians, military, and “intelligence”. This type of compromise should not exist as a matter of circumstance. It should only be possible when an end users device is directly compromised.
Probably the client runs poorly on the cutting edge Nokia 3310s those generals use
We are talking about the person/department that has ensured that they run an especially secure, certified, version of webex losing their job right?
As much as I’d like to think that senior military people have some basic awareness about security, this is really a tool that was considered secure by the organisation. Sounds like a big gaping whole letting dialin enabled for anyone to use.
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Vut it shouldnt even happen. They were in Singapore at the time that, they had to join in remotely. There is a whole department responsible for running the infrastructure and make sure its secure, this is, hardly the end users fault.
Shit they probably could have just asked the US to use the local SCIF. It’s not like we don’t already know the information.
Not even. A Pringles can and some wire.
Yes, it is a boomer move. But don’t let Cisco off the hook. What kind of specially certified security feature is that, if it can be turned off so easily by accident.
He most likely did, at least from what I can deduce from the published recording.
Sounds like the encryption is automatically turned off if someone calls in via phone. So technically e2e encryption is supported, but it’s a shit design just waiting for someone to accidentally misuse it.
It sounds like this especially secure, certified, version of webex should probably not allow dial in via phone should it?
It they used the client, yes. But in you dial in via sip, that opens up so many ways to screw up. Old software, open wifi, legacy hardware, you name it.
yes, one side has to automatically or manually accept a fake certificate/key to MITM end to end encryption. you know, like when your browser says “certificate error” and you click on advanced->accept anyway or something like that. if the software always accepts or he manually accepted one, the MITM guy can substitute his own encryption key/cert and decrypt and re-encrypt on the fly.
If you’re looking at who is allowed to issue trusted root certificates in common browsers and operating systems, nobody needs to accept nothing to have every possible man in the middle from every major country’s intelligence services already in there.
But that also depends on the issuer that WebEx used. If this really was a MITM without someone fucking up and bypassing a warning, whoever the root CA is issuing for WebEx can no longer be trusted.
More likely they dialed in via mobile rather than use “Computer Audio” and that is easily defeated using a Stingray-type device.
Yes, in that case, it most likely was using an insecure channel to directly dial into the conference. Still, the entire certificate infrastructure is mere security theater, unless you’re actually going through the trouble of checking every individual certificate yourself.
That’s the open secret of the Web, all security on it is just fake. The list of root certificates is way too long to provide any security.
Think it’s likely to impact people with regular threat models?
Any obvious solutions?
Public WiFi is the main problem, anybody connected to the same WiFi could potentially intercept all of your Web traffic. You could use a VPN to avoid that one.
Certificate transparency, pinning, etc
It’s always one of two possibilities: shit software or idiot users
In this case shit software. For a secure conference software there should be no possibility for the user to accept invalid certificates.
The developer always has to plan with what we call a DAU in germany (Dümmster anzunehmender User = dumbest user possible), and even that user should have no possibility to accidentally share a secure conference. So as a developer I would: Lock the user to certificates and encryption keys I deem secure and hook into the low level OS functions to grab the screen and disable them to prevent accidental sharing via software like Anydesk and the like which the user forgot to close. This would even interrupt the functions of a simple trojan on the PC.
Of course a dedicated attacker with physical or admin access to the device could always break these. But then you have another big security breach.
Why not both?
Yes, it’s not the 90s anymore. The network is hostile. If it’s not, nice but you’d be a fool to trust even your own. Encryption all the way!
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It probably is, but they didn’t disable the feature that allows you to dial in on a phone line for audio. That’s my guess.
“I think that’s a good lesson for everybody: never use hotel internet if you want to do a secure call,” Germany’s ambassador to the UK, Miguel Berger, told the BBC this week.
…
The exact mode of dial-in is “still being clarified”, Germany has said.
OK, well the exact mode kinda fucking matters before you just scapegoat a hotel.
This smells like a coverup.
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Oh no. They’re not referring to a specific hotel. Seriously never use hotel Internet on a sensitive device or for sensitive business. You will regret it.
End to end encryption
USE IT
In a world where I can deploy end to end encrypted comms servers to an old computer in my house, the fucking military of any country should, at a minimum, require encryption to join meetings where military strategy is being discussed.
Yes
The simplest and most straightforward answer is usually the correct one: The hotel room was probably bugged.
They can discuss missile targets but they don’t know how to set a secure comm channel, it makes me wonder… how old were they? why don’t they give a device with pre-installed VPN (incl. Killswitch) to all certain-rank officials and get done with this?..
They do. Its much more than a built in vpn, they also have specialized, hardened versions of communications apps on them. The weakest link in cybersecurity is usually the end user.
I think one issue is for high officials that outrank everyone, they can get away with getting an insecure device because they prefer an iPhone over the custom hardened phone on Android 10 locked down for secure reasons.
Not sure what their age has to do with it
an especially secure, certified version
Bwahahahahahhahahahhahahhaa
This happened because of an unintended backdoor into an end to end encrypted conversation.
The British Government are actively trying to get back doors put into end to end encryption by law.
They are doing this so they can spy on their own citizens to ostensibly make Britain safer.
But as you can see, it actually would make it less safe.
This is what happens without E2EE.
What an amazing feat of incompetence! They’d be better off just using Signal…
They’d be quantum proof as well 😅 https://signal.org/blog/pqxdh/
They even have their own Matrix Messenger they could have used…
Yeah def this is what they should’ve been using.
I love Signal but military should use their own messenging service (and they do).
Yeah agree, just saying it would’ve bedn better then the hot garbage they were using.
I don’t see how it matters if you use hotel WiFi or mobile if the mobile mast you connect to is controlled by a hostile government.
What matters is what you were sending wasn’t secured at source.
Although Wikipedia tells you the range and I’m pretty sure even Russia have access to maps and a compass.
How is it possible to accomplish a man in the middle attack on a TLS secure connection ? Hotel wifi or not, unless something major like Singaporean gov interfered with the connection, forced forged certificates into his phone, I don’t see how this was put off by compromising the connection .
I bet they are covering for the Fact that one of them has downloaded malware into his device to masturbate to a hot girl living next to him kinda ad. and then malware shared back that data to Russia. or they have a spy among them and Germany isn’t ready to admit having its defense forces compromised with Russian assets.
The easiest explanation is the room was bugged and the general stayed there.
Everyone forgets the old school stuff. It doesn’t matter how well your connection is encrypted if the GRU has the room next to you.
they were using an insecure method to connect with webex, so something like a dial-in number for using it without a computer i guess. that is probably not encrypted. the meeting could have been a fax anyway
Do you think Webex doesn’t reject insecure connections ? it is the bare minimum for any web app.
but the audio in the hands of the Russians sounds crystal clear! and you can hear all the participants very clearly, which means it has been captured from one of the involved devices.
not sure how they would check a landline call for security 🤷
TLS means dick if you have a nation-state that can mint a cert that would be trusted by your browser. Unless you’re using a site that does cert pinning (which is basically a list your browser has of URLs and expected cert fingerprints as published by the site owners) or the fuckery that Google gets up to in chrome (they monitor and immediately ping the mother ship if a Google property is detected using an unauthorized cert), you can’t really stop or detect it as an end user.
Your computer trusts so many companies to vouch for other sites’ legitimacy that it’s not out of the realm of possibilities that they leaned on a CA and minted a cert to let them MITM the connection. You’re still connecting to a “trusted” cert, even if it isn’t the legitimate one.
All the data goes to the man in the middle. Worse, there’s nothing stopping a user from connecting for other things. So a man in the middle can act like a trusted source while sending malware to the device. If they compromised the phone/computer then the encrypted tunnel is moot. It has to be decrypted at some point, even if the malware literally just creates a recording.
It is fine if you use unprotected wifi and then connect to a VPN.
You don’t even need a VPN if the software uses proper TLS encryption or equivalent
TLS downgrade attacks are a thing, and can enable MITM attacks. There are server-side mitigations (such as only allowing TLS 1.2+ which should be the case but often isn’t because the server has to support a niche user or application that only supports TLS 1.1), and since you usually don’t know which TLS version you are using, for very sensitive connections it should be assumed that TLS is not enough.
Don’t even get me started on the non-security of standard mobile/landline calls. They’re basically transparent for an attacker with means like Russia’s.
Proper E2E encryption and/or a VPN should be mandatory for a call to be considered secure, period.
If WebEx is susceptible to MITM attacks, it shouldn’t be used for sensitive calls. It’s better to use a VPN, but something like this should not happen at all, even without VPNs.
Sure, but when you demonstrably don’t have a handle on E2E encryption using a VPN should be the FIRST step because it is very easy to implement, secure, and enforce. Virtually every private company does it.
Conversely E2E encryption is hard, lots of popular apps disable it by default or in some cases because it breaks a lot of useful things (like search). I agree it SHOULD still be mandated, but it’s several orders of magnitude more expensive to switch the communication tool than mandating a VPN so for me that immediately pushes it second to VPN on the priority list.
I like the American option. We just built an entire second Internet and air-gapped it.
These VPN ad campaigns are incredibly detrimental to people’s understanding of security mechanisms in the internet.
How would this not have helped out in this case? I imagine the Bundeswehr must have an organization-wide VPN which would render any MITM in a local Wifi network impossible, barring user error.
The data still has to go through the man in the middle. It doesn’t matter if it’s encrypted by the VPN or the App.
Isn’t like very basic security advice to not use random connections for sensitive information? But than again it’s Germany, pretty sure he has his password written down on a sticky note.
günther2
EvE Online should be mandatory training for anyone with a security clearance. Minimum of six months in Goonswarm, Pandemic Horde, Fraternity, or The Initiative.
https://cad-comic.com/comic/one-of-us/
That’s only a slight exaggeration. I had a “chat” with one of our intel officers at one point due to a IRL purchase of PLEX.
Edit: maybe just Goonswarm. They do the intelligence and spy stuff the best.
