ITACS 5211: Introduction to Ethical Hacking

Wade Mackey

Ian Riley

U.S. Navy to Start Using XBox 360 Controllers

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http://www.military.com/daily-news/2017/09/17/navys-most-advanced-subs-will-soon-use-xbox-controllers.html

For anyone who hasn’t worked in or with the military, the government acquisition and stock systems are constantly derided for the huge amount of time and expense added to any purchase. In an effort to combat this, the USS John Warner is going to use the XBOX 360 controllers for periscope controls. The obvious win here is that the Navy now has a cheap supply of replacement parts for when these parts are broken rather than needing to order an entirely new $38k controller.

The dangers to the navy are that 1) The Navy is advertising a specific product they’re using, which means that 2) An adversary could use a bug in the controller driver to compromise Navy machines or 3) an adversary could produce a similar controller with a USB Rubber Ducky or other compromising software inside, and find a way to provide the controller to the ships (either by selling them in stores near the port, or by doing the controller equivalent of dropping a USB flash drive in the parking lot)

How a Fishtank Helped Hack a Casino

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Web Summary

Original PDF Source (See Page 8)

tl;dr: >10 GB of data was exfiltrated from a North American casino using a recently installed Internet of Things fishtank.

There’s not a TON of info on this (since no casino wants to divulge too much about how it was hacked or what data was lost), but there’s two details that really stand out to me:

  1. Because the device was rather new on the network, the traffic on it was never properly profiled before the hack took place.
  2. The communications took place using a audio/video protocol. Similar to ping tunneling, where the data is hidden inside a ping, I think the data here was exfiltrated using an AV protocol so that it would be less likely to be noticed by the casino. If, say, video logs were being sent off-network, it wouldn’t be unusual to see this type of traffic leaving the casino’s network.
  3. (Confusion): The article says the fishtank was “configured to use an individual VPN”; I don’t know what they mean here. I think they’re trying to say that it had its own VLAN, so it wouldn’t be able to interact with devices on the main VLAN? By my understanding, VPNs are just used to create an excrypted internet connection through a third party.