6 ms·

Pirates hack into shipping company’s servers to identify booty

109 points by pavornyoh 11y ago

SixSigma 11y ago
Sound like it could have been a lot more devastating if the attackers had more (mad) skill(z). I am curious, though, why law enforcement didn't become more involved and track them down rather than just block them.
- xigency 11y ago
  What kind of solution is it to block one IP address?
  - rossdavidh 11y ago
    My thinking exactly. It seems like it would have been a much better solution to get law enforcement involved, since there was a decent chance of getting the pirates to attack whatever ship you wanted by planting (bogus) info about valuable cargo on it. The "solution" they used instead seems like it will last about as long as it takes to get a new IP address.
  - SixSigma 11y ago
    There is that. You're likely to get the same IP for a long time on residential broadband though. it did say > connecting directly from their home system > [blocking] ending the targeted attacks But then again, maybe it was a proxy through a compromised system. All said, though, this could just be a nonsense fluff piece promoting Verizon, ars just links to their PR page when it implies you will get a detailed report.
- ChinoAntrax 11y ago
  They could have been in a place like Somalia, where there really isn't a force to send after them. The same reason they don't just have a Somalian Navy that anchors outside these villages on the coast the pirates launch from to stop them, or sits in the villages with police
- contingencies 11y ago
  I assume this was off Indonesia. Indonesia is very corrupt. Having visited major cities in Sumatra such as Medan, there is not a lot of wealth. Add that to vanishing forests and a growing population, with little education, and lots of people are willing to take risks. In addition, I've read allegations previously that there is evidence that the Indonesian military supports the pirates, ie. they are actually working for corrupt military/political officials. If you ever do ever visit Medan, check out the taxidermy museum, it's not the sort of thing I'd normally support but it's the most awesome such museum on the planet by a long shot (even better than Walter Rothschild's legacy at Tring in the UK). Incidentally in the last few days they just had a major earthquake a hundred clicks offshore to the south of Sumatra, and reports of tsunami waves. The northern tip, Banda Aceh, was one of the worst affected locations in the huge tsunami a few years back. It's enough to make you head to the northern coast and try your luck as a pirate.
dates 11y ago
the Da Vinci virus is a cover up for something even more sinister...
bsder 11y ago
I was going to make a comment about international waters and privateers ... And then realized that simply closing the security hole gains them the same amount of profit.
rwmj 11y ago
The next step is to reprogramme the delivery address and have the booty sent to the pirates.
- dredmorbius 11y ago
  Precisely the point I made elsewhere. Or: start a shipping services company and "lose" the odd lot.
  - gregw134 11y ago
    A la season 2 of the wire.
yeukhon 11y ago
What is a booty? The urban slang "booty" or something else like bootleg?
- ConroyBumpus 11y ago
  It's another term for pirate's treasure.
  - yeukhon 11y ago
    Thank you. BTW, the pirates out there, keep downvoting :-) I don't speak your pirate language.
bkor 11y ago
This story is pretty sensationalized. 1. A container shipping company does not store the bar code of crates/packages. I've easily read 100s of booking details and never seen this. At most you maybe find one booking where the customer gave too much info and the customer service person copy/pasted too much. Anyway, either the article is talking about the container number or the hacked company is a logistics company. 2. If it is a logistics company, they wouldn't know exactly where the container is on the vessel. You can ask "above/below deck", but exact details aren't normally shared. You'd need to hack two companies if the pirates behaved like the article suggests. 3. Boarding a container ship isn't that easy as a lot of them are huge. 4. A container might just be reachable. Hint: For some commodities special care is taken to ensure that the vessel crew can still reach it. It's much easier to target a container after it has left a terminal and is e.g. on a truck. Note that even with full access it is better to somehow takeover a truck than to pick it up yourself; they check and your identification (passport/drivers license) when you pick up. At most this might be about some logistics company that uses small vessels. E.g. intra Asia trade. Any big company I would be surprised if the hackers would make sense of all the systems :-P That said, every so often you do see news articles whereby someone within either customs or a shipping company sells the details to others. Those others then steal the goods. But not by boarding vessels though, they takeover the truck.
- woah 11y ago
  You're saying that the entire story is fabricated?
- chockablock 11y ago
  So, you're claiming the story is fabricated? Quoting: "They’d board a vessel, locate by bar code specific sought-after crates containing valuables, steal the contents of that crate—and that crate only—and then depart the vessel without further incident." You can download the Verizon report (that is the source for this article) here: http://www.verizonenterprise.com/resources/reports/rp_data-breach-digest_xg_en.pdf http://www.verizonenterprise.com/resources/reports/rp_data-b...
  - bkor 11y ago
BWStearns 11y ago
Hacker pirates: finally, we live in the future! Aside from that though, I wonder if we'll be seeing increasing criminal activity like this or if it'll stay as an occasional source of funny headlines. On the one hand the resources and knowledge of how to compromise a server are more accessible all the time. On the other, exploited vulnerabilities are patched and the walls stay a bit higher than the cheap ladders. This will pretty much ensure that there is almost always at least a non-trivial amount of learning that needs to be done in order to profitably compromise equipment for practical purposes. I'm thinking that the prevalence of basic technical savvy (roughly "has strong google-fu in the service of troubleshooting" or better) is going to be the largest influence on whether hacking-augmented crime increases or not. My logic here is that it would happen more if more criminals knew how to go about learning how to hack since that gap between pre-built tools and practical application is always going to be there, but it's certainly bridgeable with some curiosity. More technically savvy population, more cybercrime. It makes sense, but it can also be used as a kind of fluency metric. I thereby propose the frequency of computer-aided criminal activity as a fraction of all criminal activity to be a target metric for US technology education, higher is better.
- nxzero 11y ago
  All depends on who you define as a pirate, hacker, etc. if you consider social engineering hacking and stealing goods in transit, then using the two together is as good as written history.
  - BWStearns 11y ago
    Especially if you consider national flag swapping and the like to be breaking an information system (or at least abusing a weak auth system).
- kijin 11y ago
  Hackers (err, "crackers") can sell their services to others. A small group of tech savvy people can enable a lot of tech illiterate people to commit cybercrime. This messes up your math. We already live in a world where you don't need to own a botnet to DDoS somebody. You just rent someone else's botnet by the minute. The pirates in the story are amateurs now, but soon somebody might rise among their ranks as the go-to guy for computer stuff. Just pay him a few ringgits and you don't even need to know about Google. The only thing you need to know is who to call.
kartika- 11y ago
if they're looking for booty why don't they use a porn site?
bitwize 11y ago
To paraphrase Grace Hopper -- first actual case of software pirates being found.
codeisawesome 11y ago
> "These threat actors, while given points for creativity, were clearly not highly skilled..." Wait so a few script kiddies were able to pwn a sophisticated company's "in house CMS" (as if that was ever a good idea), and these guys are smug about the fact that the Pirates made a few typos?!
- jkot 11y ago
  And they ended future attacks by blocking IP address.. :-)
  - codeisawesome 11y ago
    Hahaha
gadders 11y ago
Funnily enough, I just finished reading a short story by Brad Taylor on this very topic: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18849590-black-flag http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18849590-black-flag Entertaining if you like reading modern special forces fiction.
germerconsult 11y ago
Reminds me of the hack that happened in Antwerp. Basically the mob obtained access to data through extortion of IT consultants and was able to present the correct documents at the gates and drive away with the containers before the correct truck arrived. http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-mob-technology-consultants-help-drug-traffickers/ http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-mob-technology-consul... http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/how-traffickers-hack-shipping-containers-to-move-drugs http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/how-traffickers-hack-shippi...
Joof 11y ago
I like the part where they point out how unskilled they are, but still managed to get the job done.

109 points by pavornyoh 11y ago

Sound like it could have been a lot more devastating if the attackers had more (mad) skill(z). I am curious, though, why law enforcement didn't become more involved and track them down rather than just block them.

xigency 11y ago
What kind of solution is it to block one IP address?
- rossdavidh 11y ago
  My thinking exactly. It seems like it would have been a much better solution to get law enforcement involved, since there was a decent chance of getting the pirates to attack whatever ship you wanted by planting (bogus) info about valuable cargo on it. The "solution" they used instead seems like it will last about as long as it takes to get a new IP address.
- SixSigma 11y ago
  There is that. You're likely to get the same IP for a long time on residential broadband though. it did say > connecting directly from their home system > [blocking] ending the targeted attacks But then again, maybe it was a proxy through a compromised system. All said, though, this could just be a nonsense fluff piece promoting Verizon, ars just links to their PR page when it implies you will get a detailed report.
ChinoAntrax 11y ago
They could have been in a place like Somalia, where there really isn't a force to send after them. The same reason they don't just have a Somalian Navy that anchors outside these villages on the coast the pirates launch from to stop them, or sits in the villages with police
contingencies 11y ago
I assume this was off Indonesia. Indonesia is very corrupt. Having visited major cities in Sumatra such as Medan, there is not a lot of wealth. Add that to vanishing forests and a growing population, with little education, and lots of people are willing to take risks. In addition, I've read allegations previously that there is evidence that the Indonesian military supports the pirates, ie. they are actually working for corrupt military/political officials. If you ever do ever visit Medan, check out the taxidermy museum, it's not the sort of thing I'd normally support but it's the most awesome such museum on the planet by a long shot (even better than Walter Rothschild's legacy at Tring in the UK). Incidentally in the last few days they just had a major earthquake a hundred clicks offshore to the south of Sumatra, and reports of tsunami waves. The northern tip, Banda Aceh, was one of the worst affected locations in the huge tsunami a few years back. It's enough to make you head to the northern coast and try your luck as a pirate.

dates 11y ago

the Da Vinci virus is a cover up for something even more sinister...

bsder 11y ago

I was going to make a comment about international waters and privateers ... And then realized that simply closing the security hole gains them the same amount of profit.

rwmj 11y ago

The next step is to reprogramme the delivery address and have the booty sent to the pirates.

dredmorbius 11y ago
Precisely the point I made elsewhere. Or: start a shipping services company and "lose" the odd lot.
- gregw134 11y ago
  A la season 2 of the wire.

yeukhon 11y ago

What is a booty? The urban slang "booty" or something else like bootleg?

ConroyBumpus 11y ago
It's another term for pirate's treasure.
- yeukhon 11y ago
  Thank you. BTW, the pirates out there, keep downvoting :-) I don't speak your pirate language.

bkor 11y ago

This story is pretty sensationalized. 1. A container shipping company does not store the bar code of crates/packages. I've easily read 100s of booking details and never seen this. At most you maybe find one booking where the customer gave too much info and the customer service person copy/pasted too much. Anyway, either the article is talking about the container number or the hacked company is a logistics company. 2. If it is a logistics company, they wouldn't know exactly where the container is on the vessel. You can ask "above/below deck", but exact details aren't normally shared. You'd need to hack two companies if the pirates behaved like the article suggests. 3. Boarding a container ship isn't that easy as a lot of them are huge. 4. A container might just be reachable. Hint: For some commodities special care is taken to ensure that the vessel crew can still reach it. It's much easier to target a container after it has left a terminal and is e.g. on a truck. Note that even with full access it is better to somehow takeover a truck than to pick it up yourself; they check and your identification (passport/drivers license) when you pick up. At most this might be about some logistics company that uses small vessels. E.g. intra Asia trade. Any big company I would be surprised if the hackers would make sense of all the systems :-P That said, every so often you do see news articles whereby someone within either customs or a shipping company sells the details to others. Those others then steal the goods. But not by boarding vessels though, they takeover the truck.

woah 11y ago
You're saying that the entire story is fabricated?
chockablock 11y ago
So, you're claiming the story is fabricated? Quoting: "They’d board a vessel, locate by bar code specific sought-after crates containing valuables, steal the contents of that crate—and that crate only—and then depart the vessel without further incident." You can download the Verizon report (that is the source for this article) here: http://www.verizonenterprise.com/resources/reports/rp_data-breach-digest_xg_en.pdf http://www.verizonenterprise.com/resources/reports/rp_data-b...
- bkor 11y ago

BWStearns 11y ago

Hacker pirates: finally, we live in the future! Aside from that though, I wonder if we'll be seeing increasing criminal activity like this or if it'll stay as an occasional source of funny headlines. On the one hand the resources and knowledge of how to compromise a server are more accessible all the time. On the other, exploited vulnerabilities are patched and the walls stay a bit higher than the cheap ladders. This will pretty much ensure that there is almost always at least a non-trivial amount of learning that needs to be done in order to profitably compromise equipment for practical purposes. I'm thinking that the prevalence of basic technical savvy (roughly "has strong google-fu in the service of troubleshooting" or better) is going to be the largest influence on whether hacking-augmented crime increases or not. My logic here is that it would happen more if more criminals knew how to go about learning how to hack since that gap between pre-built tools and practical application is always going to be there, but it's certainly bridgeable with some curiosity. More technically savvy population, more cybercrime. It makes sense, but it can also be used as a kind of fluency metric. I thereby propose the frequency of computer-aided criminal activity as a fraction of all criminal activity to be a target metric for US technology education, higher is better.

nxzero 11y ago
All depends on who you define as a pirate, hacker, etc. if you consider social engineering hacking and stealing goods in transit, then using the two together is as good as written history.
- BWStearns 11y ago
  Especially if you consider national flag swapping and the like to be breaking an information system (or at least abusing a weak auth system).
kijin 11y ago
Hackers (err, "crackers") can sell their services to others. A small group of tech savvy people can enable a lot of tech illiterate people to commit cybercrime. This messes up your math. We already live in a world where you don't need to own a botnet to DDoS somebody. You just rent someone else's botnet by the minute. The pirates in the story are amateurs now, but soon somebody might rise among their ranks as the go-to guy for computer stuff. Just pay him a few ringgits and you don't even need to know about Google. The only thing you need to know is who to call.

kartika- 11y ago

if they're looking for booty why don't they use a porn site?

bitwize 11y ago

To paraphrase Grace Hopper -- first actual case of software pirates being found.

codeisawesome 11y ago

> "These threat actors, while given points for creativity, were clearly not highly skilled..." Wait so a few script kiddies were able to pwn a sophisticated company's "in house CMS" (as if that was ever a good idea), and these guys are smug about the fact that the Pirates made a few typos?!

jkot 11y ago
And they ended future attacks by blocking IP address.. :-)
- codeisawesome 11y ago
  Hahaha

gadders 11y ago

Funnily enough, I just finished reading a short story by Brad Taylor on this very topic: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18849590-black-flag http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18849590-black-flag Entertaining if you like reading modern special forces fiction.

germerconsult 11y ago

Reminds me of the hack that happened in Antwerp. Basically the mob obtained access to data through extortion of IT consultants and was able to present the correct documents at the gates and drive away with the containers before the correct truck arrived. http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-mob-technology-consultants-help-drug-traffickers/ http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-mob-technology-consul... http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/how-traffickers-hack-shipping-containers-to-move-drugs http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/how-traffickers-hack-shippi...

Joof 11y ago

I like the part where they point out how unskilled they are, but still managed to get the job done.