TorrentFreak Email Update |
- These Pirate Parties Plan to Enter The European Parliament
- How VPN Services Responded to Heartbleed
- Off US Blacklist, Italy Begins Torrent Site Blackout, No Trials Needed
| These Pirate Parties Plan to Enter The European Parliament Posted: 11 May 2014 03:25 AM PDT  In roughly two weeks time, people all over the European Union will be going to the polls to elect the next European Parliament. Five years ago, the Swedish Pirate Party had a substantial victory with over 7% of the vote, and while the German Pirates didn’t get a seat, they did claim over two hundred thousand votes. Now, five years later, more Pirate parties are now in a position to contest the election. Today we provide a quick run-down of the Pirate candidates in the various countries, sorted by incumbency and seat apportionment (Note: many links are to non-English language websites) Sweden (20 seats)The only country with incumbent MEPs, the order of Sweden’s two main candidates is unchanged from 2009, with Christian Engstrom first, followed by Amelia Andersdotter. Amelia, the youngest ever MEP when she was elected, is also one of the candidates for the EU commission presidency. Christian told TorrentFreak: "The struggle to protect freedom on the Internet will continue, from defending net neutrality to fighting against mass surveillance. We must explain to the politicians from the older parties that the Internet is not a toy, and that we must defend our fundamental rights as vigorously in the online world as in the offline." The full list of candidates competing for the 20 seats is available here. Germany (96)Competing alongside Sweden in 2009, Germany also has the most seats of any country, with 96 up for grabs. While they didn’t quite hit 1% last time, they’ve been doing well in various regional elections for the last year or two, and they're hardly a new 'unelectable' party either, with 250 seats at various state and local governments. The 5% election threshold was ruled unconstitutional in 2011 and a proposed value of 3% was also struck down a few months ago, meaning that just over 1% of the votes are needed to start winning seats, well within their grasp. "Our vision for Europe," lead candidate Julia Reda told TF, "is based on the Internet: on sharing, collaboration and a community of peers. We need Pirates in the European Parliament to reform copyright and enable the sharing of culture and knowledge across national borders." France (74, contesting 56)France is one of a select few countries that use a regional constituency system, rather than a national list. The French Pirate Party is running 13 candidates in the North west, 20 in the south west region, 26 in the South East, 10 in Centre, 30 in Ile-de France (which includes Paris) and 9 for the overseas territories of France. Interestingly, there are at least twice as many candidates on each regions list than there are seats available, meaning that at least half the pirates are never going to be elected no matter how well they do. United Kingdom (73, contesting 8)Like France, Poland and Italy, the UK is also split into several constituencies, with the UK Pirate Party only contesting one, their headquarters region of North West England. They're focusing on this area after having had some success in local elections in the recent past, beating, or equaling the coalition-government party candidates. In keeping with the open nature of the party, they're also raising money for the election via crowdfunding platform Pozible. Candidate Jack Alnutt is firm on why people should vote Pirate. "The European Union needs more transparent and open governance, more democratic involvement with increased powers for the Parliament and better protection of our fundamental rights. The only way to make this happen is to vote Pirate in May." Spain (54)The situation in Spain is more complex than normal. There have been two competing pirate groups for a while, Partido Pirata – the national party formed in 2006 which covered the whole of Spain – and a group of regional parties that have now banded together under the banner Confederacion Pirata. It's this latter group that is running candidates nationally. Their list of 50 candidates is headed by Dario Castañé from Barcelona, a 29-year-old computer engineer who describes politics as "a passion of mine". With seats being awarded on just 2.5% of the vote last year, they have a strong chance of getting at least one Pirate into the European Parliament. Poland (51, contesting 16)Poland is another constitution-based system. Here only 6 pirates are running for election, but they're also running in a coalition, with the Direct Democracy party, the Libertarian Party, and a number of independent candidates. Four of these are going to compete for the 4 seats in Łódź [district 6] (spots 1, 3, 4, and 5), with the other two pirates on the ballot in the Silesian area [district 11] to the south (second on the list), and Lublin [district 8] to the east (fourth on the list). Netherlands (26)The ten Pirates contesting the Dutch seats are led by scientist Matthijs Pontier. They recently celebrated the first elected Pirate to the Board committee of Amsterdam West with 3.6%, and fell just short of other seats in the Amsterdam South committee (3.5%) and city council (1.8%) With no threshold to win seats, getting a seat is not outside the realms of possibility for them, especially if they can keep the momentum going. Czech Republic (21)The 21 seats in the Czech Republic will be contended by a full spread of Pirates. Leading the list is 34-year old Dr Ivan Bartos, Ph.D, an expert in database systems and part-time musician. Current polls have them running a little short of their target to get a seat, but as with the Swedish party five years ago, they've a strong youth following which may be underrepresented in the polling. This gave them a 'win' in a student mock EU election with 19.2% of the vote from the 25,000+ students aged 15 and older polled. Worst case, that's another few thousand votes next time. Greece (21)In Greece, the Pirate-Green cooperation that has existed in the European Parliament has continued, with a coalition list comprising candidates of both the Greek Pirate Party, and the Ecologist Greens party, along with several independent candidates. In 2009, the Ecologist Greens won one seat with 3.9% of the vote. What impact the Pirates will have on any Green candidates is unknown, but with a formal alliance, it's certainly expected that there will be some. Austria (18)Another party in an alliance, this time though, the coalition of three parties, all without national-level representation, as well as a few independents. Instead of a coalition with the Greens, as in Greece, the Austrian Pirates have instead joined forces with the Communist Party and the Change party to form the group ‘Europe Anders”. The list is headed by current MEP Martin Ehrenhauser (elected on a pirate-like anti-corruption and pro-transparency platform via the "Hans-Peter Martin's list" in 2009) with the first Pirate in fourth. There is a 4% threshold. Finland (13)Finland uses a non-preferential list, meaning that (as we understand it) you vote for candidates, which also count for the party. The party is allocated seats based on the votes for all its candidates, and party fills those seats based on the vote count for the candidates. Their most obvious candidate for a seat is Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde, whose campaign launch we covered recently. He was also nominated as the Pirate Party Europe candidate for Commission President with Amelia Andersdotter as mentioned earlier. Croatia (11)It’s almost déjà vu for Croatian Pirates. They are one of only three Pirate parties to have previously contested a European parliament election, along with the Germans and Swedes. In their case, however, it was during an extraordinary election last year on their acceptance to the EU, where they scored 1.13% of the vote, putting them 12th of 28 parties. This year it appears that most parties have joined into a few coalitions or partnerships, with several European group affiliations mixed, but there are still 25 groups listed on the ballot. It certainly makes for an interesting election for the 13 pirates on the Croatian Pirate Party list who are bucking the local coalition trend and standing alone. Slovenia (8)In Slovenia, they're being a little more "realistic" (in their own words) and fielding only a single candidate. Rolando Benjamin Vaz Ferreira is a translator specializing in English and German as well as his native Slovenian. The feeling is upbeat and positive though, telling TF: "We’ve received incredible support amongst those who know of us, may it be voters, journalists, civil servants and even other party officers. Our biggest limiting factor is how many people we can reach in time." In 2009, 9.7% was needed to win a seat, a figure that might be possible if the anti-corruption sentiment that has swept the country leads to a strong pirate vote. Luxembourg (6)As one of the smallest and most overlooked countries with only 6 seats available, the barrier is high (some 15%) but party president and list-leader Sven Clement is a mixture of optimist and realist. After getting 2.96% in last October's national election he's hopeful for an improvement, but a double-digit increase is unlikely. Clement told TF that despite that, people should still vote Pirate to ensure they can receive the kind of public financing the larger parties enjoy, enabling them to compete on a more level field. Estonia (6)The Estonian Pirate Party is also not running any candidates of its own in this election. They are, however, endorsing an independent candidate instead. Silver Meikar supports the Pirate platform, and has reportedly agreed to include a Pirate adviser as a member of his staff, if elected. As with Luxembourg, with only six seats available, there is a high threshold for election, but only 8.7% of the vote was needed in 2009 for a seat. Italy (73)There is some debate about Italy and if they are running a 'pirate' candidate, hence its entry at the end of the list. As far as we can tell, the Italian Pirate Party is acting as an advising party on digital rights for the coalition "The Other Europe", a left-wing coalition that includes the Communist Refoundation Party, Left Ecology Freedom, and the Labour party. Italy, like France and the UK, uses a regional constituency system. However, which candidates in the coalition's regional lists are Pirates (if any) are not known to us at this time. Belgium (21)Belgium is one of the earlier casualties. Despite having produced a candidate list for both it's Dutch and French-speaking regions, they were unable to collect enough public signatures in time to make it onto the ballot. Election datesThe European Parliament elections will take place on the following days
Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.    |
| How VPN Services Responded to Heartbleed Posted: 10 May 2014 12:39 PM PDT
Heartbleed is a bug in the open-source OpenSSL library that allows outsiders to read and dump encrypted data. When it was first made public it caused widespread panic with many experts describing it as “catastrophic.” Among the affected services were a great number of VPN providers. At least momentarily, users of those affected services risked having their passwords and usernames intercepted, as well as other data they sent over a secure connection. Perhaps even more worrying, successful hackers could have gotten their hands on private keys and certificates of VPN servers. For network adminstrators this was nearly undetectable before the bug was disclosed, and with the information the hacker could potentially decrypt users’ traffic. With the keys and certificates in hand, hackers can still target live sessions of individual VPN users after the OpenSSL vulnerabilities are patched. That is, in cases where OpenVPN is used without ephemeral keys. While not everyone agrees on the likelihood that these exploits are being used in the wild, they certainly are possible. For this reason, it’s important for VPN providers to take several steps. To the best of our knowledge the most crucial ones are the following:
TorrentFreak inquired among the companies listed in our VPN provider overview to see how they responded to Heartbleed, and how this was communicated to their users. They all agreed that Heartbleed posed a significant threat but the countermeasures, posted at the bottom of this article, vary from provider to provider. As for the future, more should be done to prevent these critical bugs from putting millions of Internet users at risk. Heartbleed has shown that more in-depth peer reviews are needed to ensure that critical infrastructure software such as OpenSSL is built on clean and secure code. In addition, it might not be a bad idea to move away from the OpenSSL monoculture, and look at alternative such as PolarSSL, LibreSSL, or GnuTLS. Of course, these alternatives have to be carefully reviewed as well. — Below is the list of responses we received from various VPN providers, between April 22 and early May. The fact that these answers are posted here is not an endorsement, nor is it an indication that the steps taken were the rights ones. That’s not up to us to judge, we merely strive to get as much information out to the public as possible. All VPN services answered the following questions. 1. What steps has your company taken in response to Heartbleed? — Private Internet Access
Our website was not exploitable given that we use a hardware load balancer that is not using a vulnerable version of OpenSSL. Immediately after patching our VPN gateways, we then setup a non-production gateway that we attempted to exploit using the Heartbleed exploit POCs (proof of concepts). While it was recently announced that OpenVPN is exploitable, it is our best belief that our private keys were never leaked given that we have systems in place that make the exploitation of our servers very unlikely. That being said, within 24 hours we are rolling out updates to our clients as well, even though it is highly unlikely that our keys were ever leaked. 2. The likeliness of our gateways being exploited prior to us rolling out these patches are extremely low. However, as stated earlier, at Private Internet Access, we strive to achieve 100% security, so we went through the motions as it is our policy to do so in best practice. 3. We waited to announce anything to our users until we were 100% certain of everything we were stating. That said, we posted on our blog after we performed our patches. Additionally, we will be sending out a mass e-mail within 24 hours to our clients as certain users (DD-WRT, stock OpenVPN, etc.) will need to manually apply updates in order to connect to our service. TorGuard
2. While the threats posed by the OpenSSL HeartBleed vulnerability are wide reaching and potentially very serious, our team can confidently say this development had no impact on the security of TorGuard’s users. Rest assured, we won’t let your heart bleed. 3. TorGuard posted the findings of the network audit on our blog and immediately emailed all clients a direct link. Ipredator
After the upgrade to the latest OpenSSL version was finished we decided to replace the private keys from all affected components because the confidentiality of those keys could not be guaranteed anymore. The window of opportunity for an attacker who had this bug as a 0day up his/her/its sleeve was simply too long. Due to the nature of the bug it is very difficult to say retrospectively if it was used to gain access to possibly sensitive memory contents of the affected machines. Since we had to replace all affected VPN server certificates we decided to deploy a new key management scheme for those machines. Each OpenVPN instance now uses one time private keys, cert and DH keys that are cycled on process restart. In the same way we have seen the emergence of special purpose hardware for Bitcoin mining we should also assume that the entities that have the means to compromise cryptography also possess special hardware to deal with encryption. As an additional precaution against this scenario we deployed server and DH keys with variable lengths instead of sticking to the “well known” lengths/constants of 2048 and 4096 bit. We are still working on making sure that all OpenSSL 1.0.1 components support the EC curve 25519 from DJB since any EC constants put forth by the NIST (or NSA) should be considered compromised. 2. Total exposure. 3. Users were informed through the usual channels (Twitter, blog, IRC). Mullvad
2. It was unknown how vulnerable OpenVPN was in practice so we decided to find out by trying to exploit the bug on a test server. We repeatedly succeeded in extracting the server’s private key. These findings were sent in full detail to the OpenVPN team and published in less harmful form e.g. here. The conclusion is that before the fixes above all OpenVPN communication were at risk of decryption by anyone knowing about the bug *at the time*. Due to perfect forward secrecy they can’t be decrypted with a key leaked at a later time. So anyone who did not know about the bug but managed to snatch a key after the bug was published can’t go back and decrypt traffic they may have stored. 3. We put a big red warning banner on our website that is still there and published a news item explaining the situation and urging all users to upgrade. VikingVPN
At the time we found out about the vulnerability, there wasn’t even a CVE entry in the database explaining the nature of the vulnerability or the attack. We knew that because of the integration of OpenSSL into the Windows OpenVPN open-source client, and the default builds of OpenSSL installed into almost all distros of Linux/BSD that this was going to be huge. As more information unfolded and the OpenSSL updates hit the verified repositories, we began the patching process on our servers. After the main vulnerability was closed and a rolling restart was issued to the server clusters, we went to work with notifying clients of the bug and advising them to update their clients to current. The servers were patched and confirmed safe by 7:00AM CST on April 8th. This is when we released our transparency post advising our users on the situation, and how they can respond to close the bug client-side. A mass email was sent shortly after advising our clients to read the post, and had instructions on updating their clients. 2. The bug is catastrophic in scale. We avoided disaster by having a very strong security model and not allowing clients to change security settings. During the vulnerable period where the bug was unknown publicly, there was no way for a VPN provider to detect if they were attacked. It is possible that server keys and certs were lost although we have had no evidence of this. Our root CA was not exposed. Our website was unaffected. Our load-balancers were unaffected. The worst case scenario for our security topology is that keys and certs and the tls-auth server key were lost to a nefarious attacker who was subscribed to the service. (because of TLS-Auth, there was no way to exploit heartbleed from outside of the network, only inside). If this were to occur, an attacker could attempt to impersonate a VPN server. In order for the attack to work they would have to take many specific steps to circumvent various load-balancing and routing steps that place during the connection process. We think that this is highly unlikely to have happened, but is not impossible, so we are disclosing it to be as open and transparent as possible. Note that a VPN service that claims zero exposure to Heartbleed is almost certainly lying or has so little knowledge about network security that they should not be in the business. Heartbleed hit everyone, it is a matter of how badly. 3. We responded publicly here, and also also had a Heartbleed article here. We also made informational posts to the community at /r/VPN on Reddit and reached out to other VPN services we are close to in order to discuss countermeasures and implementations. We also made an effort to educate the /r/VPN community on proper countermeasures. IVPN
2. A successful attack could reveal the server’s private key which could be used to impersonate the server in a MITM attack or to passively decrypt the session keys during SSL negotiation. Although we implement tls-auth this doesn’t mitigate the risk substantially since the auth keys are visible to all customers. Its important to understand that a successful attack prior to the announcement would likely only be possible from a very sophisticated and well funded adversary targeting a specific individual. Such adversaries almost certainly continue to possess undisclosed vulnerabilities that they can use to exploit targets. 3. We sent out a tweet immediately after installing the new certificates. We then emailed all our customers with information about the vulnerability and instructions on how to update the client software where required. We also made an infographic to help customers understand what passwords to change on other services. 1. Yes, we have updated OpenSSL on both OpenVPN servers and the website. The certificate for the VPN server has been updated as well. 2. Hard to say. Worst case is that information has been leaked when we had the old version of OpenSSL. 3. We posted two updates on our website. tigerVPN
Following a routine audit we’ve concluded that none of our critical systems were affected during the period between the public release of the proof of concept and the date at which the necessary fixes were applied. 2. As our systems are being actively monitored there is no reason to believe that our customers were affected by the Heartbleed attack in any way. Since the exploit seems to work on both server software and client software, there is a slight chance that, if some of our users are also using other providers, they would be affected in case a malicious provider – by choice or having been affected themselves – were to attempt to extract information from them. The information – from what we’ve seen in the behavioral analysis of the exploit by various security professionals – that they would be able to obtain would be pertinent only to their specific connection to that provider. Also, from a client’s perspective, running a Windows machine the only service potentially affected by this bug would be OpenVPN as the others are key services provided by Microsoft in the core OS and do not share anything in common with the OpenSSL library. 3. We constantly run security audits, monitor our network and improve TigerVPN. Although the incident was hyped on a big scale, we did a lot of upgrades, fixes and improvements throughout the month. If we would inform our customers about every single time we work on our software or hardware, they'd unsubscribe and report us as spam :-). We understand this is in the nature of our responsibility to pro-actively react to events such as Heartbleed. In case we ever noticed any kind of breach, all our customers would get notified immediately as with a single click. BlackVPN
Some VPN servers were vulnerable so we updated all servers on April 8th to protect against further attacks. On April 17 we issued new VPN configs with new 4096 bit certificates. We were working on this after we found out about Heartbleed but as soon as it was proven that the bug can be used against OpenVPN we immediately made the new configs + certificates available to everyone. On the VPN server side all the certificates, keys and DH keys have been replaced. 2. It has been proven that Heartbleed can be used to steal the private key and impersonate a VPN server (if the VPN server was running a vulnerable version of OpenSSL). People connecting to what they thought was their real VPN provider could actually be connecting to a fake VPN server or honeypot – although this would take the resources of a powerful government agency or similar. 3. In order to be as open and transparent as possible we started a new blog to warn people of the potential dangers and to update them of the changes we made. We echoed this message on all our social media channels ( Anonymizer
2. Small, but of course possible. We use HMAC-based TLS authentication at both ends of the connection, using separate halves of a shared key, as recommended by OpenVPN. This creates a signature of each packet which is attached to the packet. The server drops any packets that are unsigned or incorrectly signed. In the past, this has primarily been used to prevent / slow down a DDoS attack, since the attacker would need to securely hash each packet using the right half of the shared key in the way that the OpenVPN client does. Even with the suggestion from OpenVPN that TLS auth could form a kind of protection against Heartbleed, it isn’t foolproof, given that we have to distribute the key with each client or no one would be able to connect to our servers. As the researcher who created the OpenVPN penetration test earlier this week noted, it wouldn’t be that difficult for a determined hacker to discover the TLS auth key and modify his attack to use it. It does, however, prevent a drive-by attack where we are hit more or less randomly as a VPN services provider. The worst case scenario is that someone obtained our older server private key and was able to decrypt live data and create a man-in-the-middle attack against our users during the 39 days we were using OpenVPN 2.3.2. Account credentials could have been compromised, and the private key could have conceivably been as well. Once we replaced OpenVPN to a non-vulnerable version and the server certificate was replaced, that vector was closed. 3. We sent out an email notice to our customers. BolehVPN
We are also in the midst of an entire customer portal revamp to improve security and usability which we hope to release in a month or so and are considering a complete reissue of all keys when this is released. The revamp was initiated many months ago and was not as a result of the HeartBleed bug but is in line in our continuing efforts to improve our system’s security. Our OpenVPN implementation implements tls-auth with Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) would protect past communications from retrospective decryption so the risk is mitigated. In this scenario an attacker can not attack OpenVPN instances without the TLS-auth key. Our customer portal processing system never used the affected OpenSSL versions and remained with the older OpenSSL 0.9.8. Users may request for a manual regeneration of their keys if they wish to be overly cautious by opening a ticket with us. We sent out an email announcement to all users immediately, as well as a Facebook and Blog post on the 8th April 2014 3.22 PM GMT+8. We then pushed an update to our VPN clients on the 10th April with the patched OpenVPN version as well. NordVPN
2. For users: potential user detail leaks such as user names and passwords, but this is very unlikely as data that malicious people could get was in random locations in a server memory and user details are not kept in the memory for an entire session. For servers: Private SSL certificate keys are used to encrypt and decrypt data communications between user and a VPN server. If anyone could have received a certificate and perform a man in the middle attack, all data which was sent from a VPN server to the user could have been decrypted. 3. The information was constantly shared to our users via our live chat and e-mails. Also the pop-up, an announcement line and the blog records were used to inform the steps we were taking in a response to Heartbleed. Here was the latest blog record about Heartbleed: https://nordvpn.com/blog/heartbleed-vulnerability-has-been-removed/ Proxy.sh
We then researched about the implication of this bug and with the security community, we came to the conclusion that it was beyond reasonable doubt, even though most of our servers were non-vulnerable, that a new re-generation of private keys was indeed necessary. Indeed, extraction of private keys on vulnerable servers proved possible. Since re-generating complete new sets of private and public keys undeniably involves a downtime and reconfiguration on user end, we also took this ‘opportunity’ to completely upgrade our encryption scheme, now leading the industry with CBC mode of AES with 256-bit as cipher, hash algorithm of 512-bit SHA (SHA512) and control channel of 4096-bit RSA through TLSv1/SSLv3 and with 256-bit AES, enforced to all customers by default. The latest move does not necessarily respond to Heartbleed, but at least it makes it 100% theoretically impossible that the Heartbleed bug has any implication on the current VPN network, as the latter is using not only new private and public keys, but also completely new encryption algorithms. 2. It is very complex to answer with certainty what truly happened. But basically, a hacker who knew about this security hole before it went public (or within the few minutes between the time the news broke and the time we patched vulnerability), could have hacked the 4% of our servers infected with the vulnerable version of OpenSSL. They could have retrieved our private keys, and thus would potentially be able to decrypt the traffic that has been generated by our services before they have been updated with new private keys. Any service that did not either re-generated new private keys (and offered new certificate files to customers) or upgraded completely its encryption scheme (or optimally having done both), is at risk of being exposed to full decryption because the keys could have been stolen at anytime before the patch was enforced on vulnerable servers, and vulnerability across any network of more than a hundred servers built over the course of several months or years was undeniably present at sporadic levels. Now, factually, only a very close circle of white hat hackers were aware of this security hole and exploiting it in relation to keys vulnerability took us or anyone with security experience several days to figure out (wisely we applied precautionary principle and upgraded the keys well before). That means it would take at least some hours for most experienced hackers to have been able to exploit Heartbleed, hence the keys have had a thin chance of being compromised since the vulnerable servers were patched few minutes after 0day news. 3. We offered a public blog article within less than 24 hours after OpenSSL released new version and Heartbleed bug came out to public. This article can be found here and we explain in it that we successfully updated our OpenSSL software to latest version, even though most of our servers were using non-vulnerable versions of OpenSSL. The upgrade itself started few minutes after the security news broke. Twenty four hours later, we published another article to warn customers that we will be shutting down the entire network for less than 5 minutes (with downtimes of few seconds for each server) as we will be both re-generating new private and public keys, as well as upgrading our cipher and authentification encryption. Seventy eight hours later, we published a final article to explain that the upgrade has now been undertaken and that all users should download again the new configuration and certificate files in order to be able to connect to our network. All these articles were advertised on our Twitter account. Finally, we sent a mass e-mail (the first time in our history) to all our customers to explain again to them that they should download new configuration and certificate files, as well as preferably change their passwords. HideIPVPN
2. We think the only risk is that it was possible to steal the username and passwords for the client area. We think that getting these details from the memory would be very complicated. 3. We published an article here. SlickVPN
OctaneVPN
1. In summary, our website was running on an older server with OpenSSL libraries that pre-dated the introduction of the Heartbleed bug into OpenSSL, so we feel our customer confidential information was not at risk due to Heartbleed. Among our VPN network gateways, many were on a vulnerable version of OpenSSL or a vulnerable build of OpenVPN server. Those that were vulnerable were updated and restarted within hours of the public announcement. Due to the short time between public announcement and our updates, we feel the risk of key disclosure was very small, but as a precaution the next release of Octane OpenVPN client will update the client keys. In addition, this vulnerability in a key internet platform spurred us to consider a number of other scenarios which has resulted in us adding some cool new features and options in our OctaneVPN client which will be released soon. 2. Straight up, this was a serious bug in a major internet platform. The risk and vulnerability is same for all websites and services that relied on OpenSSL for encryption. In general, based on research others have posted, it appears the worst case would be that a private encryption key could be obtained by an untrusted third party. In addition, it appears this would leave no traces. Assuming others were not exploiting the Heartbleed vulnerability before its public announcement, we feel the risk of a private key release was very small due to the short time window between public announcement and us applying patches to our gateway servers. There is no evidence or unusual patterns that would lead us to suspect our gateways were targeted. Our website was not vulnerable to Heartbleed since it was running an older OpenSSL version prior to when the Heartbleed bug first entered the OpenSSL code. Remember, most sensitive web traffic is already encrypted by the end website/browser via SSL before it is encrypted again by a VPN network, so an attacker would need both a VPN private key and also the end website’s private key (say Amazon.com or gmail.com keys) to even start to have a chance. The possibility of obtaining one key through Heartbleed is remote, but doing it for two keys and the correct two keys for a given data packet before those sites were patched or new keys issued is that much harder. 3. How we communicated the above to our users. a) We developed a dedicated web page IPVanish
2. In addition to our point above, our entire Network Operations team conducted a deep dive to verify and confirm that no steps were needed in response to Heartbleed. We also continue to monitor the situation and will take the necessary steps if and when necessary. 3. We proactively communicated to our users via our homepage, blog, social media handles (including Twitter, Facebook and Google+), and affiliate network, that all IPVanish users have been and continue to be safe from Heartbleed. We additionally notified users that even though IPVanish itself never had a breach of security, we recommend they update their passwords if they use the same credentials across different services. LiquidVPN
The affected servers had new keys created from an unaffected CA. We used to use two CA's. 1 for our shared only server clusters and the 2nd one for our shared, dynamic and modulating server clusters. Our Shared IP CA had their certificates revoked and is no longer used anywhere. We already had a plan in progress to do an overhaul of our OpenVPN configurations that will include a standardized configuration across the three different VPN server builds we use. It includes an update to our network security, lowers our key re-negotiation time from 60 minutes to 30 minutes or less and uses a dedicated offline server purchased recently to serve as our air-gapped CA. When this rolls out we will issue new certificates across the network for the final time. Our webserver was patched later that morning. We requested a new SSL certificate on 4/8/2014 and it was applied on 4/9/2014. We use Viscosity by Sparklabs as our VPN client. As soon as they released their OpenSSL patch it was pushed out to the clients. 2. This was a major vulnerability. No matter how much some providers downplayed it. For LiquidVPN an attacker could have signed up to our service and got their hands on our shared TLS-Auth key. With that in hand they could decipher portions of user VPN session data but every 60 minutes keys are re-negotiated so their access would be limited. Website usernames and passwords could be compromised. Users were susceptible to man in the middle attacks. VPN usernames/passwords could be stolen. 3. We wanted to take a very proactive and transparent approach to this problem. However we had to secure users session data first. So we issued several updates beginning on April 7th. There is a handful of twitter posts they can be found @liquidvpn. Our basic announcements (there were several) can be found on the website. The network status section has more information than the announcements. Finally after everything was secured and our updates were complete we published a blog post. AirVPN
Luckily our setup which involves Perfect Forward Secrecy both with OpenVPN and on the web server and the fact that our VPN servers do not keep any database or other data pertaining to users made the vulnerability not very risky for our VPN users. Most of our VPN servers already were running non-vulnerable OpenSSL branches, as well as the various backend servers (a vital part of our infrastructure). On top of that VPN servers, web server and clients never contact directly backend servers, so we found ourselves in a very favorable situation. Our frontend web servers on the contrary were vulnerable. We proceeded to make sure that OpenSSL version on the VPN servers was not vulnerable, patch OpenSSL in our web sites and revoke the SSL certificate, reboot all the web servers to make sure that no vulnerable in-memory OpenSSL was still loaded, install new key and new SSL certificate on every frontend web server, change internal use keys and certificates, change every administrative password on every server, patch OpenSSL on the couple of VPN servers which ran OpenSSL 1.0.1f and reboot them. We performed attacks against all of our own servers to make sure that the vulnerability was not there. For this we must thank very much external, trusted reviewers who with dedication and passion continuously search for vulnerabilities in our servers and report to us the results – you know who you are, thanks again! All of the above was completed between 11.00 AM and 11.00 PM April the 8th CEST. However, we soon realized that we had to keep into account that the vulnerability is client-side too, so the fact that our servers were “secured” could not be considered sufficient. Therefore we had to face the non-trivial problem to reach and inform our users, which was solved with a “dramatic” decision about a radical upgrade to the system which would have been performed after only a few days. The upgrade would have forced users to get informed because from a certain point in time they could not connect anymore to VPN servers until they upgraded. Under a marketing point of view it appeared as an extremely risky decision, but now that two weeks have passed by we can say that this decision was wise, and anyway it was the right thing to do regardless of any marketing consideration. And it was also a good chance to switch to bigger keys and perform some radical optimizations that we could not perform without disconnecting users for several minutes. About information to the public, we started with a public announcement on April the 8th, as soon as we had clear ideas on what users needed to do. This was linked also through Twitter and Facebook. The post was updated in real time while we were working on the system. The final steps were to renew the users keys. We needed first to find an effective way to “encourage” users to upgrade their systems. We decided to switch to 4096 bit RSA and DH keys, with new certificates, in a precise moment in the future (after just few days), to maximize the probability that when a user was forced to regenerate configurations, keys and certificates, he/she would have been brought more easily to upgrade any possible vulnerable part of his/her system. This was announced here. And we sent via PM and e-mail (to those users who entered a valid e-mail address in their account data) a link to the announcement. At the same time we powered up the customer service for any clarification and to face any possible, massive wave of support requests. Since we do not outsource the customer service we did not need to impart lessons to customer care personnel in order to make them understand the problem, saving us many hours and allowing us to be confident that customers were correctly supported in case of need. Additionally we could count on our competent, supporting and very active community in our forums. VPN.S
The tools we used: Manual checks were done on all other equipment such as Cisco routers. We have opened a internal review on the possibility of switching our SSL solution to PolarSSL. 2. Risk is only associated with users sharing passwords between VPNsecure accounts on services that were affected. We have advised users to change the password on the account which automatically regenerates the openvpn keys. 3. Facebook notifications were sent out, along with a news article and email. VPN.ac
- First we added a firewall rule to temporarily block and log all Heartbleed probes against our servers, allowing us to run the upgrades and issue new encryption keys while not being exposed 2. We don’t believe that the risks our users faced were of high importance until then, but once the vulnerability became public – taking all necessary measures to mitigate the risks and protect our infrastructure was obviously the best thing a responsible company would do. 3. We announced on Twitter minutes after the vulnerability public disclosure that we’re already updating the servers. Once everything was secure on April 8, we issued a detailed statement on our website and it was sent by email to all our customers. Unspyable
2. The risks were minimal, since on the server side nothing was vulnerable. 3. Other than advising customers to upgrade their OpenVPN there was nothing else to be done. Seed4.me
2. Fortunately we are not severely affected. Possible men-in-the-middle attacks, the same as all other websites on the web. VPN services are not affected and we could not expose any private user information. More details are in the blog post. 3. We published a blog post, notified all our followers in Facebook and Twitter, asking to change password for other affected services. There is no need to change passwords for Seed4.Me accounts. Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.   |
| Off US Blacklist, Italy Begins Torrent Site Blackout, No Trials Needed Posted: 10 May 2014 05:23 AM PDT
“Italy's removal from the Special 301 List reflects the significant steps the Government of Italy has taken to address the problem of online piracy, and the continued U.S. commitment to meaningful and sustained engagement with our critical partner Italy,” the USTR said in a special announcement earlier this month. What Italy had done to deserve these compliments was fairly extraordinary. Instead of legislating to make a piracy crackdown easier or more effective, the government handed AGCOM, the Italian Communications Regulatory Authority, the power to deal with infringement. Without need for costly and drawn out legal cases and court-ordered injunctions, from March 31, 2014, AGCOM had the power to order the removal of infringing content or the blocking of allegedly copyright-infringing domains. Remember, these are regulations calling the shots – not legislation. Now, a little over two months since the start of the new system, AGCOM has been flexing its muscles against what many people believed to be the framework’s primary targets – torrent sites. In four decisions made public this week by AGCOM, LimeTorrents, TorrentDownload.ws, Torrentz.pro and TorrentDownloads.me were all deemed to be infringing and as a result will end up blocked by the country’s ISPs. The decisions, published on AGCOM.it, also reveal who made the complaints and when. The LimeTorrents case was reported to AGCOM by local anti-piracy group FPM representing Sony Music, Warner Music and Universal Music. In their evidence the labels provided links to torrents that linked to their works. After a review AGCOM agreed that the labels’ complaints were genuine. Attempts to contact LimeTorrents’ owners failed so they were disallowed from involvement in the process. In conclusion, and “in compliance with the principles of proportionality”, on May 5 Italian ISPs were given just two days to block subscriber access to LimeTorrents. In general terms the complaints against the other sites were similar and featured both music and video focused anti-piracy groups working on behalf of several movie studios. Those sites will also be blocked. Notable is the streamlined nature of the process. All complaints were filed mid-April and today, less than three weeks later, the blocks should already be in place. Little wonder the USTR is pleased. Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.   |
A month has passed since the Heartbleed security bug was first disclosed. At that time, hundreds of thousands of “secure” webservers were at risk of leaking personal information, including many popular websites. 
1. Once the vulnerability was made public we instantly started to patch all affected systems. This particular bug was present on our IPv6 VPN machines, a subset of the IPv4 VPN servers that were using OpenSSL 1.0.1 and all of our external SSL services like the website, the tor exit node, or jabber server.
1. We learned about the vulnerability at 9:17PM CST on April 7th. From that point forward, we did not sleep until the vulnerability was closed and every server was penetration tested against all known forms of the exploit to ensure that the vulnerability was closed.
When the Heartbleed announcement first broke, on the 7th April, we reviewed our servers and customer portal system and found that they did not utilize the affected OpenSSL versions. When OpenVPN released their patch to fix HeartBleed, we immediately implemented this in our own client and released this on the 10th April 2014. Moving forward, our next client release will use OpenVPN 2.3.3 which we hope to release in the coming week.
1. In a response to Heartbleed, NordVPN has changed private keys for all servers. Also, the main NordVPN’s certificate has been revoked and a new one has been added. Our OpenSSL libraries have been upgraded from version 1.0.1e to a safe 1.0.1g.
1. When the Heartbleed security news broke, our engineering unit immediately scanned all our servers and upgraded to latest version the few servers (about 4% of our infrastructure) that were using vulnerable versions of OpenSSL. Our team then progressively patched absolutely all our servers in an attempt to enjoy other bugfixes (unrelated to security) accompanied with the successive new versions of OpenSSL. Vulnerable servers were patched within less than one hour and the non-vulnerable ones progressively got all upgraded within 24 hours.
1. Our experts evaluated possible risks, replaced the certificate and 
| You are subscribed to email updates from TorrentFreak To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
