[MUSIC]
So welcome everybody.
This is my first time at CCC Camp.
Is it someone else's first time as well?
Yeah.
Good for us newcomers.
I thought this topic is kind of good for this camp,
but I also have a video next which has music at least
that is good for this camp,
but it's kind of relevant to the topic.
So I thought I would play it.
Let's see if we can get it to play.
Hopefully the Wi-Fi works and we can get it to play.
It's essentially a very old ad that very old people like me
and others who are old like me will recognize.
So let's see.
Do we get sound?
We got sound when we tested.
But it's the you wouldn't steal a car.
The privacy campaign.
You wouldn't steal a bike.
You wouldn't steal the purse.
You wouldn't do that and that.
It had really good music.
So too bad.
It's if someone can do some beatboxing right now,
that would be helpful.
Was that a pig beatboxing?
Nice try anyway.
So since we're talking about ethics, this whole campaign
was essentially about not stealing a car
and like privacy is a crime.
But then someone on the internet was like,
well, I would maybe download a car if the owner could keep the car.
So that would be kind of ethical and that would be kind of okay, I guess.
How many here would download a car?
Quite a few.
Thank you.
Okay, so to get started on this topic of ethics,
hackers kind of work in sometimes in peculiar domains.
So sometimes we're going on the boundaries of law and so forth.
So I thought I would take you through my short version
of the evolution of the hacker ethics as you would know it.
And this goes back even before my time.
It was like in the 60s, 70s when computers started being more common.
Hackers would essentially be doing all kinds of things
on these computers that were not really accessible to everyone yet.
And they kind of went through this stage where they had this,
the hacker ethic.
There was a guy who wrote a book
and Richard Solomon, which is considered the last true hacker,
said about ethics in that book like this,
that the hacker ethic refers to the feelings of right and wrong
to the ethical ideas this community of people had.
That knowledge should be shared with other people who can benefit from it
and that important resources should be utilized rather than wasted.
And I think probably quite a few of us can stand behind that statement.
Also, the hacker ethic can kind of be summarized into, in that era,
exceptional single mindedness and determination to keep plugging away
at a problem until the optimal solution had been found.
Our well-documented traits of the early hackers,
willingness to work right through the night on a single programming problem
are widely cited as features of the early hacker computer culture.
Who here has spent an entire night figuring out a problem?
Okay, quite a few.
So you can also consider yourself early hackers in a way.
And then when we go a bit further, maybe to the 80s,
things started shifting, there started to be sort of more...
The ethics started dwindling maybe a little bit more.
There was some white hat, black hat stuff going on in the 90s as well.
There started to be a little bit more of a divide
and people started going to jail for doing criminal stuff, so black hats.
And there started to be more like a divide of white hats and black hats.
And the hacker manifesto was written by a guy called the mentor.
And essentially his statement in that manifesto is that
this is our world now, the world of the electron and the switch.
The beauty of the board, we make use of a service already existing
without paying for what could be dirt cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons.
And you call us criminals.
We explore and you call us criminals.
We seek after knowledge and you call us criminals.
So it's more like a hacktivism kind of freedom to all information and all data kind of era.
And then to kind of sum up the...
Or to get back more to today.
Today we have sort of...
We don't really have these clear-cut maybe books.
Well, we do have some books, but...
At least for me, working in this industry,
I don't really come across that many ethical sort of statements and things like that.
Some of them we might see in ethical hacking certificates,
but they're very sort of rudimentary.
Don't test without permission.
Don't be an asshole.
Don't break shit and steal stuff and so forth.
And those are kind of okay, but...
I feel like there should be maybe a little bit more.
And some of the bug bounty platforms,
because I work with bug bounty as well,
some of the bug bounty platforms have these kind of code of conduct.
So they have like, you know, you shouldn't do this, you shouldn't do that,
you know, respect others, you know, and things like that.
And don't go out of scope.
And scope is kind of the limitation where companies in bug bounty programs,
they say, "You can test this, but don't test this."
And then someone goes and tests this, and then what should happen?
Sometimes not much.
So this was kind of the super quick background of hacker ethics.
And what really got me into this talk was the...
kind of the things that I've seen recently that made me think,
"Okay, maybe we should have even more discussions about ethics
when it comes to security testing, and especially in the bug bounty
space where I work a lot."
And if you're not aware of bug bounty, it's essentially security testing for a reward.
So you do some testing, and you send in a report through usually a bug bounty platform,
and the company will pay a reward based on how severe the issue is.
And some of the things that I've seen will kind of touch upon both security testing
and the bug bounty area, because that's what I know.
So probably there's much more sort of things that go on,
but these are the things that I thought I would share with you,
because it might not be that well known, some of them at least.
But we'll start with the really simple ones.
You're testing with permission, and then you bring down some servers.
It's probably happened to a few, maybe here.
Has it happened to any of you?
Yeah? Okay, a couple.
I see my colleagues over there as well.
We've done this, unfortunately, quite a few times, and it really boils down to,
maybe we should have done more due diligence.
Maybe the computers that we were testing were in a broom closet somewhere,
or it was like a Raspberry Pi that really couldn't handle many requests,
so it just cannot handle anything automated, and it just dies.
So we're not really doing a service for the customer
or the individual that we're testing, and probably not anyone else.
And it's not really nice getting a call from the client saying,
"Oh, you brought our servers down. What are you doing? Stop doing whatever you're doing.
It's not cool. Our production is down."
And then you find out their production is running on potatoes,
so that's also a good finding in itself.
All right, so now for the more gray area of the things that I have seen recently.
Someone popped the champagne, and that's great.
And I have introduced this arbitrary Gandalf the gray scale.
Some of you might not see it, but depending on how gray I believe it would be,
there's a number of Gandalfs in there to represent how gray this thing might be.
So let's get started with the first one.
So the first one kind of goes from the first example we had,
testing without permission and then bringing down servers, for example.
I would give it maybe like one Gandalf.
I mean, it's kind of like, yeah, and in some cases,
it's maybe not that legal as well in some countries.
You know, you're not really allowed to test without permission.
So I'll give it one Gandalf maybe.
Then the other one is stumbling across a vulnerability without permission,
but then you kind of notify the target company through, for example, your local cert.
And the local cert in many of our European countries especially
protect the hacker from the company if they want to pursue you as a hacker.
So they protect you as an individual as well so you don't get pursued
because it's a cert contacting the company.
I'll give this maybe like one Gandalf, maybe not even a single Gandalf,
maybe a hobbit, I don't know.
And then we have this really awesome thing,
testing without permission and then blackmailing the target.
Reward me or else something will happen.
Someone will hack you.
It's not me, but here's my full name.
A lot of times, we've seen these types of individuals contact companies directly
and saying like they have a terrible vulnerability and it's really critical
and you need to pay me right away.
And then when you start asking, okay, what is this vulnerability actually?
Then it's like, okay, well, you have a file that shouldn't be there.
It could be really almost nothing and they want a reward for it.
Sometimes it could actually be something, but you don't really know
until you get into this super annoying conversation.
Usually, it's almost like spam or like a scam where they really like try to get you.
They might send the CEO of the company this email and they scramble all the jets like,
whoa, something is going on and it's not really good for business either.
So it's quite interrupting as well.
So you're not really benefiting anyone, I would say.
I'll give it one, maybe two Gandalfs.
And then there's a new really cool trend, marketing trend,
where you test without permission with your super awesome service
that finds vulnerabilities.
And then you send an email to the company saying,
my super cool service found hundreds of vulnerabilities in your company.
Let's meet up and have an online meeting and talk.
So they're trying to sell it to you and it's usually,
like there's a different scale of how aggressive they are.
Some of them are very aggressive.
Some of them might, for example, contact everyone in the organization
to try and sell this service that they have.
We've seen it.
It's really cool and it really doesn't get you any sales,
at least if you contact us.
But for some it might work.
I would give this maybe one Gandalf, two Gandalfs,
depending on how aggressive it is.
And then another really nice trend that we have seen recently
is that you purchase stolen credentials off the dark web
and then you ask the company to give you an award.
So they submit it to a bug bounty program.
So maybe they found the credentials of one of your employees,
maybe it's an IT admin,
and then they submit it to a bug bounty program in hopes for a reward.
And in their submission, they say, I purchased these off the dark web.
Okay, well, if you're a company, it's like,
if you say that, we can't really reward you
because that's not legal to buy stolen stuff.
Normally, companies can't do it.
Some do it anyway, and some have been known to pay for them as well.
I know some, I'm not going to name names,
but it has been happening.
And the rewards have sometimes been pretty substantial.
I'll give it maybe three Gandalfs, maybe four.
One of the issues that I see with this is,
obviously, there's a meme if you can't see it,
it says the secret ingredient is crime.
So if you're not very good at hacking,
maybe you can go to the dark web and do this.
But one of the issues that I see with this is that
there's a sort of basic thing with how markets work in general.
So if you, let's say, everyone starts doing it
because it's very profitable,
then we have a huge demand for stolen credentials coming in.
All the ethical hackers of the world want to buy stolen credentials.
And then the criminals are going like,
oh, shit, we have a huge demand.
What should we do?
All right, let's increase the criminal activity
so we can get some more supply.
And then the supply and demand cycle just,
it just starts going.
And, yeah, I don't know.
It's kind of a bit of a problem, I would say, to do this.
Maybe later, some of you can discuss how ethical it really is,
and is it really an ethical hacker kind of thing to do?
Then, to take this a bit further,
is maybe, I don't know if you know,
but there are services that you can subscribe to
where you can purchase stolen credentials of the dark web.
Oh, sorry, the service purchases the credentials for you from the dark web.
So it's kind of like a Netflix of crime, you know?
So it's like, okay, I'll just subscribe to this service
and I'll get all the stolen credentials.
So I don't know, maybe,
what if you had a Netflix for stolen cars?
Would you subscribe to that?
I don't know.
But this is kind of,
I mean, it gets a little bit more difficult
because now you're just,
you're not buying the credentials yourself,
but you have a proxy that's buying them
and you're subscribing to the service.
And there's multiple services like this.
Probably, some of you know,
if you want to use them, don't ask me.
But yeah, I would give this maybe three gandalfs
on the gray scale.
And of course, when they do both these things,
they submit them to companies running bug bounty programs
in hopes of rewards.
So yeah, that's great.
And I kind of like to always take a step forward
and go in further.
So what if you exploit the Netflix of crime
to get those credentials
and then submit that to a bug bounty program
in hopes for reward?
I give it maybe five gandalfs
because it kind of goes like even further.
So you're doing a crime on a service
that is doing, well, buying stolen stuff
and selling that as a subscription.
I would give it maybe five gandalfs.
What do you think?
Yeah, maybe.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Yeah, maybe keep your enemies close, I guess.
Then I saw a new trend popping up lately.
We've all known of credential stuffing in general
as an attack used by criminals.
But ethical hackers in the bug bounty scene
have started using it as well.
So they take leaked credentials off the web
and then they try it on everything.
And if it works, then they submit a report
to the company in hopes for a reward.
And I don't know, maybe not that great,
but should you really, usually in the policies
of these bug bounty programs, they kind of say
like you're not maybe allowed to do this kind of things.
Maybe you're not allowed to get credentials
for certain things.
But then if you take it from some leaked dumps online
and you use that and check if they work,
maybe, I don't know, could be.
Maybe a little grayish, maybe.
I'll give it maybe four, three Gandalfs maybe.
But then there's purchasing stolen credentials
of the dark web and using those for credential stuffing.
So it goes again a step further.
I wonder what the next step after this would be,
but I guess we'll find out pretty soon.
But I would give this maybe five Gandalfs
because let's say ethical hacker purchases credentials
of your company online.
Then they take those credentials.
They don't give it to you yet.
They're just going to test if it works everywhere.
And then if it works, which it might,
then after that and after gaining access
to a certain system, maybe it's really bad, right?
They go into that system and then they also check
what they can access in that system, of course.
So it kind of goes maybe a smidge too far in some cases,
I would say.
I would give it five Gandalfs maybe.
So just to kind of, because there was some secret ingredients
in this presentation and a lot of them
had to do with crime, I was thinking that I would kind of
just quickly go through the legals of Finland
because I'm from Finland.
So if you purchase stolen goods, regardless of how much it costs,
you can get up to one year and six months of jail time.
And in Germany, you get five years or a fine.
Germans, it's like what?
Or a fine, like what does it depend on?
I don't know, but maybe you guys probably know
what it depends on, but...
The judge, okay.
So if you're good buddies with the judge,
you only get a fine.
Yeah, probably it's also depending on how severe it is
and so forth.
In Canada and US, if the values exceed over $5,000,
so let's say I run a bug bounty program,
someone gives, they've bought stolen credentials.
They want me to give them a reward.
I'm a US company.
I give them a reward over $5,000.
I've committed a federal crime.
This may or may not have happened.
I may or may not know and I may or may not say anything.
In Canada, you can get up to 10 years in prison.
Wait, wait, wait.
The company is committing a crime by paying a reward
to somebody who has stolen the credentials.
Even if they're your own clients?
Yeah, there is some differences if it's your own,
but it depends on the legal.
I'm not a lawyer, so maybe consult a lawyer.
Don't listen to me regarding legal stuff.
Or well, the basics, you should know that it could be a crime.
And I think at this camp, I already saw an Italian lawyer
on stage at one of the lightning talks.
So he probably knows a bit more than me about the legal stuff.
But since some of this is like a little bit gray area,
or maybe not, and some of it might be criminal,
or maybe not, I'm not sure.
But what I'm thinking is that also because maybe some of these stolen goods
or like stolen credentials, they're too accessible.
Maybe that's also a part of the issue.
Like you can just subscribe to this Netflix of crime
and like get your crime feed into your inbox.
So maybe that's part of the problem.
I'm not sure.
It's not that difficult to go on the dark web and buy credentials,
stolen credentials, or stolen anything, really.
Maybe it's just too accessible.
So maybe in some cases, for example, the ethical hackers that are doing it,
maybe they're not just thinking too much about the ethics of it all.
They're just doing it because there's a reward at the end.
Another kind of issue that we've seen in the bug bounty scene especially
is that you hold on to vulnerabilities in the pursuit of rewards.
So essentially, you have maybe a cool vulnerability
that you've discovered yourself.
You're not going to share it because then others might use it
to get the rewards.
So you want to make sure that you've collected all the rewards
from all the different companies.
And I'm not sure how ethical that is.
I forgot to put the Gandalfs here, but maybe a couple of Gandalfs on that one.
Essentially, the hacker ethics from the early days at least
was to be open and share.
And I personally, I believe in that being a good thing.
But I can also understand why they would want to hold on
to certain types of vulnerabilities if it's in their own benefit.
Obviously, everyone has hungry mouths to feed, including their own.
Another issue that I've seen also is it kind of goes into the ethics
of bug bounty as well, is that in a lot of cases,
the bug bounty programs, they define a policy.
You define a policy, you're allowed to do this and that,
and go so and so far.
But the company themselves, for example, they pay the researcher
or the hacker, the ethical hacker, based on the impact of the finding.
So in some cases, even if you have these sort of arbitrary limitations
from policy, the hackers might have an incentive to actually go further
to increase the impact of the vulnerability so they can get a higher reward.
So there's kind of like a dilemma in this issue because it's like,
in theory, you shouldn't, but if you do, you might get a higher reward.
So maybe you should, but should you really?
And it really kind of plays back into the ethical boundaries
of that particular hacker, how far will they go?
And we've seen cases of ethical hackers dumping databases and going even further.
So I don't know how many Gandalfs this one should be,
but maybe both the hacker and the company should get a few Gandalfs for this one.
And then, of course, there's secret techniques or open sharing.
Some prefer to have their secret techniques and keep them to themselves
because there's more rewards for them.
Some prefer to share everything.
And I guess one of the reasons I wanted to talk at this camp
about these issues as well is that there's probably a lot of you that
also are interested in discussing these things and seeing where this should go.
And I don't know, in my opinion, it would be better if everyone would share,
but some people prefer to keep some techniques to themselves.
So what is then actually ethical hacking?
I mean, there are some boundaries.
Some of them are legal, but some of them, even the legal boundaries,
are not that well known.
There might be also different types of boundaries,
depending on the country that the company is in and also where the hacker is in.
So it might be difficult to sort of set the boundaries even legally
because it depends sometimes.
So what should the boundaries be?
And who should define them?
What is ethical hacking?
And how can we as a community improve on these issues?
And I guess the final question, what does your moral compass look like?
In which direction does it point?
Are you a white hat, a black hat, or something in between, or a mix of them all?
And I guess this presentation was a lot faster than I was planning on.
So in case you need to find me later, you can find me at the Salmiaki Village in Cold North.
There's my contact details, and apparently I was too fast.
Apparently I was too fast.
Thanks Joachim.
It looks like we have about 15 minutes for questions.
If there are any, are there any questions from the internet?
None? Any questions from the audience?
Please line up over there by the microphone.
Thank you.
Hi, I'm not an expert whatsoever.
I'm a total movie, so this question might be a little bit stupid.
But from what I understood, you considered the interest of the people being hacked,
and the interest of the people who were hacking.
What about the greater good?
What about people who are not related to the company, not related to the hacker?
Like everybody, isn't that a very relevant question for whether it's ethical or not?
Does it benefit everybody, what I'm doing as a hacker?
Or does it worsen the situation for everyone?
Yeah, I mean, and it also depends.
Does it benefit everybody, or a large amount of people, or a few people?
It's a difficult question really to answer.
I don't really have an answer, I guess.
Yeah, it's ethics.
Hey, you focused on the legality a lot, and on, you know,
let's call it technical hardcore hacks.
But some of the stuff that you had, where is it with credentials?
And just yesterday we had a cool presentation by Kirilis,
I don't know if he's there, on social engineering.
And I mean, you know, the most obvious kind of social engineering is super duper direct,
and then it's fairly in your face, and okay, you've got the credential, that's it.
But once you go for the higher value targets, usually you start to build up networks,
and it's human level trust that you have to build with a lot of people
to build your network to actually get at the whale that you're aiming at.
And then you betray those people.
And that can have real psychological impact on those people.
We had a really cool discussion after the session yesterday with a bunch of friends.
This is not something I see discussed a lot in ethical hacking, you know,
the psychological impact on, oh, fuck, I trusted that guy.
So what are your thoughts on that?
Yeah, that's right.
Betraying trust can be very detrimental, like, regarding the person's mental health.
And we also see, for example, a lot of people that are victims to cybercrime also,
they suffer greatly sometimes.
So in some cases, I think we should maybe have some like victim health care,
like the cybercrime health care station or something.
I don't know what that would look like.
But it's very difficult for people mentally, especially if they're,
for example, the entry point to a bigger event, then it's very hard on them.
Once it dawns on them that this really was serious.
So yeah, there's a lot to improve on that area as well.
Any more questions?
Maybe just a comment.
What you just talked about is what's called a second victim in safety literature.
Like the pilot who is like, you know, like the plane crashed, right?
Let's say some people died.
Like, it's not good, but it's not really the pilot's fault.
Almost never, like very rarely.
But they feel really responsible and sometimes commit acts against themselves.
Let's just put it that way.
So actually, in general, security, I think, would benefit a lot from safety literature.
But that's a different discussion to be here.
All right.
So that's one more question, it seems.
What's the revenue?
Revenue who does the service is 6.8 million last year.
I work for a big enterprise.
This is private.
So how do you feel about that revenue number?
6.8 million.
Revenue.
What?
Sorry.
Spy cloud.
The service enterprises subscribe to get essentially leaks, dumps, credits of their own input?
Yeah, that's one of the services that you can subscribe to.
I mean, I'm not sure how ethical.
There's also other sort of cyber threat intelligence related companies that provide stolen credentials, etc.
It's gray area.
Yeah, I don't know.
That's, I guess, one of the questions I also have.
Like, I'm not sure what's right and what's wrong.
So probably more discussions are needed to find the boundaries and what's right and what's wrong.