Today there has been a new interesting development. A number of Iranians reported they are being informed by Google that “Government-backed attackers may be trying to steal your password”. Below screenshot is sent to me by a friend reporting the same from Canada:
This is a familiar alert for us, but what is interesting is the possible attack vector: users inside Iran aside, the users who got this alert outside the country all had Iranian mobile numbers assigned in their Google accounts as backup / recovery number.
This means as suspected earlier, SMS interception in Iranian
mobile operators
is being used for resetting the password of Iranian users.
We recommend using TOTP using your mobile, using U2F keys, and not using any Iranian mobile phone number as backup number in your Google profile.
Iranian government hackers in the recent months, repeatedly managed to hack activists / journalist email and social media accounts protected by Two Factor Authentication. The first major incident reported in the media was Imam Ali charity in Iran, although this was not the first by any means. here are their Tweets (in Persian), informing Gmail, Telegram, LinkedIn, and Facebook accounts of a large number of their colleagues in the organization has been hacked:
اطلاعیه شماره ۲
حمله سایبری سازمان دهی شده از طریق پیامک‌های مخابرات
در صبح روز پنجشنبه ۶ اردیبهشت ۹۷، حمله سایبری به اکانتهای تلگرام، جی‌میل، فیسبوک و لینکدین تعداد زیادی از اعضای جمعیت امام علی شکل گرفت.
And in late September, a lawyer has tweeted the same attacks on her Gmail and Telegram accounts, and also many other woman’s rights activists in Iran:
امروز صبح(ساعت 6.30) حساب تلگرام و حیمیل من هک شد( به رغم دو مرحله‌ای بودن) تلگرامم رو از نو ساختم و همین الان ایمیلم رو پس گرفتم. کدوم نهاد و مرجع و با چه مجوزی ساعت 6.30 به اطلاعات شخصی من دست پیدا کرده؟ پ.ن: تلاش برای هک عده‌ای از فعالین زنان امروز گسترده بوده، #اطلاع‌رسانیhttps://t.co/xQ1ANlZOBC
What happens is Iranian security forces have successfully phished or otherwise gained access to a target’s Gmail password. Then they send a 2FA request, usually in very early mornings when target is sleep, using the victim’s phone number. As they have full access to the country’s mobile operator networks, they intercept the 6 digit code sent by Google:
1: Hacker choose Password Recovery
2: Hacker sees OTP, and clicks on “try another way”
3: Hacker enters the mobile number of the Victim and request a code via SMS
4: Hacker enters the victim’s mobile number, intercept the SMS on operator, and enter the 6 digit code to gain access to the account
In many cases, they don’t even need the password, as they can also request a password reset request (Again!) by entering the phone number in Gmail.
Once they have access to the email of the victim, they start resetting passwords of their social media accounts, i.e. Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, etc.
Using the same technique, for instant messengers:
As most instant messenger Apps, i.e. Telegram, Whatsapp and others use SMS to authenticate their users, once attacker can intercept the victims SMS, they can simply authenticate a new session for their instant messengers and read their messages. Very few IMs like Telegram, actually offer a second factor for authentication – in case of telegram, a password – but many do not have this function activated, as it is not required by the platform.
Workarounds:
Iranian users are advised to use offline methods only, i.e TOTP for their second factor authentication, and delete their phone numbers from their google records so it can not be used for password recovery or 2FA fallback. As for the instant messengers, they should activate the 2FA for the platforms that support this, and quit the ones they don’t support 2FA.
It has been some time! Our blog needs some serious posts and updates for you. On behalf of our small team and as project director, I apologize to you. 2017 was an amazing ride, and it came with all sorts of challenges, many new projects, and ended up in a massive sociopolitical unrest in Iran. All of which kept us so busy, blog updates took a back seat.
But you will see a few posts in the coming days, reporting back to you on some stuff we have been busy with, projects like major improvement of our free VPN network, our research work, our response to the late December events in Iran, and other stuff we want to share with you.
دوستان و همراهان گرامی پروژه آی نیتا:
مدت زمان زیادی بود که وبلاگ پروژه نیاز به چند پست خیلی جدی و به روز رسانی برای شما عزیزان داشت. از طرف تیم کوچک پروژه آی نیتا و به عنوان مدیر پروژه، من از شما عذرخواهی میکنم. سال ۲۰۱۷ سال بسیار پرباری بود، و با چالش های زیادی دست و پنجه نرم کردیم از جمله درگیر شدن در تعداد زیادی پروژه های جدید و در نهایت و در پایان سال هم شلوغی های اجتماعی – سیاسی ایران، که همه آنچنان ما رو مشغول نگه داشتند که به روز رسانی این وبلاگ به عقب افتاد.
ولی ظرف چند روز اینده تعدادی پست جدید در راه هستند، که به شما دوستان گزارش های کوتاهی از پروژه هایی که در آن درگیر بودیم خواهیم داد. به عنوان مثال بهینه سازی اساسی شبکه وی پی ان رایگان ما، کارهای تحقیقاتی که انجام شده، واکنش به مشکلات پیش آمده شبکه در اعتراض های دیماه و بقیه مواردی که ما رو به خودشون سرگرم نگه داشتند.
Like the years before,Project Ainita team is gonna be at the Internet Freedom Festival in Valencia, Spain. If you are participating, tweet us and lets meet. If you are not, just follow @ProjectAinita and #IFF2017 on twitter for updates. 🙂
Project Ainita is proud to expand and launch our free services for East Africa. For more information on this new service and connection guides, please visit our service page for East Africa.
