MPAA University Toolkit Phone Home

This is a follow-up to my story Examining the MPAA University Toolkit.

After reading the hysteria posted on the Slashdot story MPAA College Toolkit Raises Privacy, Security Concerns, I thought I would take a look at traffic leaving the box. Aside from traffic generated by the auto-start of Firefox, the only interesting event was the following. I captured it with my gateway Sguil sensor.

Sensor Name: hacom
Timestamp: 2007-11-23 21:27:04
Connection ID: .hacom_5136150487897024842
Src IP:  69.255.105.234 (c-69-255-105-234.hsd1.va.comcast.net)
Dst IP:  66.252.137.155 (Unknown)
Src Port:  39532
Dst Port:  80
OS Fingerprint: 69.255.105.234:39532 - UNKNOWN
 [S4:61:1:60:M1460,S,T,N,W4:.:?:?] (up: 3 hrs) 
OS Fingerprint:   -> 66.252.137.155:80 (link: ethernet/modem)

SRC: GET /version.txt HTTP/1.1
SRC: Accept-Encoding: identity
SRC: Host: universitytoolkit.com
SRC: Connection: close
SRC: User-Agent: Python-urllib/2.5
SRC: 
SRC: 
DST: HTTP/1.1 200 OK
DST: Date: Fri, 23 Nov 2007 21:27:31 GMT
DST: Server: Apache/2.0.52 (Red Hat)
DST: Last-Modified: Fri, 12 Oct 2007 14:14:45 GMT
DST: ETag: "4f4002-7-57333f40"
DST: Accept-Ranges: bytes
DST: Content-Length: 7
DST: Connection: close
DST: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
DST: 
DST: 1.2-RC3

That's it.

Comments

Anonymous said…
I don't follow /., but I do note the following about the MPAA University Toolkit in addition to its inappropriate data disclosure problems.

It does not (and cannot) distinguish between p2p traffic and p2p traffic undesired by the MPAA. It instead flags all p2p traffic. Despite the resulting analysis (traffic content examination, user interviews) necessary to differentiate, they claim that such noisy reports will produce "minimal workload" for IT staff. That's at best laughable.

Such a tool can only be workable in an environment in which prior permission must be granted to send each type of traffic on the network. This describes some military and corporate networks, but certainly not general consumer ISP or university networks.

As a propaganda ploy for the MPAA, who is seeking to drive legislation mandating technical measures against infringement, providing the tool may be useful regardless of how useless that tool actually is. For actually helping flag and correct infringement problems on a real network, however, it's very much worse than useless.
4:33 PM
Anonymous said…
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
3:15 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Zeek in Action Videos

Image
This is a quick note to point blog readers to my Zeek in Action YouTube video series for the Zeek network security monitoring project .  Each video addresses a topic that I think might be of interest to people trying to understand their network using Zeek and adjacent tools and approaches, like Suricata, Wireshark, and so on.  I am especially pleased with Video 6 on monitoring wireless networks . It took me several weeks to research material for this video. I had to buy new hardware and experiment with a Linux distro that I had not used before -- Parrot .  Please like and subscribe, and let me know if there is a topic you think might make a good video.
Read more

MITRE ATT&CK Tactics Are Not Tactics

Image
Just what are "tactics"? Introduction MITRE ATT&CK  is a great resource, but something about it has bothered me since I first heard about it several years ago. It's a minor point, but I wanted to document it in case it confuses anyone else. The MITRE ATT&CK Design and Philosophy document from March 2020 says the following: At a high-level, ATT&CK is a behavioral model that consists of the following core components: • Tactics, denoting short-term, tactical adversary goals during an attack; • Techniques, describing the means by which adversaries achieve tactical goals; • Sub-techniques, describing more specific means by which adversaries achieve tactical goals at a lower level than techniques; and • Documented adversary usage of techniques, their procedures, and other metadata. My concern is with MITRE's definition of "tactics" as "short-term, tactical adversary goals during an attack," which is oddly recursive. The key word in the tacti
Read more

New Book! The Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Volume 4

Image
  I've completed the TaoSecurity Blog book series . The new book is  The Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Volume 4: Beyond the Blog with Articles, Testimony, and Scholarship .  It's available now for Kindle , and I'm working on the print edition.  I'm running a 50% off promo on Volumes 1-3 on Kindle through midnight 20 April. Take advantage before the prices go back up. I described the new title thus: Go beyond TaoSecurity Blog with this new volume from author Richard Bejtlich. In the first three volumes of the series, Mr. Bejtlich selected and republished the very best entries from 18 years of writing and over 18 million blog views, along with commentaries and additional material.  In this title, Mr. Bejtlich collects material that has not been published elsewhere, including articles that are no longer available or are stored in assorted digital or physical archives. Volume 4 offers early white papers that Mr. Bejtlich wrote as a network defender, either for technical or pol
Read more