[Emergency ANN] Bitcoinica site is taken offline for security investigation

[Clipse]

Posted in the apology threat: https://claims.bitcoinica.com/

[muyuu]

Posted in the apology threat: https://claims.bitcoinica.com/

That totally looks like it needed 5 solid days of team work 

  _{Sorry... just on the wind up a bit before going to sleep.}

[coinft]

Posted in the apology threat: https://claims.bitcoinica.com/

How can we be sure this page is legit? No official post here, and not even a link to it on www.bitcoinica.com. I don't feel good giving this information to anyone who might be able to divert a DNS record.

-coinft

[DeathAndTaxes]

Posted in the apology threat: https://claims.bitcoinica.com/

How can we be sure this page is legit? No official post here, and not even a link to it on www.bitcoinica.com. I don't feel good giving this information to anyone who might be able to divert a DNS record.

-coinft

If they could divert a DNS record .... wouldn't that mean they could also spoof the www.bitcoinica.com page only?

[zhoutong]

Posted in the apology threat: https://claims.bitcoinica.com/

How can we be sure this page is legit? No official post here, and not even a link to it on www.bitcoinica.com. I don't feel good giving this information to anyone who might be able to divert a DNS record.

-coinft

If they could divert a DNS record .... wouldn't that mean they could also spoof the www.bitcoinica.com page only?

They didn't divert a DNS record. The hacker manipulated our load balancer (which acts like a reverse proxy) to some site that I'm not supposed to access.

[coinft]

Posted in the apology threat: https://claims.bitcoinica.com/

How can we be sure this page is legit? No official post here, and not even a link to it on www.bitcoinica.com. I don't feel good giving this information to anyone who might be able to divert a DNS record.

-coinft

If they could divert a DNS record .... wouldn't that mean they could also spoof the www.bitcoinica.com page only?

They didn't divert a DNS record. The hacker manipulated our load balancer (which acts like a reverse proxy) to some site that I'm not supposed to access.

What? Is this site safe to submit a claim or not? Because after your post in the apology thread I already did.

@DnT: www points to a blogspot google IP.

-coinft.

[zhoutong]

Posted in the apology threat: https://claims.bitcoinica.com/

How can we be sure this page is legit? No official post here, and not even a link to it on www.bitcoinica.com. I don't feel good giving this information to anyone who might be able to divert a DNS record.

-coinft

If they could divert a DNS record .... wouldn't that mean they could also spoof the www.bitcoinica.com page only?

They didn't divert a DNS record. The hacker manipulated our load balancer (which acts like a reverse proxy) to some site that I'm not supposed to access.

What? Is this site safe to submit a claim or not? Because after your post in the apology thread I already did.

@DnT: www points to a blogspot google IP.

-coinft.

This is safe now because we no longer point to the load balancer.

The domain is being controlled by a single reliable team member. Just make sure that it's https. (There's no way to get a SSL certificate without proving the domain ownership. Please do not trust any SSL certificate for bitcoinica.com issued before May 10, 2012.)

[Phinnaeus Gage]

Explaining the details of your operations might not be a wise thing to do in public.

Might make some sense if one has the time, interest, and skill to run an effective honeypot.  But I cannot see that laying out the welcome mat here and in this way is likely to pull in more than an handful of ankle-biter class victims.

Actually the app server is in my office, but I do realize not every company can afford a dedicated pipe inbound. We do have a couple of encrypted KVM VMs for "non paying" servers (mail, etc) at some dedicated servers out there.

Or a guy that just breaks into the office. Not much skill required.


Edit: Come to think of it. That would be a novel excuse these days: Hey, someone stole my server, I mean physically stole it ! 

I can see it now!


What the hell does 01000011 01101111 01101100 01100100 00100000 01010111 01100001 01101100 01101100 01100101 01110100 mean?

[btcgoldsilver]

Wheres the claims page?
All I'm getting is this ....

Unable to connect
       
Firefox can't establish a connection to the server at bitcoinica.com.
       
The site could be temporarily unavailable or too busy. Try again in a few moments.
If you are unable to load any pages, check your computer's network connection.
If your computer or network is protected by a firewall or proxy, make sure  that Firefox is permitted to access the Web.

 

[rdponticelli]

Wheres the claims page?
All I'm getting is this ....

Unable to connect
       
Firefox can't establish a connection to the server at bitcoinica.com.
       
The site could be temporarily unavailable or too busy. Try again in a few moments.
If you are unable to load any pages, check your computer's network connection.
If your computer or network is protected by a firewall or proxy, make sure  that Firefox is permitted to access the Web.

 

Posted in the apology threat: https://claims.bitcoinica.com/

[rjk]

The weird thing is that Firefox won't connect, but Internet Explorer will.

[Phinnaeus Gage]

The weird thing is that Firefox won't connect, but Internet Explorer will.

Or Chrome.

The server at claims.bitcoinica.com can't be found, because the DNS lookup failed. DNS is the network service that translates a website's name to its Internet address. This error is most often caused by having no connection to the Internet or a misconfigured network. It can also be caused by an unresponsive DNS server or a firewall preventing Google Chrome from accessing the network.

[rjk]

The weird thing is that Firefox won't connect, but Internet Explorer will.

Or Chrome.

The server at claims.bitcoinica.com can't be found, because the DNS lookup failed. DNS is the network service that translates a website's name to its Internet address. This error is most often caused by having no connection to the Internet or a misconfigured network. It can also be caused by an unresponsive DNS server or a firewall preventing Google Chrome from accessing the network.

I was able to connect to the claims.bitcoinica.com site once in firefox, but have never been able to connect to www.bitcoinica.com. Now, I can't access it either. I'd guess the DNS is either being DDoSed, or it has a major problem with its round-robin setup.

[Serge]

claims works fine on my chrome, www doesn't resolve ever since the incident

[BCB]

claims works fine on my chrome, www doesn't resolve ever since the incident

this works for me.

https://173.45.224.244/

[rdponticelli]

Cached dns may be causing all the troubles. They will surely work when the cached entries timeout.

[rjk]

Cached dns may be causing all the troubles. They will surely work when the cached entries timeout.

It's a bit worse than that, the nameservers are acting really weird. http://www.intodns.com/bitcoinica.com
I did a bit of nslookup'ing, and the DNS servers don't respond when asked for SOA, NS or A records. OpenDNS has cached copies of the A records, but not all of them, and no cached copies of NS records.

[marcus_of_augustus]

I luv these geeked out security discussions after the fact .... and in the end when everything is plain sailing they go back to hiding the key under the doormat.

[jixapori]

I luv these geeked out security discussions after the fact .... and in the end when everything is plain sailing they go back to hiding the key under the doormat.

Possibly people just do not have the resources or experience to set things up properly? For instance you clearly cannot rely on even physical security of any one machine, so at a minimum we are talking about multiple machines distributed across multiple physical locations for your site. Also dont forget your custom bitcoin client. None of this is cheap, least of all people to work on it who know what they are doing. Maybe it is not worth it to spend that much just to secure a few tens of thousands of bitcoins.

[realnowhereman]

What's wrong with the claims page:

• It's not asking for the account password.  Anyone who knows the usernames (and we can assume the attacker has a copy of the database) can submit a fake claim, and at the very least delay the real claim.
• If the attacker had access to the database, how does any of the information asked for demonstrate my real identity?
• It asks for real name and phone number.  I never gave bitcoinica that information in the first place (that bit of paranoia has paid off).  No advice is on the page for people in that position.
• EXACT balances are requested, but if you supply exact balances it rejects the request saying "give only two decimal places".  It's not EXACT any more then is it?
• Rejecting EXACT balances of more than two decimal places is pretty bad; but no advice is given as to whether the two decimal places you supply should be rounded up or down from your exact balance.  If I have 10.009 BTC is that "EXACT"ly 10.01 or 10.00?
• Given that there was a complete database compromise -- exactly what is it that you're achieving with all this nonsense?  Assuming you kept the passwords hashed, then the only bit of information that can be used to verify the owner that is possibly not compromised is the real owner's knowledge of the unhashed password.
• All you are actually verifying with this circus show is the owner of the email is the one making the claim.  However...
• You send out a verification email, which has no information on it other than a URL to click.  You have to click the link to see what the verification details were; but the verification page has no "approve" or "cancel" button.  So if an attacker does submit a fake form, then they simply hope that the actual owner clicks the link.  Given the dearth of information about the process from bitcoinica, and the lack of advice in the verification email (i.e. "don't click this link if you haven't started a claim") the user will assume that this email is the start of a claims process and will click the link; giving legitimacy to the fake claim.
• My email was verified when I registered the account -- what possible purpose is there in verifying it again?
• As continued evidence that you still haven't learned your lesson... you are relying on unencrypted email (FOR THE THIRD TIME: EMAIL IS A POSTCARD) to deliver information that you specifically say "should remain confidential".  The claim ID should have been listed on the original claim page after confirmation and only half of it should have been sent in the email.
• In short, this entire process is security theatre; not actual security.

In a situation that requires ambiguities be kept to an absolute minimum (one assumes the claims system will ideally be done automatically for the bulk of the work) you've added ambiguities where there need not have been any.  "Two decimal places" especially... what, are you short of bytes?

Seriously, what exactly do you think this "claims process" is achieving or protecting.  In what way is this a security measure?  Are you simply trying to verify if the database has been tampered with?  If so, SAY THAT.  Don't doll it up as if it's some kind of security measure for our benefit.  If the database has been tampered with you can't trust it anyway, so verifying emails is pointless.