Mr. Robot’s latest episode showed us the stunning conclusion of the Stage 2 Dark Army hack meant to destroy E Corp’s paper records, as well as some picture-perfect hacking script commands from Elliot and clever firewall configurations from Mr. Robot. As usual, WatchGuard CTO Corey Nachreiner published his weekly article analyzing the technical accuracy of the show’s hacks on GeekWire. Head over there to read the complete details.
This episode featured Elliot flipping back and forth between himself and his ‘Mr. Robot’ alter ego as he tries to stop the hacked UPS firmware updates that will destroy the paper records of E Corp (along with the entire building and a significant number of innocent casualties). All of Elliot’s on-screen commands are realistic and make sense for the task he’s trying to complete. Mr. Robot takes him over several times during this process to prevent him from completing the job and eventually modifies E Corp’s firewall to prevent Elliot from accessing their network. Here’s an excerpt from Corey’s article discussing this.
While I can’t find any specific reference to this “firewall” command, it seems to be the show’s take on an “pintables”-like firewall on the UPS system. Real or not, Mr. Robot’s commands seem to adjust the firewall rules configuration file (fw.fwl) on the UPS system to block any IP in the 192.251.0.0/16 network range. This effectively blocks Elliot from connecting to the UPS server for good…Even though I haven’t seen the particular “firewall” used on the UPS server, the commands to add new policies or rules are similar to real ones used by similar firewalls.
Read the full article on GeekWire and learn more about firewall rules and auto-blocking suspicious connections here on Secplicity. As always, check back next week for more Mr. Robot Rewind.