From The Blog
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NetSPI’s Offensive Security Offering Leverages Subject Matter Experts to Enhance Pen Testing
Written by Sean KalinichBlack Hat 2023 Las Vegas. The term offensive security has always been an interesting one for me. On the surface is brings to mind reaching…Written on Tuesday, 12 September 2023 17:05 in Security Talk Read 725 times Read more...
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Black Kite Looks to Offer a Better View of Risk in a Rapidly Changing Threat Landscape
Written by Sean KalinichBlack Hat 2023 – Las Vegas. Risk is an interesting subject and has many different meanings to many different people. For the most part Risk…Written on Tuesday, 12 September 2023 14:56 in Security Talk Read 361 times Read more...
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Microsoft Finally Reveals how they Believe a Consumer Signing Key was Stollen
Written by Sean KalinichIn May of 2023 a few sensitive accounts reported to Microsoft that their environments appeared to be compromised. Due to the nature of these accounts,…Written on Thursday, 07 September 2023 14:40 in Security Talk Read 710 times Read more...
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Mandiant Releases a Detailed Look at the Campaign Targeting Barracuda Email Security Gateways, I Take a Look at What this all Might Mean
Written by Sean KalinichThe recent attack that leveraged a 0-Day vulnerability to compromise a number of Barracuda Email Security Gateway appliances (physical and virtual, but not cloud) was…Written on Wednesday, 30 August 2023 16:09 in Security Talk Read 530 times Read more...
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Threat Groups Return to Targeting Developers in Recent Software Supply Chain Attacks
Written by Sean KalinichThere is a topic of conversation that really needs to be talked about in the open. It is the danger of developer systems (personal and…Written on Wednesday, 30 August 2023 13:29 in Security Talk Read 654 times Read more...
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Leaked Data from Duolingo incident Shows US is most Impacted
Written by Sean KalinichDuolingo, is a language learning site (not to be confused with an LLM) and has a very large base of users. The site is a…Written on Tuesday, 29 August 2023 19:12 in Security Talk Read 1077 times Read more...
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We talk about the Ransomware Threat Landscape with SecureWorks at Black Hat 2023
Written by Sean KalinichBlack Hat 2023 – Las Vegas, NV – One of my personal focuses is understanding the “Why” behind changes in the threat landscape. In simple…Written on Tuesday, 29 August 2023 18:26 in Security Talk Read 587 times Read more...
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Now Patched Flaw Leverages Abandoned Reply URL found in Entra ID allows for Privilege Escalation
Written by Sean KalinichMicrosoft has not been having the greatest of months. First it was identified that a stollen MSA signing key was used by a Nation State…Written on Monday, 28 August 2023 15:39 in Security Talk Read 1303 times Read more...
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Qrypt Looking to Attack the Inefficiencies in Quantum Encryption to make Quantum Secure Communication a Reality Today
Written by Sean KalinichBlack Hat 2023, Las Vegas – At Black Hat one of my favorite things to do is see what the latest buzzword(s)/phrases are. One of…Written on Monday, 28 August 2023 12:53 in Security Talk Read 800 times Read more...
Recent Comments
- Sean, this is a fantastic review of a beautiful game. I do agree with you… Written by Jacob 2023-05-19 14:17:50 Jedi Survivor – The Quick, Dirty, and Limited Spoilers Review
- Great post. Very interesting read but is the reality we are currently facing. Written by JP 2023-05-03 02:33:53 The Dangers of AI; I Think I Have Seen this Movie Before
- I was wondering if you have tested the microphone audio frequency for the Asus HS-1000W? Written by Maciej 2020-12-18 14:09:33 Asus HS-1000W wireless headset impresses us in the lab
- Thanks for review. I appreciate hearing from a real pro as opposed to the blogger… Written by Keith 2019-06-18 04:22:36 The Red Hydrogen One, Possibly One of the Most “misunderstood” Phones Out
- Have yet to see the real impact but in the consumer segment, ryzen series are… Written by sushant 2018-12-23 10:12:12 AMD’s 11-year journey to relevance gets an epic finish.
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Kaspersky; the plot and ridiculousness thickens
Written by Sean Kalinich
A few days ago we published an article that covered a leaked batch of emails that showed Kaspersky has worked with the Russian Government. We also covered that the pieces of the emails that were published were completely out of context, and also are nothing out of the ordinary for a company that has a contract with a Government body. Kaspersky's denial of cooperation is also nothing new, so why the big deal in the media? Well we might have found a few pieces to that puzzle which would certainly explain the big push to discredit Kaspersky.
Leaked emails are the new "IT" when it comes to swaying the debate
Written by Sean Kalinich
Questionable security practices aside, it seems that just about every "big" scandal lately has had leaked emails as some sort of component. In the latest such scandal we find that leaked Kaspersky emails are at the core of the US National Security policy maker's concerns over the company and the use of the product inside the US. According to "internal company emails obtained by Bloomberg Businessweek" Kaspersky has had a rather close relationship with Russian intelligence agencies.
No, The Jayden K Smith Facebook Message is not real...
Written by Sean Kalinich
You have probably seen a message, or email, or even a recent Facebook post claiming that a dangerous Facebook Hacker by the name of Jayden K Smith working his way through the Facebook community and hacking user accounts with ease. In fact, this "hacker" is so good that you are at risk if even one of your friends has him in their friends list. This is quite scary and also not real at all. Yup, that message, email, or post is just like every other chain message out there, completely full of crap.
Facebook Hate Speech AI Blocking The Wrong People
Written by Sean Kalinich
Hate is a powerful item and when it spills out it can be violent, rude and many other things. Because of the power of hate found in images, media, mems, etc., many have wondered why there are not more efforts to prevent the posting or sharing of such information. After all why would a media (social or other) want to allow hate speech or images posted on their pages. Facebook took this thought process and turned it into a policy that is designed to help stop hate speech from showing up. Now the system has inadvertently started censoring the wrong people.
New WikiLeaks Vault7 reveals show nothing that is all that new
Written by Sean Kalinich
WikiLeaks is at it again with their "Vault 7" releases. This time part of the dump features a nice little took kit for continued exploitation of some Linux systems. The tool kit is called OutlawCountry and is, to be perfectly honest, not much more than a remote management, monitoring and exfiltration tool. It is intended to run in the background on a system after a vulnerability has been exploited to allow the payload to be pushed. It looks very similar to a tool that the NSA used for years and has now become the commercial product Kaseya.
For the last couple of days the world has been buzzing with news about the Petya malware. When the news of the outbreak broke on Tuesday morning, it was all about a new ransomware that was spreading around the globe. References to WannaCry were made and fingers pointed to the use of the same NSA exploit as the attack vector. However, Petya was not really like WannaCry in that there was no “kill-switch”. Wednesday morning the big players in the anti-malware and security markets had sent out their “what you should know emails” and a low-grade form of panic hit many enterprises.
AMD’s 11-year journey to relevance gets an epic finish.
Written by Sean Kalinich
In the early 2000s AMD was on top of the world, they had a desktop processor that was what everyone wanted. AMD was handily beating Intel in terms of performance and pushing x86-64 computing out to the world. In 2006 AMD made an odd decision to buy GPU maker ATi for a rather hefty sum. This one act threw AMD off their game so badly that they operated in the red for many years after the purchase. However, over the last 2-3 years AMD has made some well-planned changes internally. These changes included dropping the mobile focus and creating the RTG (Radeon Technology Group). They have secured some technologies through purchases and cleaned up some financially impacting deals.
Is HBM a viable technology for GPUs? Yes, Yes it is… just not right now
Written by Sean Kalinich
Over the last couple of days, we have received information that would indicate nVidia is not moving to HBM 2 for their consumer GPUs (outside of some extremely high-end models). Instead, they appear to be focusing on improvements found in GDDR5X and GDDR6. Conversely, AMD appears to be focusing on HBM for many of their high-end and even some mid-range cards. The two very different paths has sparked something of a debate amongst fans of both products (as you can imagine). The questions are, why chose one over the other at this point and is HBM a truly viable option for AMD?
Microsoft finds active exploit of Intel's AMT vulnerability
Written by Sean Kalinich
Remote management and access tools are great things for IT staff to use, but if they are not set up correctly or they have bugs hidden in the code they can quickly become a nightmare. Intel’s AMT (Active Management Technology) suite of tools recently was found to have a rather nasty little surprise hidden in them. It seems that a flaw in the way their SOL (Serial on LAN) tool runs combined with the way Windows deals with AMT allowed attackers to use AMT to deploy malware and to exfiltrate data from a compromised system.
CD Projekt RED admits to data theft and blackmail
Written by Sean Kalinich
CD Projekt RED has found themselves the victim of both data theft and now blackmail. At least that is what we are hearing from their Twitter account. According to CD Projekt, someone has made off with information that relates to their upcoming game Cyberpunk 2077. The Tweet goes on to say that the files are old and are not representative of the current version of the game. They also say they are not planning on giving in to the ransom demands. It is something of an interesting situation to be honest.
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Did Intel Repond to Threadripper, or just to Ryzen in General?
Written by Sean Kalinich
Computex 2017 is done, the hangovers are pretty much gone, and what do we have to show for it? Well… we have a new fight for fanboys and review sites alike to talk about. This is the fight between AMD’s Threadripper and Intel’s New X series CPUs. The crux of the argument is that Intel’s 18 Core i9 with 44 PCIe lanes is a reactionary move to a leak of Threadripper’s specifications.
This is going to be a little bit of a departure from how we would normally approach covering specific technology. Instead of addressing the state of hardware based on what we have actually worked with, we are going to look at VR from the standpoint of a consumer looking to buy for the first time. There are a couple of reasons to do this; the first is that we do not have either an Oculus Rift, HTC Vive or any other PC based VR technology. We do have the Oculus powered Gear VR, but that is in a category all on its own which we will cover in some detail below. So with the preface out of the way, let’s get started
AMD Drops the Ryzen based Threadripper CPU on Computex
Written by Sean Kalinich
Earlier today, we talked about Intel’s response to AMD’s Ryzen success so we thought we would give some love to AMD as well. Although we are not out at Computex (again) we are still getting news from different manufacturers. We are also getting information from a few people that are in the sweltering heat…. Oh yeah; back to talking about AMD’s response to Intel’s Core i9 X-series.
Intel Launches the new X-Series at Computex 2017
Written by Sean Kalinich
With Computex going on there has already been lots of news hitting the street about new PC gear. Everything from GPUs, Laptops, Cases, overclocking world records, you know the stuff. We have also heard that Intel has kicked a new series of CPUs out the door. These are their “X” series of CPUs and are pretty much a direct response to the performance that AMD’s Ryzen has shown off.