Displaying items by tag: Hacking

It seems that the recent $81 million dollar attack against the Bangladesh Central Bank might have also been about the Seth Rogan Movie “the interview”... ok, not really, but the attack that happened at Sony in 2014 seems to have many things in common with the recent attack that resulted in the theft of $81 million. During the Sony attack the initial blame was centered on the release of the Interview, but that was never confirmed and seemed to be way off base.

Three years ago today DecryptedTech published an article calling out a software distribution company for installing Bitcoin mining software on subscribers’ systems. We highlighted the danger of the trust people put in web services by allowing agent software to run on their systems in order to use a service. Now we hear about a French company Tuto4PC that has taken this one step further and included some nasty little surprises in a utility they require for use of their free tutorial service. The discovery was made by Cisco’s Talos Security Intelligence group and, of course, is being refuted aggressively by the guys at Tuto4PC.

There is nothing like finding out that all of your protections are useless. This is almost what happened when security researchers found a massive hole in the Windows App Locker protection. Although the news that there is a flaw in any software, much less Windows will come as no surprise it is still a little odd that this one made it through QA testing. The flaw is one that very simple and has already been seen in the wild over the last couple of days. All you need to do to execute code on a system is to direct Regsvr32 to a remotely hosted file. Security researcher Casey Smith found this handy little tidbit of information and states that you do not even need to elevate privileges to get it to work.

One of the dangers of pointing anything out about the security, or lack of security, with a product or service is the chance that someone will not like what you say and come after you. This is what is happening with Chris Vickery. If you do not know who Vickery is we can give you some background. Vickery is a security researcher that has been focusing on systems and services that cater to kids and parents. He has uncovered some rather unsettling information about a number of products that leak information about kids. The revelations are very disturbing to say the least.

The term hack-proof is one that people have thrown around for some time. It is one of those phrases like NSA-Proof or malware proof that really do not mean what they should mean. However, it is certainly meant to mean that the technology in question is resistant to the majority of known (important word there) attacks. It is important to mention this definition as we start talking about the announcement that MIT and Texas Instruments have developed a new “hack-proof” RFID chip.

Norse Corp, famous for their live attack map and Viking based parties at Black Hat, could be having some financial issues. At least that is the word from researcher Brian Krebs. Over the last couple of weeks they have laid off 30% of their staff and let their CEO go. Neither of the occurrences is good news for a company that is relatively new (Norse was founded in 2010). The basis of the business was to provide a nimble product that would allow for better threat tracking and blocking. Everything was centered on the use of live information to help prevent and mitigate attacks.

One cool thing about working in IT is that things are very predictable. You generally know how a system or application will react if you do this or that to it. This is how people find and use exploits in software and even hardware. You look at how an application works and identify ways you can use those processes against it. It is like digital judo. However, what many people do not really get is that this also works when setting up a larger organization for an attack. If you can track how they will respond to a particular threat, you can use it against them in very interesting ways.

It seems that the stars might finally align to remove one of the largest security holes in the history of… well history itself. Oracle is announcing that it is finally getting rid of the Java Browser Plug-in… sometime. According to a blog post on the Oracle page they are aware that most (if not all) browsers are already blocking plug-ins like the one in the Java Runtime Environment. These are for security, stability and performance, and really should have been done a long time ago. Over the last few years the Java browser plug-in (along with Flash) has been the vector of choice for many web-based attacks.

In the fast paced and insanely stupid argument between privacy advocates and national security advocates we often hear how we need to give up one or the other. The security guys say that privacy will block criminal activity so we need to give up some of that. On the other side the Privacy gang feels that giving up privacy is only hurting the people that are not doing anything wrong. They also feel it has an impact on free speech and limits discourse. What neither side is getting is that they both are right. Strong privacy protections and encryption allow for better and more secure communication. The complement each other in a way that no one seems to get.

You have to love how easy it is to find information out in the wilds of the internet. In the last couple of weeks a number of cloud-databases have been found to be leaking data to the interment due to an almost total lack of security. The latest one seems to be a group of 191… Million voters in the US. Yup, if you have voted in any election since 2000 your personal information is out there on the open internet. The information that is out contains names, addresses, party affiliation and voter ID numbers… it is not as bad as it could be, but it is still bad.