Collaborate Disseminate
[Wladimir Palant] seems to be on a one man crusade against security problems in security software. The name may not be immediately recognizable, but among his other infamies is originating Adblock Plus, which we have a love-hate relationship with. (Look, surf the net with an adblocker, but disable it for …read more
Continue reading This Week in Security: Bitdefender, Ripple20, Starbucks, and Pwned Passwords
Netbooks are dead, long live the Chromebook. Lewin Day wrote up a proper trip down Netbook Nostalgia Lane earlier this month. That’s required reading, go check it out and come back. You’re back? Good. Today I’m making the case that the Chromebook is the rightful heir to the netbook crown, …read more
Continue reading Netbooks: The Next Generation — Chromebooks
We’re fans of haveibeenpwned.com around here, but a weird story came across my proverbial desk this week — [Troy Hunt] wrote a malicious SQL injection into one of their emails! That attack string was a simple ';--
Wait, doesn’t that look familiar? You remember the header on the haveibeenpwned web …read more
Continue reading This Week in Security: HaveIBeenPwned And Facebook Attack Their Customers
Intel announced CrossTalk, a new side-channel attack that can leak data from CPU buffers. It’s the same story we’ve heard before. Bits of internal CPU state can be inferred by other processes. This attack is a bit different, in that it can leak data across CPU cores. Only a few …read more
Continue reading This Week in Security: Crosstalk, TLS Resumption, And Brave Shenanigans
So first off, remember the Unc0ver vulnerability/jailbreak from last week? In the 13.5.1 iOS release, the underlying flaw was fixed, closing the jailbreak. If you intend to jailbreak your iOS device, make sure not to install this update. That said, the normal warning applies: Be very careful about running out-of-date …read more
Continue reading This Week in Security: Exim, Apple Sign-in, Cursed Wallpaper, and Nuclear Secrets
Researchers at the NCCGroup have been working on a 5-part explanation of a Windows kernel vulnerability, targeting the Kernel Transaction Manager (KTM). The vulnerability, CVE-2018-8611, is a local privilege escalation bug. There doesn’t seem to be a way to exploit this remotely, but it is an interesting bug, and NCCGroup’s …read more
Another DDOS amplification technique has just recently been disclosed, NXNSAttack (technical paper here) that could be used against DNS servers.
We’ve covered amplification attacks before. The short explanation is that some UDP services, like DNS, can be abused to get more mileage out of a DDoS attack. The attacking machined …read more
Continue reading This Week in Security: DNS DDOS, Revenge of the 15 Year Old Bug, and More
Thunderspy was announced this week, developed by [Björn Ruytenberg]. A series of attacks on the Thunderbolt 3 protocol, Thunderspy is the next vulnerability in the style of Inception, PCILeech, and Thunderclap.
Inception and PCILeech were attacks on the naive Direct Memory Access (DMA) built into Firewire, Thunderbolt 1, and PCIe. …read more
Continue reading This Week in Security: Thunderspy, Facebook Breaking Everything, and More
Apple recently patched a security problem, and fixed the Psychic Paper 0-day. This was a frankly slightly embarrasing flaw that [Siguza] discovered in how iOS processed XML data in an application’s code signature that allowed him access to any entitlement on the iOS system, including running outside a sandbox.
Entitlements …read more
Continue reading This Week in Security: Psychic Paper, Spilled Salt, and Malicious Captchas
You may have heard about a new bill working its way through the US congress, the EARN IT act. That’s the “Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies Act of 2020”. (What does that mean? It means someone really wanted their initials to spell out “EARN IT”.)
EARN IT …read more
Continue reading EARN IT: Privacy, Encryption, and Policing in the Information Age