Category Archives: Kenneth White

Patch Tuesday, January 2020 Edition

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Microsoft today released updates to plug 50 security holes in various flavors of Windows and related software. The patch batch includes a fix for a flaw in Windows 10 and server equivalents of this operating system that prompted an unprecedented public warning from the U.S. National Security Agency. This month also marks the end of mainstream support for Windows 7, a still broadly-used operating system that will no longer be supplied with security updates. Continue reading Patch Tuesday, January 2020 Edition→

Avast, NordVPN Breaches Tied to Phantom User Accounts

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Antivirus and security giant Avast and virtual private networking (VPN) software provider NordVPN each today disclosed months-long network intrusions that — while otherwise unrelated — shared a common cause: Forgotten or unknown user accounts that granted remote access to internal systems with little more than a password. Continue reading Avast, NordVPN Breaches Tied to Phantom User Accounts→

15-Year-old Finds Flaw in Ledger Crypto Wallet

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A 15-year-old security researcher has discovered a serious flaw in cryptocurrency hardware wallets made by Ledger, a French company whose popular products are designed to physically safeguard public and private keys used to receive or spend the user’s cryptocurrencies.

Hardware wallets like those sold by Ledger are designed to protect the user’s private keys from malicious software that might try to harvest those credentials from the user’s computer.  The devices enable transactions via a connection to a USB port on the user’s computer, but they don’t reveal the private key to the PC.

Yet Saleem Rashid, a 15-year-old security researcher from the United Kingdom, discovered a way to acquire the private keys from the Ledger devices. Rashid’s method requires an attacker to have physical access to the device, and normally such attacks would fall under the #1 rule of security — namely, if an attacker has physical access to your device it is not your device anymore. Continue reading 15-Year-old Finds Flaw in Ledger Crypto Wallet→