Slashdot Mirror

Trailrunner7 writes, quoting Threat Post: "Carrier IQ, a startup heavily bruised last fall by harsh criticism of its handset diagnostic software, today announced it's hired a high-profile lawyer as its Chief Privacy Officer. Magnolia Mansourkia Mobley, a CIPP and former Verizon executive, will be tasked with quickly broadening the company's focus on consumer privacy. She also was named the company's General Counsel. The company became the flashpoint in a heated controversy after initial reports its analytics software, embedded in some 150 mobile phones, was capable of gathering a great deal of personal data without the customer's consent."

Trailrunner7 writes "A new project that was setup to monitor the quality and strength of the SSL implementations on top sites across the Internet found that 75 percent of them are vulnerable to the BEAST SSL attack and that just 10 percent of the sites surveyed should be considered secure. The SSL Pulse project, set up by the Trustworthy Internet Movement, looks at several components of each site's SSL implementation to determine how secure the site actually is. The project looks at how each site is configured, which versions of the TLS and SSL protocols the site supports, whether the site is vulnerable to the BEAST or insecure renegotiation attacks and other factors. The data that the SSL Pulse project has gathered thus far shows that the vast majority of the 200,000 sites the project is surveying need some serious help in fixing their SSL implementations."

Gunkerty Jeb writes "Purloined data and documents, including source code belonging to the U.S. software firm VMWare, continue to bubble up from the networks of a variety of compromised Chinese firms, according to 'Hardcore Charlie,' an anonymous hacker who has claimed responsibility for the hacks. In a statement on the VMWare Web site, Ian Mulholland, Director of VMWare's Security Response Center, said the company acknowledged that a source code file for its ESX product had been leaked online. In a phone interview, Mulholland told Threatpost the company was monitoring the situation and conducting an investigation into the incident."

Gunkerty Jeb writes "Italian security researcher Luigi Auriemma was trying to play a trick on his brother when he accidentally discovered two vulnerabilities in all current versions of Samsung TVs and Blu-Ray systems that could allow an attacker to gain remote access to those devices. Auriemma claims that the vulnerabilities will affect all Samsung devices with support for remote controllers, and that the vulnerable protocol is on both TVs and Blu-Ray enabled devices. One of the bugs leads to a loop of endless restarts while the other could cause a potential buffer overflow."

Trailrunner7 writes, quoting Threatpost: "Search giant Google said it is quintupling the top bounty it will pay for information on security holes in its products to $20,000. Google said it was updating its rewards and rules for the bounty program, which is celebrating its first anniversary. In addition to a top prize of $20,000 for vulnerabilities that allow code to be executed on product systems, Google said it would pay $10,000 for SQL injection and equivalent vulnerabilities in its services and for certain vulnerabilities that leak information or allow attackers to bypass authentication or authorization features."

chicksdaddy writes "Threatpost is reporting on a new study of mobile malware that finds accountability, not superior technology, has kept Apple's iOS ecosystem free of viruses, even as the competing Android platform strains under the weight of repeated malicious code outbreaks. Dan Guido of the firm Trail of Bits and Michael Arpaia of iSEC Partners told attendees at the SOURCE Boston Conference on Thursday about an empirical analysis of existing malicious programs for the Android and iOS platforms which shows that Google is losing the mobile security contest badly — every piece of malicious code the two identified was for the company's Android OS, while Apple's iOS remained free of malware, despite owning 30% of the mobile smartphone market in the U.S. Apple's special sauce? Policies that demand accountability from iOS developers, and stricter controls on what applications can do once they are installed on Apple devices."

chicksdaddy writes "Threatpost is reporting on a new study of mobile malware that finds accountability, not superior technology, has kept Apple's iOS ecosystem free of viruses, even as the competing Android platform strains under the weight of repeated malicious code outbreaks. Dan Guido of the firm Trail of Bits and Michael Arpaia of iSEC Partners told attendees at the SOURCE Boston Conference on Thursday about an empirical analysis of existing malicious programs for the Android and iOS platforms which shows that Google is losing the mobile security contest badly — every piece of malicious code the two identified was for the company's Android OS, while Apple's iOS remained free of malware, despite owning 30% of the mobile smartphone market in the U.S. Apple's special sauce? Policies that demand accountability from iOS developers, and stricter controls on what applications can do once they are installed on Apple devices."

Trailrunner7 writes "Mozilla is developing a feature in Firefox that would require some user interaction in order for Flash ads, Java scripts and other content that uses plugins to play. In addition to easing system slowdowns, the opt-in for Web plugins is expected to reduce threats posed by exploiting security vulnerabilities in plugins, including zero-day attacks. 'Whether you hate them or love them, content accessed through plugins is still a sizable chunk of the web. So much so, that over 99% of internet users have Flash installed on their browser,' writes Mozilla's Jared Wein, the lead software engineer on the project, in a blog post."

chicksdaddy writes "Threatpost is reporting on a critical security flaw in the latest version of Backtrack Linux, a popular distribution that is used by security professionals for penetration testing. The previously undiscovered privilege escalation hole was discovered by a student taking part in an InfoSec Institute Ethical Hacking class, according to the post on the group's Web site. 'The student in our ethical hacking class that found the 0day was using backtrack and decided to fuzz the program, as well as look through the source code,' wrote Jack Koziol, the Security Program Manager at the InfoSec Institute. 'He found that he could overwrite config settings and gain a root shell.' An unofficial patch is available from InfoSec Institute. Koziol said that an official patch is being tested now and is expected shortly."

chicksdaddy writes "Threatpost is reporting on a critical security flaw in the latest version of Backtrack Linux, a popular distribution that is used by security professionals for penetration testing. The previously undiscovered privilege escalation hole was discovered by a student taking part in an InfoSec Institute Ethical Hacking class, according to the post on the group's Web site. 'The student in our ethical hacking class that found the 0day was using backtrack and decided to fuzz the program, as well as look through the source code,' wrote Jack Koziol, the Security Program Manager at the InfoSec Institute. 'He found that he could overwrite config settings and gain a root shell.' An unofficial patch is available from InfoSec Institute. Koziol said that an official patch is being tested now and is expected shortly."

Trailrunner7 writes, quoting Threatpost: "Apple is planning to release a software fix that will find and remove the Flashback malware that has been haunting Mac users for several months now. ... Apple said on Tuesday that it was in the process of developing a tool that would detect and remove Flashback, but the company did not specify when the fix would be available. Security researchers and customers have been questioning why Apple hasn't yet provided a fix for the malware even though Flashback has been around in one form or another for more than six months now."

Trailrunner7 writes "Project Basecamp, a volunteer effort to expose security holes in industrial control system software, unveiled new modules on Thursday to exploit holes in common programmable logic controllers (PLCs). The new exploits, which are being submitted to the Metasploit open platform, include one that carries out a Stuxnet-type attack on PLCs made by the firm Schneider Electric, according to information provided to Threatpost by Digital Bond, a private consulting firm that has sponsored the effort. It was the third major release from researchers working for Project Basecamp and included three new modules for the Metasploit platform that can exploit vulnerable PLCs used in critical infrastructure deployments. The exploits rely on a mix of software vulnerabilities and insecure 'features' of common PLCs, which serve a variety of purposes in industries as varied as power generation, water treatment, manufacturing and others."

Trailrunner7 writes with this excerpt from Threatpost: "Mozilla has made a change in Firefox that will block all of the older versions of Java that contain a critical vulnerability that's being actively exploited. The decision to add these vulnerable versions of Java to the browser's blocklist is designed to protect users who may not be aware of the flaw and attacks. 'This vulnerability — present in the older versions of the JDK and JRE — is actively being exploited, and is a potential risk to users. To mitigate this risk, we have added affected versions of the Java plugin for Windows (Version 6 Update 30 and below as well as Version 7 Update 2 and below) to Firefox's blocklist. A blocklist entry for the Java plugin on OS X may be added at a future date. Mozilla strongly encourages anyone who requires the JDK and JRE to update to the current version as soon as possible on all platforms,' Mozilla's Kev Needham said."

Trailrunner7 writes "Yahoo has decided that it's now time to start implementing a Do Not Track system across its various Web properties. The company is one of the last large Web content providers to officially commit to using a DNT technology, and Yahoo said that it plans to have the system implemented by early summer. Yahoo officials said that their Do Not Track implementation has been in development since 2011 and that it will be a simple way for consumers to turn on the DNT option."

Trailrunner7 writes "Welcome to the age of targeted attacks, Mac users. Perhaps having grown tired of owning Windows machines around the world for the last few years, attackers have now taken up the challenge of going after Macs with the same kind of targeted attack tactics that have served them so well in the Windows world. Researchers have found a new attack that employs two separate pieces of malware, a malicious Word document and some techniques for maintaining persistence on compromised machines, and the campaign is specifically targeted at Mac users. The command-and-control domain involved in the attack is located in China and the attack exploits a three-year-old vulnerability in the way that Office for Mac handles certain Word files, according to researchers at AlienVault, who discovered and analyzed the attacks."

Trailrunner7 writes "The Federal Trade Commission has issued a new report (PDF) on consumer privacy and online tracking. Among the recommendations the commission makes is that data brokers make themselves known to consumers and be open and transparent about the data they collect. The FTC also says companies should be building privacy protections into their products by design, including implementing the Do Not Track mechanism once it's finalized. Data brokers are essentially an unregulated group of companies that collect, store and sell information about consumers and their behaviors and buying preferences. Privacy advocates and some lawmakers have criticized the industry's practices and called for some regulation. As a result, the FTC is recommending that the industry not only create a central site to inform consumers about the kinds of data they collect and sell, but also is pushing for legislation to address the industry's problems."

chicksdaddy writes "Threatpost has a write-up of a study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University that provides the first conclusive evidence that Chinese government censorship extends to social media sites like Sina Weibo, the popular micro blogging Web site that many have likened to a Chinese Twitter. 'The study ... found that censors in China delete around 16 percent of the messages submitted to Sina Weibo ... The study, released in March, concludes that "soft censorship" in China — the removal of controversial subject matter from blogs and Web pages — is at least as popular as hard censorship, like the blocking of offensive sites. The result is suppression of news about events or individuals that are deemed threatening to the ruling Communist party.'"

chicksdaddy writes "Threatpost has a write-up of a study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University that provides the first conclusive evidence that Chinese government censorship extends to social media sites like Sina Weibo, the popular micro blogging Web site that many have likened to a Chinese Twitter. 'The study ... found that censors in China delete around 16 percent of the messages submitted to Sina Weibo ... The study, released in March, concludes that "soft censorship" in China — the removal of controversial subject matter from blogs and Web pages — is at least as popular as hard censorship, like the blocking of offensive sites. The result is suppression of news about events or individuals that are deemed threatening to the ruling Communist party.'"

Gunkerty Jeb writes with a selection from Threatpost about upcoming legislation to watch out for: "EFF looked at two bills making their way through Congress: The Cybersecurity Act of 2012 (S. 2105), sponsored by Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) of Connecticut and the Secure IT Act (S. 2151), sponsored by Senator John McCain (R-AZ). The digital rights group claims that the quality of both bills ranges from 'downright terrible' to 'appropriately intentioned.' Each, however, is conceptually similar and flawed, EFF said."

Trailrunner7 writes "The U.S.'s leading Internet Service Providers signed on to a new FCC code of conduct to limit the impact of major cyber security threats, including botnets, attacks on the Domain Name System and Internet routing attacks. AT&T, CenturyLink, Comcast, Cox, Sprint, Time Warner Cable, T-Mobile and Verizon were among the ISPs that participated in the agreement. 'The recommendations approved today identify smart, practical, voluntary solutions that will materially improve the cyber security of commercial networks and bolster the broader endeavors of our federal partners,' said FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski." A fact sheet from the FCC provides details on the recommendations, but they're pretty vague: "The CSRIC recommended ISPs participate in a U.S. Anti-Bot Code of Conduct (PDF) that encourages ISPs to engage in: (1) end-user education to prevent bot infections; (2) detection of bots; (3) notification of potential bot infections; (4) remediation of bots; and (5) collaboration and sharing of information." They also recommend broader adoption of DNSSEC and the development of an "industry framework" to combat IP route hijacking.

Trailrunner7 writes "Those multi-gesture passcode locks on Android phones that give users (and their spouses) fits apparently present quite a challenge for the FBI as well. Frustrated by a swipe passcode on the seized phone of an alleged gang leader, FBI officials have requested a search warrant that would force Google to 'provide law enforcement with any and all means of gaining access, including login and password information, password reset, and/or manufacturer default code ("PUK"), in order to obtain the complete contents of the memory of cellular telephone.' The request is part of a case involving an alleged gang leader and human trafficker named Dante Dears in California. Dears served several years in prison for his role in founding a gang in California called PhD, and upon his release he went back to his activities with the gang, according to the FBI's affidavit."

chicksdaddy writes "Threatpost is reporting today on the findings of an ENISA study that looked at whether consumers would pay more for goods in exchange for more privacy. The answer — 'Sure...just not much more.' The report (PDF): 'Study on Monetizing Privacy: An Economic Model for Pricing Personal Information' presents the findings of a laboratory study in which consumers were asked to buy identical goods from two online vendors: one that collected minimal customer information and another that required the customer to surrender more of their personal information to purchase the item, including phone number and a government ID number. The laboratory experiment showed that the majority of consumers value privacy protections. When the prices of the goods offered by both the privacy protecting and the privacy violating online retailers were equal, shoppers much preferred the privacy protecting vendor. But the preference for more privacy wasn't very strong, and didn't come close to equaling consumers' preference for lower prices. In fact, consumers readily switched to a more privacy-invasive provider if that provider charged a lower price for the same goods. How much lower? Not much, researchers discovered. A discount of just E0.50 ($0.65) was enough to sway consumers away from a vendor who would protect the privacy of their personal data."

chicksdaddy writes "Threatpost is reporting today on the findings of an ENISA study that looked at whether consumers would pay more for goods in exchange for more privacy. The answer — 'Sure...just not much more.' The report (PDF): 'Study on Monetizing Privacy: An Economic Model for Pricing Personal Information' presents the findings of a laboratory study in which consumers were asked to buy identical goods from two online vendors: one that collected minimal customer information and another that required the customer to surrender more of their personal information to purchase the item, including phone number and a government ID number. The laboratory experiment showed that the majority of consumers value privacy protections. When the prices of the goods offered by both the privacy protecting and the privacy violating online retailers were equal, shoppers much preferred the privacy protecting vendor. But the preference for more privacy wasn't very strong, and didn't come close to equaling consumers' preference for lower prices. In fact, consumers readily switched to a more privacy-invasive provider if that provider charged a lower price for the same goods. How much lower? Not much, researchers discovered. A discount of just E0.50 ($0.65) was enough to sway consumers away from a vendor who would protect the privacy of their personal data."

Trailrunner7 writes "When the long arm of the law reached in to arrest members of Anonymous's senior leadership on Tuesday, speculation immediately turned to the identities of the six men behind the Guy Fawkes mask. With the benefit of hindsight, it turns out that many had been hiding in plain sight, with day jobs, burgeoning online lives and — for those who knew where to look — plenty of clues about their extracurricular activities on behalf of the world's most famous hacking crew. Two of the accused, Darren Martyn (aka 'pwnsauce,' 'raepsauce,' and 'networkkitten,') and Donncha O'Cearbhail, formerly known as Donncha Carroll (aka 'Palladium'), sported significant online footprints and made little effort to hide their affinity for hacking. In other areas, however, Martyn (who was reported to be 25, but claimed to be 19), seemed to be on his way to bigger and better things. He was a local chapter leader of the Open Web Application Security Project in Galway, Ireland. He spent some of his free time with a small collective of computer researchers with Insecurety Research, under the name 'infodox.'"

chicksdaddy writes with a tidbit from the RSA conference. From the article: "A panel of security and policy experts speaking at the RSA Conference in San Francisco on Wednesday said that, despite dire warnings about the information warfare capabilities of China and other developing nations, the risk of an all-out cyberwar is remote, and that the U.S. still holds many of the cards. Rather than trying to deliver a knock-out cyberwar capability, the U.S. should embrace the Cold War notions of containment and mutually assured destruction with advanced nations like China and Russia. Tried and true methods to win security from cyberattacks include international diplomacy, multilateral agreements that clarify the parameters for peaceful and hostile cyberactions and — of course — a strong offensive capability."

chicksdaddy writes with a tidbit from the RSA conference. From the article: "A panel of security and policy experts speaking at the RSA Conference in San Francisco on Wednesday said that, despite dire warnings about the information warfare capabilities of China and other developing nations, the risk of an all-out cyberwar is remote, and that the U.S. still holds many of the cards. Rather than trying to deliver a knock-out cyberwar capability, the U.S. should embrace the Cold War notions of containment and mutually assured destruction with advanced nations like China and Russia. Tried and true methods to win security from cyberattacks include international diplomacy, multilateral agreements that clarify the parameters for peaceful and hostile cyberactions and — of course — a strong offensive capability."

chicksdaddy writes "Tech-enabled filtering and blocking of Web sites and Internet addresses that are deemed hostile to repressive regimes has been a major political and human rights issue in the last year, as popular protests in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Syria erupted. Now it looks as if Pakistan's government is looking for a way to strengthen its hand against online content it considers undesirable. According to a request for proposals from the National ICT (Information and Communications and Technologies) R&D Fund, the Pakistani government is struggling to keep a lid on growing Internet and Web use and is looking for a way to filter out undesirable Web sites. The 'indigenous' filtering system would be 'deployed at IP backbones in major cities, i.e., Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad,' the RFP reads (PDF). It would be 'centrally managed by a small and efficient team stationed at POPs of backbone providers,' and must be capable of supporting 100Gbps interfaces and filtering Web traffic against a block list of up to 50 million URLs without latency of more than 1 millisecond."

chicksdaddy writes "Tech-enabled filtering and blocking of Web sites and Internet addresses that are deemed hostile to repressive regimes has been a major political and human rights issue in the last year, as popular protests in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Syria erupted. Now it looks as if Pakistan's government is looking for a way to strengthen its hand against online content it considers undesirable. According to a request for proposals from the National ICT (Information and Communications and Technologies) R&D Fund, the Pakistani government is struggling to keep a lid on growing Internet and Web use and is looking for a way to filter out undesirable Web sites. The 'indigenous' filtering system would be 'deployed at IP backbones in major cities, i.e., Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad,' the RFP reads (PDF). It would be 'centrally managed by a small and efficient team stationed at POPs of backbone providers,' and must be capable of supporting 100Gbps interfaces and filtering Web traffic against a block list of up to 50 million URLs without latency of more than 1 millisecond."

Trailrunner7 writes "Google is in the process of developing a tool to help users generate strong passwords for the various and sundry Web sites for which they need to register and authenticate. The password-generator is meant to serve as an interim solution for users while Google and other companies continue to work on widespread deployment of the OpenID standard. The tool Google engineers are working on is a fairly simple one. For people who are using the Chrome browser, whenever a site presents them with a field that requires creating a password, Chrome will display a small key icon, letting the users know that they could allow Chrome to generate a password for them."

Trailrunner7 writes "In the last couple of years, Google and some other Web giants have moved to make many of their services accessible over SSL, and in many cases, made HTTPS connections the default. That's designed to make eavesdropping on those connections more difficult, but as researchers have shown, it certainly doesn't make traffic analysis of those connections impossible. Vincent Berg of IOActive has written a tool that can monitor SSL connections and make some highly educated guesses about the contents of the requests going to Google Maps, specifically looking at what size the PNG files returned by Google Maps are. The tool then attempts to group those images in a specific location, based on the grid and tile system that Google uses to construct its maps."

Trailrunner7 writes "Adobe, which has spent the last few years trying to dig out of a deep hole of vulnerabilities and buggy code, is making a major change to Flash, adding a sandbox to the version of the player that runs in Firefox. The sandbox is designed to prevent many common exploit techniques against Flash. The move by Adobe comes roughly a year after the company added a sandbox to Flash for Google Chrome. Flash, which is perhaps the most widely deployed piece of software on the Internet, has been a common attack vector for several years now, and the attacks in some cases have been used to get around exploit mitigations added by the browser vendors. The sandbox is designed to prevent many of these attacks by not allowing exploits against Flash to break out into the browser itself."

Gunkerty Jeb writes "Researchers have identified a strain of malware that's being used in a string of targeted attacks against defense contractors, government agencies and other organizations by leveraging exploits against zero-day vulnerabilities. The attacks may have been going on since 2009 in some form and the emails containing the malicious attachments are specifically targeted at executives and officials in various industries using fake conference invitations. The attack campaign, as many do, appears to be changing frequently, as the attackers use different binaries and change up their patterns for connecting to remote command-and-control servers. The research, done by Seculert and Zscaler, shows that the attackers are patient, taking the time to dig up some information about their potential targets, and are carefully choosing organizations that have high-value intellectual property and assets (PDF)."

judgecorp writes "Google, Microsoft, PayPal, Facebook and others have proposed DMARC, or Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance, an email authentication protocol to combat phishing attacks. Authentication has been proposed before; this group of big names might get it adopted." Adds reader Trailrunner7, "The specification is the product of a collaboration among the large email receivers such as AOL, Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Hotmail, and major email senders such as Facebook, Bank of America and others, all of whom have a vested interest in either knowing which emails are legitimate or being able to prove that their messages are authentic. The DMARC specification is meant to be a policy layer that works in conjunction with existing mail authentication systems such as DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) and SPF (Sender Policy Framework)."

Trailrunner7 writes "Facebook and the state of Washington are suing an ad network they accuse of encouraging people to spread spam through clickjacking schemes and other tactics. The company at the center of the allegations, Adscend Media, denies the charges and said it will fight them vigorously. According to the office of Washington Attorney General Rob McKenna, the company paid and encouraged scammers to design Facebook pages to bait users into visiting Websites that pay the company. The bait pages would appear in posts that seem to originate from a person's Facebook friends and offer visitors an opportunity to view 'provocative' content in exchange for clicking the 'like' button on the Facebook page."

Trailrunner7 writes "The FBI is in the early stages of developing an application that would monitor sites such as Twitter and Facebook, as well as various news feeds, in order to find information on emerging threats and new events happening at the moment. The tool would give specialists the ability to pull the data into a dashboard that also would include classified information coming in at the same time. One of the key capabilities of the new application, for which the FBI has sent out a solicitation, would be to 'provide an automated search and scrape capability for social networking sites and open source news sites for breaking events, crisis and threats that meet the search parameters/keywords defined by FBI/SIOC.'"

Trailrunner7 writes "At the S4 security conference this week, 'Project Basecamp,' a volunteer-led security audit of leading programmable logic controllers (PLCs), performed by a team of top researchers found that decrepit hardware, buggy software and pitiful or nonexistent security features make thousands of PLCs vulnerable to trivial attacks by external hackers that could cause PLC devices to crash or run malicious code. 'We were looking for a Firesheep moment in PLC security,' Peterson told the audience of ICS security experts. They got one. 'It's a blood bath mostly,' said Wightman of Digital Bond. 'Many of these devices lack basic security features.' While the results of analysis of the various PLCs varied, the researchers found significant security issues with every system they tested, with some PLCs too brittle and insecure to even tolerate security scans and probing."

Trailrunner7 writes "A new research report says variants of the Sykipot Trojan have been found that can steal Dept. of Defense smartcard credentials. The research, published in a blog post Thursday, is the latest by Alien Vault to look at Sykipot, a Trojan horse program known to be used in targeted attacks against the defense industry. The new variants, which Alien Vault believes have been circulating since March, 2011, have been used in 'dozens of attacks' and contain features that would allow remote attackers to steal smart card credentials and access sensitive information."

chicksdaddy wrote in with a link to a story about a Microsoft project that will share security information in real time with customers and law enforcement. The article reads "Microsoft has proven that it can take down huge, global botnets like Kelihos, Rustock and Waldec. Now the company is ready to start making the data it acquires in those busts available to governments, law enforcement and customers as a real time threat intelligence feed. Representatives from the Redmond, Washington software maker told an audience at the International Conference on Cyber Security (ICCS) here that it was testing a new service to distribute threat data from captured botnets and other sources to partners, including foreign governments, Computer Emergency Response Teams (CERTs) and private corporations."

chicksdaddy wrote in with a link to a story about a Microsoft project that will share security information in real time with customers and law enforcement. The article reads "Microsoft has proven that it can take down huge, global botnets like Kelihos, Rustock and Waldec. Now the company is ready to start making the data it acquires in those busts available to governments, law enforcement and customers as a real time threat intelligence feed. Representatives from the Redmond, Washington software maker told an audience at the International Conference on Cyber Security (ICCS) here that it was testing a new service to distribute threat data from captured botnets and other sources to partners, including foreign governments, Computer Emergency Response Teams (CERTs) and private corporations."

Trailrunner7 writes with an article at Threat Post about China's ability to block Tor. From the article: "The much-discussed Great Firewall of China is meant to prevent Chinese citizens from getting to Web sites and content that the country's government doesn't approve of, and it's been endowed with some near-mythical powers by observers over the years. But it's somewhat rare to get a look at the way that the system actually works in practice. Researchers at Team Cymru got just that recently when they were asked by the folks at the Tor Project to help investigate why a user in China was having his connections to a bridge relay outside of China terminated so quickly. Not only is China able to identify Tor sessions, it can do so in near real-time and then probe the Tor bridge relay and terminate the session within a couple of minutes."

SharkLaser writes "Fake antivirus scams have plagued Windows and Mac OS X during the last couple of years. Now it seems like such scams have spread to Android. Fake antivirus scams on Android work the same as they do on PC's — a user with an Android phone downloads an application or visits a website that says that the user's device is infected with malware. It will then show a fake scan of the system and return hard-coded 'positives' and gives the option the option to buy antivirus software that will 'remove' the malware on the affected system. Android, which is based on Linux, has been plagued with malware earlier too. According to McAfee, almost all new mobile malware now targets Android. Android app stores, including the official one from Google, has also been hosting hundreds of trojan applications that send premium rate SMSes on behalf of unsuspecting users."

Trailrunner7 writes "Just a day after security researcher Stefan Viehbock released details of a vulnerability in the WiFi Protected Setup (WPS) standard that enables attackers to recover the router PIN, a security firm has published an open-source tool capable of exploiting the vulnerability. The tool, known as Reaver, has the ability to find the WPS PIN on a given router and then recover the WPA passphrase for the router, as well. Tactical Network Solutions has released the tool as an open-source project on Google Code, but also is selling a more advanced commercial version."

Trailrunner7 writes "There is a newly discovered vulnerability in the WiFi Protected Setup standard that reduces the number of attempts it would take an attacker to brute-force the PIN for a wireless router's setup process. The flaw results in too much information about the PIN being returned to an attacker and makes the PIN quite weak, affecting the security of millions of WiFi routers and access points. Security researcher Stefan Viehbock discovered the vulnerability (PDF) and reported it to US-CERT. The problem affects a number of vendors' products, including D-Link, Netgear, Linksys and Buffalo. 'I noticed a few really bad design decisions which enable an efficient brute force attack, thus effectively breaking the security of pretty much all WPS-enabled Wi-Fi routers. As all of the of the more recent router models come with WPS enabled by default, this affects millions of devices worldwide,' Viehbock said."

chicksdaddy writes "A month after an unknown gray hat hacker calling himself 'pr0f' used a three character password to hack his way onto Siemens software used to manage water treatment equipment in South Houston, Texas, a security researcher working for Google is accusing the company of trying to cover up the existence of other, more serious vulnerabilities in its products. Billy Rios has disclosed a range of vulnerabilities in Siemens SIMATIC software on his blog. The holes could allow a remote attacker to gain access to the Simatic user interface without a user name and password. Rios claims that he has disclosed the hole to Siemens and that the company has acknowledged the problem, only to deny its existence when a reporter asked for more information about the vulnerability."

chicksdaddy writes "A month after an unknown gray hat hacker calling himself 'pr0f' used a three character password to hack his way onto Siemens software used to manage water treatment equipment in South Houston, Texas, a security researcher working for Google is accusing the company of trying to cover up the existence of other, more serious vulnerabilities in its products. Billy Rios has disclosed a range of vulnerabilities in Siemens SIMATIC software on his blog. The holes could allow a remote attacker to gain access to the Simatic user interface without a user name and password. Rios claims that he has disclosed the hole to Siemens and that the company has acknowledged the problem, only to deny its existence when a reporter asked for more information about the vulnerability."

Trailrunner7 writes "Researchers are warning about a new remotely exploitable vulnerability in 64-bit Windows 7 that can be used by an attacker to run arbitrary code on a vulnerable machine. The bug was first reported a couple of days ago by an independent researcher and confirmed by Secunia. In a message on Twitter, a researcher named w3bd3vil said that he had found a method for exploiting the vulnerability by simply feeding an iframe with an overly large height to Safari. The exploit gives the attacker the ability to run arbitrary code on the victim's machine."

chicksdaddy writes "Data from application testing firm Veracode suggests that the quality of application code submitted for auditing is pretty much constant throughout the year — except for the months of October and November, when the average density of vulnerabilities in the code jumps considerably. But why? Is it the pressure of deadlines? The stress of developers' lives (kids back to school, etc.)?"

chicksdaddy writes "Data from application testing firm Veracode suggests that the quality of application code submitted for auditing is pretty much constant throughout the year — except for the months of October and November, when the average density of vulnerabilities in the code jumps considerably. But why? Is it the pressure of deadlines? The stress of developers' lives (kids back to school, etc.)?"

jfruhlinger writes "In a political environment that's become very strongly defined by partisan lines, the SOPA debate has offered an unexpected ray of hope: the two main Congressional opponents of the bill are Ron Wyden, an Oregon Senator deemed a 'hardcore liberal' and Darrell Issa, a California Representative who is one of the Obama Administration's fiercest critics. (There are both Ds and Rs in favor of the bill, too.)" (Read more below.) In the technical rather than political world, opposition seems easier to find: Trailrunner7 writes "A group of engineers, networking specialists, security experts and other specialists deeply involved with the Internet's development and growth have sent a letter to lawmakers criticizing the highly controversial SOPA and PIPA bills and imploring them not to pass the legislation, which they say would stifle innovation and 'threaten engineers who build Internet systems or offer services that are not readily and automatically compliant with censorship actions by the U.S. government.' The letter is signed by a long list of Internet pioneers and other respected figures, including Steve Bellovin, Paul Vixie, Vint Cerf, Jon Callas, Tony Li, Robert W. Taylor, Esther Dyson and Fred Baker, among many others. Both SOPA and PIPA have been criticized heavily by technologists, privacy advocates and security experts who say that not only would the proposed bills make it difficult for companies to create innovative new technologies, but they also would likely not even accomplish the goals their authors' had in mind, namely preventing copyright infringement and content piracy."

And (hat tip to Rob Malda), here's the letter itself (PDF).

New submitter realized writes "Yesterday Carrier IQ released a report (PDF) which tries to answer some questions about how their system operates. Also, after reports of the FBI using Carrier IQ data, the company responded by saying, 'Carrier IQ has never provided any data to the FBI. If approached by a law enforcement agency, we would refer them to the network operators.' Additionally, the EFF just released a report which says they believe keystroke data 'is in fact being inadvertently transmitted to some third parties,' but they would like to study carrier profiles to verify information." Reader Trailrunner7 adds that Carrier IQ's report indicates "under some limited circumstances its software will log the contents of SMS messages sent to a user's phone, but that that the contents of those messages would not be human readable. Instead, they would be in an encoded form that could not be decoded without special software and the carriers don't have access to the contents of the messages either. The company said it has worked on a fix for the bug, which affected devices running the embedded version of the Carrier IQ agent."