This is just part of CrowdStrike's branding strategy.This will be an educational and recruitying site but I seriously doubt the work posted will be keeping anyone's networks any safer.
Consider:
1) If you are a network security firm and have the resources on staff to reverse engineer malware, why would you allow them to contribute at a competitor's site? Do you think that CrowdStrike is going to be giving away IP for free? I think not. They aren't going to sharing any goodies until they've milked them for all they're worth.
AV companies share this information all the time, albeit in a more static manner. Why? Because AV has been commoditized, and all major AV companies sell their product based on what ELSE they bring to the table. Plus, there's more than enough malware to go around. This will just solve the difficult problems, which is a benefit to everyone, while leaving the sheer volume of simpler stuff for the individual companies to tackle in their own way.
Likewise, CrowdStrike isn't selling AV protection, they'll be selling a crowdsourcing solution with features that work right now.
Think about, say, the latest Ransomware trend. A site like this would be perfect for cracking the encryption routines... after which, each lab will apply the routines to their own samples to produce a solution that works with their own system. But the reverse engineering will have been done once, instead of many times, saving analyst hours while also giving street cred to the few who contribute. Malware analysts are really a lot like grad students; they need to publish to get further in the field, and they're always working on new and novel systems and ideas (and would usually rather be working on those than on figuring out how someone encrypted a specific packer variant that will be abandoned within a week).
2) Will the creation of CrowdRE make CrowdStrike obsolete? Obviously not. It will only prove that the skills to RE malware effectively are skills that CrowdStrike, Mandiant, et. al. have that you don't.
Exactly. Professional reverse engineering is a niche field, and there aren't really a large number of people who can do it well for all platforms.
3) If I'm a student or under-employed and needed a venue to show off my skillz then this sounds like a place to make a name.
See 1)
4) If your company's network security is breached, posting the malware you found isn't going to fix your problem. You will will still need the folks with the chops to clean up the mess. And oh, by the way, we here at CrowdStrike can make it all those bad guys go away.
Well, even after figuring out how the malware works, there's still a lot of janitorial work to do to clean up the mess, not to mention the rest of the remediation process (how do you stop it from happening again?). CrowdStrike doesn't cover all those bases, but they likely want to act as brokers for those who do.
It's a good idea but not for what it claims to be.
I'd say it's good for what it claims to be, but that the entire problem space is significantly larger than what this claims to solve -- for the rest, you really do need talented individuals and organized groups with resources to come in and fix the problems, once the problems have been defined.
Literally every time there's some new bit of Mac malware, we see a chorus of predictions in the form of "This is it, now the floodgates are going to open!" This has been going on for years, and these predictions have all been wrong. There are a couple of a new threats a year, and there isn't actually any particular reason to believe we're on the cusp of a dramatic non-linear increase.
The difference is in WHAT the threats are -- last year brought us FakeAV for Macs, which showed that the criminal element was now looking at the platform as profitable. Then, later in the year, we got Flashback, which has been continually updated through April to provide botnet access and a data leak conduit on OS X.
But the real news hasn't been with these pieces of fake software, it's been with Trojanized backdoor and keylog software... which has been climbing at a steady rate, both in variants and in detected installs. We're seeing a dramatic increase in data exfiltration on Macs. It's not really a case of "now the floodgates are going to open!" but more a case of "the gates opened last year, and we're going to keep seeing the consequences."
Apple has taken note however, and has implemented a number of security changes -- not just GateKeeper, but little significant things such as not letting MachO binaries run unless they're in a proper executable bundle with proper file permissions and an info.plist.
So for the first time, we're seeing a malware arms race on OS X, which truly has never happened before.
While not dramatic, this is a few particular reasons to believe that we're on the cusp of a non-linear increase -- because it's now profitable to scam OS X users via their OS, and more and more criminal groups are realizing they can take some of the unsuspecting pie.
The app itself doesn't really do anything malicious -- it snarfs down your address book and grabs your SMS ID -- which are things done by countless other apps. The malicious bit is all done server-side, where the "company" sends promotional SMSes out to everyone in your address book, spoofing your SMS ID....and the App was removed within an hour of Apple being made aware of the situation.
I would say where the rubber meets the road, iOS has been more secure, because Apple guards the gateway and does it well. However, if anything malicious does make it past, it can have a field day.
...for a limited time. Apple pulled the app from the store almost an hour before this hit Slashdot.
As for this being caught... that doesn't take much: all it takes is the first few people complaining about you spamming them via SMS, and the gig is up.
This isn't even the first time they've found it... functionally, the app does nothing that the Facebook app doesn't do, except for forge your SMS credentials. I doubt Apple's going to be pulling the Facebook integration from iOS 6 though....
If you follow Romney's logic, you don't even need to pull the jail card.
Think about this scenario:
'Movies are people, my friend,' Romney said.
Some people in the front of the audience shouted, 'No, they're not!'
'Of course they are,' Romney said. 'Everything movies earn ultimately goes to people. Where do you think it goes?'
Personally, I think corporations are works of fiction, not people, and so should be subject to copyright law, not the constitution.
I'd love to slap a DMCA violation on a shell corporation:D Any derivative work would also have to be licensed by the original, therefore bankruptcy is no longer an option if you want to rebuild the same company's assets after the fact. Maybe bankruptcy would put the non-tangible assets of the company and any derivatives into the public domain?
Why can't you live without your AC? Many places are much warmer and people can't afford AC. They simply adjust and get used to the heat. Men is adapted to hunt kudus in the scorching heat of the southern African plains and should be able to deal with this. Accept the heat and stop wasting energy please.
It is not a waste of energy to cool my house to a safe and comfortable level and I will use my energy any way I damn well please as long as I'm paying the bill for it.
You may not have any concern, but you should. The Megaquake is coming; it's only a matter of when, not if.
The PNW also has to worry about fire and flood, depending on where you situate.
If you don't have a "all infrastructure will be down for the next 6 months" emergency plan and live in the PNW, it's going to really suck when something bad happens. Just hope that it's not in your lifetime.
Someone needs to start supplying PC heat pumps -- where all that exhaust energy is actually used to drive the pump, cooling the house and decreasing the overall amount of heat exhaust (as some of the heat will be converted into kinetic energy).
Doesn't matter if it is useful data since Marketing believes that if they have enough data about you that they will be able to create the perfect ad to make you buy a product that you really are not interested in buying, yet.
FTFY.
Actually, it works both ways: Sales uses it to shape their demands for how the product is developed, too. Marketing just carries more weight.
Yeah; it's entertainment and their methodology sucks, but the results of this test were pretty conclusive. Until I see otherwise, it's the best examination I've seen of the Hindenburg disaster to date (and yes, I was grumbling about some of what they did and didn't do -- but they got a few things right and those things point to "rocket fuel paint" not being the major issue).
One of the saner parts of our system is that DoJ-stuffing is significantly more difficult here. Senate stuffing, on the other hand, is trivially easy, and they keep the position for life (which does limit the windows in which the stuffing can take place -- or limits the life expectancy of Senators).
Well, it has changed; back when Mulroney was in power, he actually got a Majority vote to push US policies through parliament.... Harper has somehiow managed to roll a majority government with the majority of voters voting against him. Part of his platform was that he would push US policies through parliament... and the country said "no". Now we have to ask him to change the voting laws in order to get him out of power.
Good thing the Green Party is gaining popularity and skill.... although next election I think we need a coalition party called "Not the conservative party" where members can vote however they want once their seats are established.
You have an excellent point regarding design: why not build it around a rowing machine instead of hand-and-feet pedals? It's efficient, and a flywheel should be able to even out the force expenditure... and rowers should be able to take to the thing like ducks to water:)
Busted on Mythbusters; the paint used to seal the canvas had the wrong proportions, and did not have the same burn rate as rocket fuel. The paints were also layered, and at least one of those layers was fairly fire retardant. If you watch the episode on the Hindenburg, you'll see they did a number of large-scale models, and it really was the hydrogen that caused part of the issue (ANY skin that is at all burnable will cause the same effect when the volume of hydrogen gets large enough). In small-scale, hydrogen just burns "up" -- and quickly, with an almost invisible flame. This doesn't scale, however.
Short story is: it's possible to use hydrogen in an airship if you use the right fireproof materials for structure and envelope -- but it's still going to cause a large fireball if it starts leaking and is exposed to flame (oxygen is also needed, so as long as it's sealed, sparks inside the envelope shouldn't be a big problem).
The silly thing here is that 3D is at least possible -- we have two eyes, and so stereographic images are the best we can see.
Now on to audio: we've got 3 audio sensors: 2 eardrums and our skin surface. The ".1" in Dolby generally pushes the large waves that our body picks up ouside our eardrums. Plus, the waves are large enough that no matter where they come from, they hit our ears at essentially the same moment. For higher sounds, a single person would need 2.1 (a speaker for each ear, one for the body). All the "moving the sound source around" etc. can be done these days by the preprocessor.
When you get beyond a single person, you may want 7.1 to normalize the sound output -- but when doing this, you would really need to virtually place every person inside that range, plus calibrate the speakers based on the room properties. The end result is about as good as you're going to be able to get in a room that's not purpose-made for playing that audio.
Moving on to 62.2 -- same thing applies, but you're going to want to lock down the room properties, or everything'll be thrown off really quickly, and you'll end up with sound that's no better than 2.1 driven through that many speakers, and possibly worse. I *guess* such a system means that instead of interpolating the virtual position of any sound source and merging it into the 2-output soundstream, you could assign it a location in the mesh and let the sound system figure out the rest... but WHY? The algorithms behind virtually placing a sound source on a sound stage with two-plus-one outputs are well known, and the equipment to do so is so well commodotized that pretty much any decent system on the market can do it easily.
Summary for my rant: In order for this to really be worthwhile, Dolby needs to provide us with more audio inputs, as everything else can be accomplished without the extra individually-driven sound sources (to a point).
OK, so I'll keep going:D When you look at the speed of thought, the speed of light and the speed of sound, you DO need more speakers individually driven on the sound stage the larger the stage. You want to ensure that the sound is synchronized with the image throughout the receiving area, and if speakers are driven from the same source but are a significant distance apart, you're going to get muddied sound. Your sound stage can take that into consideration, and add the appropriate delay, but then you end up with some areas out of synch with the image. Increasing independent sources within the stage allows the sounds to blend more naturally -- as a result, the overall sound is not muddy, but sitting in a different location will give you a slightly different audio experience -- and only some of the sound will be out of synch with the image; a small enough amount that our brains will compensate, just like they do in real life.
So, all of this said: 62.2 makes a LOT of sense for a large stadium. Your living room? Stick with 2.1 or possibly up to 7.1 if you've got a dedicated decently-sized theatre.
Great... with automation, non-trained security will be able to tell that my phone or sunglasses are actually a concealed weapon... while not noticing the sheath knife the guy next to me is wearing.
I think detecting heart and respiratory rate would be much more useful -- assuming it doesn't take too much calibration, does not require the subject to be stationary, and can be used to sample a mass of people instead of a single sample.
Slashdot Mirror
This is just part of CrowdStrike's branding strategy.This will be an educational and recruitying site but I seriously doubt the work posted will be keeping anyone's networks any safer.
Consider:
1) If you are a network security firm and have the resources on staff to reverse engineer malware, why would you allow them to contribute at a competitor's site? Do you think that CrowdStrike is going to be giving away IP for free? I think not. They aren't going to sharing any goodies until they've milked them for all they're worth.
AV companies share this information all the time, albeit in a more static manner. Why? Because AV has been commoditized, and all major AV companies sell their product based on what ELSE they bring to the table. Plus, there's more than enough malware to go around. This will just solve the difficult problems, which is a benefit to everyone, while leaving the sheer volume of simpler stuff for the individual companies to tackle in their own way.
Likewise, CrowdStrike isn't selling AV protection, they'll be selling a crowdsourcing solution with features that work right now.
Think about, say, the latest Ransomware trend. A site like this would be perfect for cracking the encryption routines... after which, each lab will apply the routines to their own samples to produce a solution that works with their own system. But the reverse engineering will have been done once, instead of many times, saving analyst hours while also giving street cred to the few who contribute. Malware analysts are really a lot like grad students; they need to publish to get further in the field, and they're always working on new and novel systems and ideas (and would usually rather be working on those than on figuring out how someone encrypted a specific packer variant that will be abandoned within a week).
2) Will the creation of CrowdRE make CrowdStrike obsolete? Obviously not. It will only prove that the skills to RE malware effectively are skills that CrowdStrike, Mandiant, et. al. have that you don't.
Exactly. Professional reverse engineering is a niche field, and there aren't really a large number of people who can do it well for all platforms.
3) If I'm a student or under-employed and needed a venue to show off my skillz then this sounds like a place to make a name.
See 1)
4) If your company's network security is breached, posting the malware you found isn't going to fix your problem. You will will still need the folks with the chops to clean up the mess. And oh, by the way, we here at CrowdStrike can make it all those bad guys go away.
Well, even after figuring out how the malware works, there's still a lot of janitorial work to do to clean up the mess, not to mention the rest of the remediation process (how do you stop it from happening again?). CrowdStrike doesn't cover all those bases, but they likely want to act as brokers for those who do.
It's a good idea but not for what it claims to be.
I'd say it's good for what it claims to be, but that the entire problem space is significantly larger than what this claims to solve -- for the rest, you really do need talented individuals and organized groups with resources to come in and fix the problems, once the problems have been defined.
Literally every time there's some new bit of Mac malware, we see a chorus of predictions in the form of "This is it, now the floodgates are going to open!" This has been going on for years, and these predictions have all been wrong. There are a couple of a new threats a year, and there isn't actually any particular reason to believe we're on the cusp of a dramatic non-linear increase.
The difference is in WHAT the threats are -- last year brought us FakeAV for Macs, which showed that the criminal element was now looking at the platform as profitable. Then, later in the year, we got Flashback, which has been continually updated through April to provide botnet access and a data leak conduit on OS X.
But the real news hasn't been with these pieces of fake software, it's been with Trojanized backdoor and keylog software... which has been climbing at a steady rate, both in variants and in detected installs. We're seeing a dramatic increase in data exfiltration on Macs. It's not really a case of "now the floodgates are going to open!" but more a case of "the gates opened last year, and we're going to keep seeing the consequences."
Apple has taken note however, and has implemented a number of security changes -- not just GateKeeper, but little significant things such as not letting MachO binaries run unless they're in a proper executable bundle with proper file permissions and an info.plist.
So for the first time, we're seeing a malware arms race on OS X, which truly has never happened before.
While not dramatic, this is a few particular reasons to believe that we're on the cusp of a non-linear increase -- because it's now profitable to scam OS X users via their OS, and more and more criminal groups are realizing they can take some of the unsuspecting pie.
The app itself doesn't really do anything malicious -- it snarfs down your address book and grabs your SMS ID -- which are things done by countless other apps. The malicious bit is all done server-side, where the "company" sends promotional SMSes out to everyone in your address book, spoofing your SMS ID. ...and the App was removed within an hour of Apple being made aware of the situation.
I would say where the rubber meets the road, iOS has been more secure, because Apple guards the gateway and does it well. However, if anything malicious does make it past, it can have a field day.
...for a limited time. Apple pulled the app from the store almost an hour before this hit Slashdot.
As for this being caught... that doesn't take much: all it takes is the first few people complaining about you spamming them via SMS, and the gig is up.
The App's in Russian -- there's likely very few users (other than security researchers) outside of iTunes Russia who've downloaded it (until now).
This isn't even the first time they've found it... functionally, the app does nothing that the Facebook app doesn't do, except for forge your SMS credentials. I doubt Apple's going to be pulling the Facebook integration from iOS 6 though....
Seems to me that Corporations have the same rights as illegal immigrants :)
If you follow Romney's logic, you don't even need to pull the jail card.
Think about this scenario:
'Movies are people, my friend,' Romney said.
Some people in the front of the audience shouted, 'No, they're not!'
'Of course they are,' Romney said. 'Everything movies earn ultimately goes to people. Where do you think it goes?'
Personally, I think corporations are works of fiction, not people, and so should be subject to copyright law, not the constitution.
I'd love to slap a DMCA violation on a shell corporation :D Any derivative work would also have to be licensed by the original, therefore bankruptcy is no longer an option if you want to rebuild the same company's assets after the fact. Maybe bankruptcy would put the non-tangible assets of the company and any derivatives into the public domain?
Why can't you live without your AC? Many places are much warmer and people can't afford AC. They simply adjust and get used to the heat. Men is adapted to hunt kudus in the scorching heat of the southern African plains and should be able to deal with this. Accept the heat and stop wasting energy please.
It is not a waste of energy to cool my house to a safe and comfortable level and I will use my energy any way I damn well please as long as I'm paying the bill for it.
You sound like you're from California....
Move to the Pacific Northwest. That's what my wife and I did.
http://www.weather.com/weather/hourbyhour/graph/USOR0275
No concern of heat or dry or hurricane or earthquake or tornado ...
http://news.discovery.com/earth/megaquake-schedule-pacific-northwest.html
You may not have any concern, but you should. The Megaquake is coming; it's only a matter of when, not if.
The PNW also has to worry about fire and flood, depending on where you situate.
If you don't have a "all infrastructure will be down for the next 6 months" emergency plan and live in the PNW, it's going to really suck when something bad happens. Just hope that it's not in your lifetime.
How are your winters for heating with a white roof? I guess probably not all that bad in SC...
Someone needs to start supplying PC heat pumps -- where all that exhaust energy is actually used to drive the pump, cooling the house and decreasing the overall amount of heat exhaust (as some of the heat will be converted into kinetic energy).
I wonder... when they say "hotmail," do they include live.com, etc.? Microsoft has a lot of different services using the hotmail system.
I stopped using Hotmail when Microsoft bought them, but I've still got an account.
Marketing Marketing Marketing
Doesn't matter if it is useful data since Marketing believes that if they have enough data about you that they will be able to create the perfect ad to make you buy a product that you really are not interested in buying, yet.
FTFY.
Actually, it works both ways: Sales uses it to shape their demands for how the product is developed, too. Marketing just carries more weight.
Would Nietzsche have been an Apple user?
Is that you, Socrates?
Only the Illegal ones -- and then only if they want the "good" jobs.
Yeah; it's entertainment and their methodology sucks, but the results of this test were pretty conclusive. Until I see otherwise, it's the best examination I've seen of the Hindenburg disaster to date (and yes, I was grumbling about some of what they did and didn't do -- but they got a few things right and those things point to "rocket fuel paint" not being the major issue).
One of the saner parts of our system is that DoJ-stuffing is significantly more difficult here. Senate stuffing, on the other hand, is trivially easy, and they keep the position for life (which does limit the windows in which the stuffing can take place -- or limits the life expectancy of Senators).
Well, it has changed; back when Mulroney was in power, he actually got a Majority vote to push US policies through parliament.... Harper has somehiow managed to roll a majority government with the majority of voters voting against him. Part of his platform was that he would push US policies through parliament... and the country said "no". Now we have to ask him to change the voting laws in order to get him out of power.
Good thing the Green Party is gaining popularity and skill.... although next election I think we need a coalition party called "Not the conservative party" where members can vote however they want once their seats are established.
You have an excellent point regarding design: why not build it around a rowing machine instead of hand-and-feet pedals? It's efficient, and a flywheel should be able to even out the force expenditure... and rowers should be able to take to the thing like ducks to water :)
Busted on Mythbusters; the paint used to seal the canvas had the wrong proportions, and did not have the same burn rate as rocket fuel. The paints were also layered, and at least one of those layers was fairly fire retardant. If you watch the episode on the Hindenburg, you'll see they did a number of large-scale models, and it really was the hydrogen that caused part of the issue (ANY skin that is at all burnable will cause the same effect when the volume of hydrogen gets large enough). In small-scale, hydrogen just burns "up" -- and quickly, with an almost invisible flame. This doesn't scale, however.
Short story is: it's possible to use hydrogen in an airship if you use the right fireproof materials for structure and envelope -- but it's still going to cause a large fireball if it starts leaking and is exposed to flame (oxygen is also needed, so as long as it's sealed, sparks inside the envelope shouldn't be a big problem).
You're obviously using the wrong headphones.
The silly thing here is that 3D is at least possible -- we have two eyes, and so stereographic images are the best we can see.
Now on to audio: we've got 3 audio sensors: 2 eardrums and our skin surface. The ".1" in Dolby generally pushes the large waves that our body picks up ouside our eardrums. Plus, the waves are large enough that no matter where they come from, they hit our ears at essentially the same moment. For higher sounds, a single person would need 2.1 (a speaker for each ear, one for the body). All the "moving the sound source around" etc. can be done these days by the preprocessor.
When you get beyond a single person, you may want 7.1 to normalize the sound output -- but when doing this, you would really need to virtually place every person inside that range, plus calibrate the speakers based on the room properties. The end result is about as good as you're going to be able to get in a room that's not purpose-made for playing that audio.
Moving on to 62.2 -- same thing applies, but you're going to want to lock down the room properties, or everything'll be thrown off really quickly, and you'll end up with sound that's no better than 2.1 driven through that many speakers, and possibly worse. I *guess* such a system means that instead of interpolating the virtual position of any sound source and merging it into the 2-output soundstream, you could assign it a location in the mesh and let the sound system figure out the rest... but WHY? The algorithms behind virtually placing a sound source on a sound stage with two-plus-one outputs are well known, and the equipment to do so is so well commodotized that pretty much any decent system on the market can do it easily.
Summary for my rant: In order for this to really be worthwhile, Dolby needs to provide us with more audio inputs, as everything else can be accomplished without the extra individually-driven sound sources (to a point).
OK, so I'll keep going :D
When you look at the speed of thought, the speed of light and the speed of sound, you DO need more speakers individually driven on the sound stage the larger the stage. You want to ensure that the sound is synchronized with the image throughout the receiving area, and if speakers are driven from the same source but are a significant distance apart, you're going to get muddied sound. Your sound stage can take that into consideration, and add the appropriate delay, but then you end up with some areas out of synch with the image. Increasing independent sources within the stage allows the sounds to blend more naturally -- as a result, the overall sound is not muddy, but sitting in a different location will give you a slightly different audio experience -- and only some of the sound will be out of synch with the image; a small enough amount that our brains will compensate, just like they do in real life.
So, all of this said: 62.2 makes a LOT of sense for a large stadium. Your living room? Stick with 2.1 or possibly up to 7.1 if you've got a dedicated decently-sized theatre.
Great... with automation, non-trained security will be able to tell that my phone or sunglasses are actually a concealed weapon... while not noticing the sheath knife the guy next to me is wearing.
I think detecting heart and respiratory rate would be much more useful -- assuming it doesn't take too much calibration, does not require the subject to be stationary, and can be used to sample a mass of people instead of a single sample.
I wonder what sort of mashup could be made combining this technology with
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/05/17/1320255/fingerprint-scanner-that-works-from-6-feet