ReportWire

Tag: Security

  • Iranian Hackers Tried to Give Hacked Trump Campaign Emails to Dems

    Iranian Hackers Tried to Give Hacked Trump Campaign Emails to Dems

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    The week was dominated by news that thousands of pagers, walkie-talkies and other devices were exploding across Lebanon on Tuesday and Wednesday in an attack targeting the militant group Hezbollah. At least 32 people were killed, including at least four children, and more than 3,200 people were injured. The covert campaign has widely been attributed to Israel, though none of the country’s government agencies have commented.

    In addition to the carnage, the attacks have—seemingly by design—had the effect of sowing paranoia and fear, not just among members of Hezbollah but also in the general Lebanese public. Hardware and warfare experts say that the incident is unlikely to establish a global precedent that people’s most trusted communication devices and electronics, like smartphones, are rigged with explosives left and right. But it does create the potential to inspire copycats and puts defenders on notice that such attacks are possible.

    Researchers say that China’s 2023 Zhujian Cup, a hacking competition with ties to the country’s military, took the unusual step of requiring participants to keep the content of the exercise secret—and they may have been targeting a real victim as part of the event. Apple’s new stand-alone app Passwords that launched with iOS 18 may help solve your login problems. And a now-deleted post from billionaire Elon Musk that questioned why no one has attempted to assassinate Joe Biden and Kamala Harris renewed concerns this week that Musk is willing to inspire extremist violence and is a national security threat in the United States.

    And there’s more. Each week, we round up the privacy and security news we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

    Last month, media outlets, Microsoft, and Google warned that an Iranian state-sponsored hacking group known as APT42 had targeted both the Joe Biden and Donald Trump political campaigns, and that it had successfully stolen emails from the Trump campaign that were later shared with reporters. Now the FBI has chimed in with the added revelation that the same hackers also sent those stolen Trump communications to the Democrats, too—though for now there’s no sign that the Democrats solicited those emails from the Iranians or necessarily even received the Iranians’ message.

    Republicans were nonetheless quick to compare the news to accusations that the Trump campaign “colluded” with the Russian hackers, part of the Kremlin’s GRU military intelligence agency, who breached the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton Campaign in 2016 to carry out a hack-and-leak operation. In a statement, the Trump campaign demanded that the Democrats “must come clean on whether they used the hacked material.” The Harris campaign told CNN that it has cooperated with law enforcement and that it was “not aware of any material being sent directly to the campaign,” believing the emails to be spam or phishing attempts. “We condemn in the strongest terms any effort by foreign actors to interfere in US elections, including this unwelcome and unacceptable malicious activity,” Morgan Finkelstein, the national security spokesperson for the Harris campaign, told CNN.

    The FBI announced this week that it had taken down a network of hacked machines being secretly controlled by a Chinese state-sponsored hacking group known as Flax Typhoon. The botnet, made up of 260,000 routers and internet-of-things devices, was allegedly being run by a Chinese contractor known as the Beijing Integrity Technology Group, a rare instance of a known, publicly traded company operating essentially a massive collection of hacked devices on behalf of the Chinese state. The botnet, according to the FBI and security firm Black Lotus Labs, had been used to hack government agencies, defense contractors, telecoms, and other US and Taiwanese targets. At the time of its takedown, the botnet still encompassed 60,000 machines, making it the largest Chinese state-sponsored botnet ever, according to Black Lotus Labs.

    On Wednesday night, two young men were arrested after they allegedly stole hundreds of millions of dollars of cryptocurrency and spent the earnings on luxury cars, watches, jewelry, and designer handbags. In an unsealed indictment, the US Department of Justice charged Malone Lam, 20, known online as “Anne Hathaway” and Jeandiel Serrano, 21, aka “VersaceGod,” with stealing $243 million in cryptocurrency and laundering the proceeds through mixing services to conceal the origin.

    CoinDesk reported that the men allegedly tricked the heist’s victim, a creditor of the now-defunct trading firm Genesis, using a social engineering scam that led them to reset their Gemini two-factor authentication and transfer 4,100 bitcoin to a compromised wallet. An analysis of the transaction by blockchain investigator ZachXBT revealed that the $243 million was divided among multiple wallets and then distributed to over 15 exchanges.

    On Thursday, TechCrunch reported that Apple’s latest desktop operating system update, macOS 15 (Sequoia), breaks some functionality of major security tools made by CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, and Microsoft. It’s unclear what specifically in the update is causing the issues, but social media posts and internal Slack messages reviewed by the tech outlet show that the update has frustrated engineers working on macOS-focused security tools.

    A CrowdStrike sales engineer informed colleagues via Slack, as seen by TechCrunch, that the company would not be able to support Sequoia on day one, despite its usual practice of quickly supporting new OS releases. While they hope for a quick patch, they will likely need to scramble to resolve the issue with an update in their own code, assuming no immediate fix is available from Apple, which has not yet commented on the issue.

    Cryptocurrency theft has become practically a common-garden form of cybercrime. But one brutal gang took that form of thievery to a new level of cruelty and violence, breaking into a series of victims’ homes to threaten and extort them into handing over their crypto holdings, sometimes even resorting to kidnapping and torture. This week, that disturbing story came to a close with the sentencing of the group’s ring leader, a Florida man named Remy St. Felix, to 47 years in prison. St. Felix is one of 12 members of the gang to have now been charged, convicted, and sentenced. Prior to the home invasions that St. Felix led, another member of the group named Jarod Seemungal allegedly stole millions with more traditional crypto hacking techniques. But St. Felix’s more violent, offline extortion attempts netted his gang only around $150,000 in cryptocurrency before they were caught and sentenced to years behind bars. The lesson: Crime doesn’t pay—or at least, not the physical kind.

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    Andy Greenberg, Lily Hay Newman, Dhruv Mehrotra

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  • Protesters gather outside Raytheon

    Protesters gather outside Raytheon

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    ANDOVER — Massachusetts Peace Action and Merrimack Valley People for Peace held a peace protest Thursday outside defense contractor Raytheon’s plant, 362 Lowell St.

    The two groups were stationed outside the plant’s front gate as a statement against nuclear weapons and Raytheon’s involvement in developing weapons for the U.S. military.

    Planned protests mark the International Days of Action Against Nuclear Weapons.

    Another protest is set from noon to 1 p.m. Sunday in Shawsheen Square at the intersection of Routes 28 and 133.

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    By Angelina Berube | aberube@eagletribune.com

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  • First Israel’s Exploding Pagers Maimed and Killed. Now Comes the Paranoia

    First Israel’s Exploding Pagers Maimed and Killed. Now Comes the Paranoia

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    “They don’t trust their smartphones, so they reach back to these more archaic devices, and those blow up. What’s next?” says Schneier. “Everything becomes less efficient, because they can’t communicate well.”

    Schneier describes the paranoia-inducing effect of the operation as a kind of ongoing “tax” on Hezbollah as an organization. “There are a lot of things you can’t do if you can’t trust your comms,” he says. Schneier compares the end result to the nearly incommunicado state of a hunted figure like Osama bin Laden, who in his final years was reduced to sending messages only via the human couriers who visited his secret compound in Pakistan.

    That paranoia, in fact, has been seeded among Lebanon’s population for years. Israel’s pager- and walkie-talkie-based attacks follow repeated public warnings from Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah about the surveillance dangers of smartphones, given Israeli intelligence’s well-known hacking prowess. “Please break it, bury it, lock it up in a metal box,” Nasrallah said in one speech. In another, he appeared on Lebanese television next to an image of an iPhone circled in red with a slash across it. “These are deadly spies,” he warned. Cell phones were reportedly banned from Hezbollah meetings in favor of pagers.

    Now the older, alternative devices Hezbollah has fallen back to carry even greater fears of injury or death. And that fear has come to encompass communications electronics more broadly: At Wednesday’s funeral for victims of Tuesday’s attack, for instance—an event that was itself the target of another attack—attendees were asked to remove the batteries from their phones.

    Creating distrust of communication devices within Hezbollah may well be Israel’s purposeful tactic of “preparing the battle space” ahead of impending Israeli military operations against Lebanon, says Thomas Rid, a professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University and author of Active Measures, who specializes in disinformation and influence operations. He compares the operation to cyberattacks or physical attacks on “command-and-control” infrastructure at the beginning of a conflict, such as the United States’ efforts, documented in former NSA chief Michael Hayden’s book Playing to the Edge, to destroy the Iraqi military’s fiber-optics-based communications in 2003 in order to “herd” the enemy’s military toward more easily intercepted radio-based communications.

    “This is taking attacks on command-on-control to a whole new level,” Rid says. “They sent the message: ‘No, we’re not just penetrating these devices and bugging them, we’re literally blowing them up, taking away the confidence you might have had in your command-and-control and also in any future devices that you might procure.’”

    For Israeli intelligence, Rid notes, the attack also represents a stunning reassertion of its power and public image following its disastrous failure to prevent Hamas’ attacks of October 7. “This operation goes a long way in terms of demonstrating that they are, perhaps, the most creative and the most ruthless intelligence establishment on the planet right now,” he says.

    Thanks to the collateral damage of Israel’s brazen offensive, however, its effects—both physical and psychological—have by no means been limited to Hezbollah operatives. The French-Lebanese security researcher Kobeissi, who now works as the founder and CEO of Paris-based tech firm Symbolic Software, says he’s already seen false rumors and misleading videos spread among Lebanese people, suggesting for instance that iPhones, too, are exploding. “People are losing their minds, because it’s scary as shit, and that’s the point,” he says. “It’s impossible to think about this as limiting Hezbollah’s communications and capabilities without realizing it’s also going to have a terrorizing effect on the adjacent population.”

    Kobeissi argues that the attack’s collateral damage will shape how a generation of people think about Western technology in Lebanon and beyond. “The average Lebanese person doesn’t have a specific understanding of what it means to conduct a supply chain attack,” he says. “What they see is that a device made by an American ally, a device they rely on, may blow up. And it’s unfortunate that the Israeli intelligence community didn’t consider the knock-on effects that this could have globally.”

    Aside from that issue of trust, Israel’s attack also represents an escalation, says Harvard’s Bruce Schneier—a new kind of attack that, now that it’s been demonstrated, is sure to be seen again in some form, perhaps even in an act of retaliation against Israel itself.

    “It’s not just Hezbollah that should worry. If I were Ukraine, I’d be worried. If I were Russia, I’d worry. If I were Israel, I’d worry. This doesn’t just go one way,” he says. “Now we all live in a world of connected devices that can be weaponized in unexpected ways. What does that world look like?”

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    Andy Greenberg

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  • Did a Chinese University Hacking Competition Target a Real Victim?

    Did a Chinese University Hacking Competition Target a Real Victim?

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    Capture the flag hacking contests at security conferences generally serve two purposes: to help participants develop and demonstrate computer hacking and security skills, and to assist employers and government agencies with discovering and recruiting new talent.

    But one security conference in China may have taken its contest a step further—potentially using it as a secret espionage operation to get participants to collect intelligence from an unknown target.

    According to two Western researchers who translated documentation for China’s Zhujian Cup, also known as the National Collegiate Cybersecurity Attack and Defense Competition, one part of the three-part competition, held last year for the first time, had a number of unusual characteristics that suggest its potentially secretive and unorthodox purpose.

    Capture the flag (CTF) and other types of hacking competitions are generally hosted on closed networks or “cyber ranges”—dedicated infrastructure set up for the contest so that participants don’t risk disrupting real networks. These ranges provide a simulated environment that mimics real-world configurations, and participants are tasked with finding vulnerabilities in the systems, obtaining access to specific parts of the network, or capturing data.

    There are two major companies in China that set up cyber ranges for competitions. The majority of the competitions give a shout out to the company that designed their range. Notably, Zhujian Cup didn’t mention any cyber range or cyber range provider in its documentation, leaving the researchers to wonder if this is because the contest was held in a real environment rather than a simulated one.

    The competition also required students to sign a document agreeing to several unusual terms. They were prohibited from discussing the nature of the tasks they were asked to do in the competition with anyone; they had to agree not to destroy or disrupt the targeted system; and at the end of the competition, they had to delete any backdoors they planted on the system and any data they acquired from it. And unlike other competitions in China the researchers examined, participants in this portion of the Zhujian Cup were prohibited from publishing social media posts revealing the nature of the competition or the tasks they performed as part of it.

    Participants also were prohibited from copying any data, documents, or printed materials that were part of the competition; disclosing information about vulnerabilities they found; or exploiting those vulnerabilities for personal purposes. If a leak of any of this data or material occurred and caused harm to the contest organizers or to China, according to the pledge that participants signed, they could be held legally responsible.

    “I promise that if any information disclosure incident (or case) occurs due to personal reasons, causing loss or harm to the organizer and the country, I, as an individual, will bear legal responsibility in accordance with the relevant laws and regulations,” the pledge states.

    The contest was hosted last December by Northwestern Polytechnical University, a science and engineering university in Xi’an, Shaanxi, that is affiliated with China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and also holds a top-secret clearance to conduct work for the Chinese government and military. The university is overseen by China’s People’s Liberation Army.

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    Kim Zetter

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  • A Creative Trick Makes ChatGPT Spit Out Bomb-Making Instructions

    A Creative Trick Makes ChatGPT Spit Out Bomb-Making Instructions

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    After Apple’s product launch event this week, WIRED did a deep dive on the company’s new secure server environment, known as Private Cloud Compute, which attempts to replicate in the cloud the security and privacy of processing data locally on users’ individual devices. The goal is to minimize possible exposure of data processed for Apple Intelligence, the company’s new AI platform. In addition to hearing about PCC from Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, Craig Federighi, WIRED readers also received a first look at content generated by Apple Intelligence’s “Image Playground” feature as part of crucial updates on the recent birthday of Federighi’s dog Bailey.

    Turning to privacy protection of a very different kind in another new AI service, WIRED looked at how users of the social media platform X can keep their data from being slurped up by the “unhinged” generative AI tool from xAI known as Grok AI. And in other news about Apple products, researchers developed a technique for using eye tracking to discern passwords and PINs people typed using 3D Apple Vision Pro avatars—a sort of keylogger for mixed reality. (The flaw that made the technique possible has since been patched.)

    On the national security front, the US this week indicted two people accused to spreading propaganda meant to inspire “lone wolf” terrorist attacks. The case, against alleged members of the far-right network known as the Terrorgram Collective, marks a turn in how the US cracks down on neofascist extremists.

    And there’s more. Each week, we round up the privacy and security news we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

    OpenAI’s generative AI platform ChatGPT is designed with strict guardrails that keep the service from offering advice on dangerous and illegal topics like tips on laundering money or a how-to guide for disposing of a body. But an artist and hacker who goes by “Amadon” figured out a way to trick or “jailbreak” the chatbot by telling it to “play a game” and then guiding it into a science-fiction fantasy story in which the system’s restrictions didn’t apply. Amadon then got ChatGPT to spit out instructions for making dangerous fertilizer bombs. An OpenAI spokesperson did not respond to TechCrunch’s inquiries about the research.

    “It’s about weaving narratives and crafting contexts that play within the system’s rules, pushing boundaries without crossing them. The goal isn’t to hack in a conventional sense but to engage in a strategic dance with the AI, figuring out how to get the right response by understanding how it ‘thinks,’” Amadon told TechCrunch. “The sci-fi scenario takes the AI out of a context where it’s looking for censored content … There really is no limit to what you can ask it once you get around the guardrails.”

    In the fervent investigations following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States, the FBI and CIA both concluded that it was coincidental that a Saudi Arabian official had helped two of the hijackers in California and that there had not been high-level Saudi involvement in the attacks. The 9/11 commission incorporated that determination, but some findings indicated subsequently that the conclusions might not be sound. With the 23-year anniversary of the attacks this week, ProPublica published new evidence “suggest[ing] more strongly than ever that at least two Saudi officials deliberately assisted the first Qaida hijackers when they arrived in the United States in January 2000.”

    The evidence comes primarily from a federal lawsuit against the Saudi government brought by survivors of the 9/11 attacks and relatives of victims. A judge in New York will soon make a decision in that case about a Saudi motion to dismiss. But evidence that has already emerged in the case, including videos and documents such as telephone records, points to possible connections between the Saudi government and the hijackers.

    “Why is this information coming out now?” said retired FBI agent Daniel Gonzalez, who pursued the Saudi connections for almost 15 years. “We should have had all of this three or four weeks after 9/11.”

    The United Kingdom’s National Crime Agency said on Thursday that it arrested a teenager on September 5 as part of the investigation into a cyberattack on September 1 on the London transportation agency Transport for London (TfL). The suspect is a 17-year-old male and was not named. He was “detained on suspicion of Computer Misuse Act offenses” and has since been released on bail. In a statement on Thursday, TfL wrote, “Our investigations have identified that certain customer data has been accessed. This includes some customer names and contact details, including email addresses and home addresses where provided.” Some data related to the London transit payment cards known as Oyster cards may have been accessed for about 5,000 customers, including bank account numbers. TfL is reportedly requiring roughly 30,000 users to appear in person to reset their account credentials.

    In a decision on Tuesday, Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal blocked an effort by Poland’s lower house of parliament, known as the Sejm, to launch an investigation into the country’s apparent use of the notorious hacking tool known as Pegasus while the Law and Justice (PiS) party was in power from 2015 to 2023. Three judges who had been appointed by PiS were responsible for blocking the inquiry. The decision cannot be appealed. The decision is controversial, with some, like Polish parliament member Magdalena Sroka, saying that it was “dictated by the fear of liability.”

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    Lily Hay Newman

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  • Apple Intelligence Promises Better AI Privacy. Here’s How It Actually Works

    Apple Intelligence Promises Better AI Privacy. Here’s How It Actually Works

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    Apple is making every production PCC server build publicly available for inspection so people unaffiliated with Apple can verify that PCC is doing (and not doing) what the company claims, and that everything is implemented correctly. All of the PCC server images are recorded in a cryptographic attestation log, essentially an indelible record of signed claims, and each entry includes a URL for where to download that individual build. PCC is designed so Apple can’t put a server into production without logging it. And in addition to offering transparency, the system works as a crucial enforcement mechanism to prevent bad actors from setting up rogue PCC nodes and diverting traffic. If a server build hasn’t been logged, iPhones will not send Apple Intelligence queries or data to it.

    PCC is part of Apple’s bug bounty program, and vulnerabilities or misconfigurations researchers find could be eligible for cash rewards. Apple says, though, that since the iOS 18.1 beta became available in late July, no on has found any flaws in PCC so far. The company recognizes that it has only made the tools to evaluate PCC available to a select group of researchers so far.

    Multiple security researchers and cryptographers tell WIRED that Private Cloud Compute looks promising, but they haven’t spent significant time digging into it yet.

    “Building Apple silicon servers in the data center when we didn’t have any before, building a custom OS to run in the data center was huge,” Federighi says. He adds that “creating the trust model where your device will refuse to issue a request to a server unless the signature of all the software the server is running has been published to a transparency log was certainly one of the most unique elements of the solution—and totally critical to the trust model.”

    To questions about Apple’s partnership with OpenAI and integration of ChatGPT, the company emphasizes that partnerships are not covered by PCC and operate separately. ChatGPT and other integrations are turned off by default, and users must manually enable them. Then, if Apple Intelligence determines that a request would be better fulfilled by ChatGPT or another partner platform, it notifies the user each time and asks whether to proceed. Additionally, people can use these integrations while logged into their account for a partner service like ChatGPT or can use them through Apple without logging in separately. Apple said in June that another integration with Google’s Gemini is also in the works.

    Apple said this week that beyond launching in United States English, Apple Intelligence is coming to Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United Kingdom in December. The company also said that additional language support—including for Chinese, French, Japanese, and Spanish—will drop next year. Whether that means that Apple Intelligence will be permitted under the European Union’s AI Act and whether Apple will be able to offer PCC in its current form in China is another question.

    “Our goal is to bring ideally everything we can to provide the best capabilities to our customers everywhere we can,” Federighi says. “But we do have to comply with regulations, and there is uncertainty in certain environments we’re trying to sort out so we can bring these features to our customers as soon as possible. So, we’re trying.”

    He adds that as the company expands its ability to do more Apple Intelligence computation on-device, it may be able to use this as a workaround in some markets.

    Those who do get access to Apple Intelligence will have the ability to do far more than they could with past versions of iOS, from writing tools to photo analysis. Federighi says that his family celebrated their dog’s recent birthday with an Apple Intelligence–generated GenMoji (viewed and confirmed to be very cute by WIRED). But while Apple’s AI is meant to be as helpful and invisible as possible, the stakes are incredibly high for the security of the infrastructure underpinning it. So how are things going so far? Federighi sums it up without hesitation: “The rollout of Private Cloud Compute has been delightfully uneventful.”

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    Lily Hay Newman

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  • Hackers Threaten to Leak Planned Parenthood Data

    Hackers Threaten to Leak Planned Parenthood Data

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    Even those of you who do everything you can to secure those secrets can find yourself vulnerable—especially if you’re using a YubiKey 5 authentication token. The multifactor authentication devices can be cloned thanks to a cryptographic flaw that can’t be patched. The company has rolled out some mitigation measures—and the attack itself is relatively difficult to pull off. But it may be time to invest in a new dongle.

    That’s not all, folks. Each week, we round up the privacy and security news we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

    At the end of August, cybercriminals from the ransomware group RansomHub appear to have hacked into the systems of Planned Parenthood’s Montana branch. The organization this week confirmed it had suffered from a “cybersecurity incident” on August 28 and said its staff immediately took parts of its network offline, reporting the incident to law enforcement.

    Days after the incident took place, RansomHub claimed to be behind the attack, posting Planned Parenthood on its leak website. The criminal group said it would publish 93 GB of data. It is unclear what, if anything, the ransomware group has obtained, but Planned Parenthood clinics can hold a huge array of highly sensitive data about patients, including information on abortion appointments. (Around 400,000 Planned Parenthood patients in Los Angeles were impacted following a similar ransomware incident in 2021.)

    In recent months, RansomHub has emerged as one of the most active ransomware-as-a-service groups, following the law enforcement disruption of LockBit. According to an FBI and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency alert at the end of August, the group is “efficient and successful” and has stolen data from at least 210 victims since it formed in February. “The affiliates leverage a double-extortion model by encrypting systems and exfiltrating data to extort victims,” the alert said.

    The Nigeria-based scammers known as the Yahoo Boys run almost every scam in the playbook—from romance scams to pretending to be FBI agents. Yet there’s little-more devious than the increase in sextortion cases linked to the West African scammers. This week, Nigerian brothers Samuel Ogoshi and Samson Ogoshi were sentenced to more than 17 years in US jail for running sextortion scams, following their extradition earlier this year. It is the first time Nigerian scammers have been prosecuted for sextortion in the US, the BBC reported.

    The Ogoshi brothers, who pleaded guilty in April, have been linked to the death of 17-year-old Jordan DeMay, who took his life six hours after he started talking to the scammers, who posed as a girl, on Instagram. The teenager had been duped into sending the brothers explicit images, and after he had done so, they threatened to post the images online unless he paid them hundreds of dollars. US prosecutors said the brothers sexually exploited and extorted more than 100 victims, with at least 11 of them being minors. There has been a huge spike in sextortion cases in recent years.

    In June, the US Commerce Department banned the sale of Kaspersky’s antivirus tools over national security concerns about its links to the Russian government. (Kaspersky has, for years, denied connections). The firm later fired its workers and said it was closing its US business. This week, cybersecurity company Pango Group announced it is purchasing Kaspersky Lab’s US antivirus customers, according to Axios. This equates to around 1 million customers, who will be transitioned to Pango’s antivirus software Ultra AV. Ahead of the Kaspersky deal, parent company Aura also announced it was spinning out Pango Group into its own business. Pango’s president said customers would not need to take any action and that it would allow subscribers to continue to receive updates after September 29, when Kaspersky updates will stop.

    For years, the EU has been trying to introduce new child protection laws that would require private chats to be scanned for child sexual abuse material—something that would potentially undermine encrypted messaging apps that provide everyday privacy to billions of people. The plans have been highly controversial and were shelved earlier this year. However, the proposed law, which has been dubbed “chat control,” reappeared in legislators’ in-trays this week. The Council of the EU, which is currently chaired by Hungary, wants to pass legislation by October, but reports say strong resistance to the plans still remain.

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    Matt Burgess, Andrew Couts

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  • YubiKeys Are a Security Gold Standard—but They Can Be Cloned

    YubiKeys Are a Security Gold Standard—but They Can Be Cloned

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    The YubiKey 5, the most widely used hardware token for two-factor authentication based on the FIDO standard, contains a cryptographic flaw that makes the finger-sized device vulnerable to cloning when an attacker gains temporary physical access to it, researchers said Tuesday.

    The cryptographic flaw, known as a side channel, resides in a small microcontroller used in a large number of other authentication devices, including smartcards used in banking, electronic passports, and the accessing of secure areas. While the researchers have confirmed all YubiKey 5 series models can be cloned, they haven’t tested other devices using the microcontroller, such as the SLE78 made by Infineon and successor microcontrollers known as the Infineon Optiga Trust M and the Infineon Optiga TPM. The researchers suspect that any device using any of these three microcontrollers and the Infineon cryptographic library contains the same vulnerability.

    Patching Not Possible

    YubiKey maker Yubico issued an advisory in coordination with a detailed disclosure report from NinjaLab, the security firm that reverse engineered the YubiKey 5 series and devised the cloning attack. All YubiKeys running firmware prior to version 5.7—which was released in May and replaces the Infineon cryptolibrary with a custom one—are vulnerable. Updating key firmware on the YubiKey isn’t possible. That leaves all affected YubiKeys permanently vulnerable.

    “An attacker could exploit this issue as part of a sophisticated and targeted attack to recover affected private keys,” the advisory confirmed. “The attacker would need physical possession of the YubiKey, Security Key, or YubiHSM; knowledge of the accounts they want to target; and specialized equipment to perform the necessary attack. Depending on the use case, the attacker may also require additional knowledge, including username, PIN, account password, or authentication key.”

    Side channels are the result of clues left in physical manifestations such as electromagnetic emanations, data caches, or the time required to complete a task that leaks cryptographic secrets. In this case, the side channel is the amount of time taken during a mathematical calculation known as a modular inversion. The Infineon cryptolibrary failed to implement a common side-channel defense known as constant time as it performs modular inversion operations involving the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm. Constant time ensures the time-sensitive cryptographic operations execute is uniform rather than variable depending on the specific keys.

    More precisely, the side channel is located in the Infineon implementation of the Extended Euclidean Algorithm, a method for, among other things, computing the modular inverse. By using an oscilloscope to measure the electromagnetic radiation while the token is authenticating itself, the researchers can detect tiny execution time differences that reveal a token’s ephemeral ECDSA key, also known as a nonce. Further analysis allows the researchers to extract the secret ECDSA key that underpins the entire security of the token.

    In Tuesday’s report, NinjaLab cofounder Thomas Roche wrote:

    In the present work, NinjaLab unveils a new side-channel vulnerability in the ECDSA implementation of Infineon 9 on any security microcontroller family of the manufacturer. This vulnerability lies in the ECDSA ephemeral key (or nonce) modular inversion, and, more precisely, in the Infineon implementation of the Extended Euclidean Algorithm (EEA for short). To our knowledge, this is the first time an implementation of the EEA is shown to be vulnerable to side-channel analysis (contrarily to the EEA binary version). The exploitation of this vulnerability is demonstrated through realistic experiments and we show that an adversary only needs to have access to the device for a few minutes. The offline phase took us about 24 hours; with more engineering work in the attack development, it would take less than one hour.

    After a long phase of understanding Infineon implementation through side-channel analysis on a Feitian 10 open JavaCard smartcard, the attack is tested on a YubiKey 5Ci, a FIDO hardware token from Yubico. All YubiKey 5 Series (before the firmware update 5.7 11 of May 6th, 2024) are affected by the attack. In fact all products relying on the ECDSA of Infineon cryptographic library running on an Infineon security microcontroller are affected by the attack. We estimate that the vulnerability exists for more than 14 years in Infineon top secure chips. These chips and the vulnerable part of the cryptographic library went through about 80 CC certification evaluations of level AVA VAN 4 (for TPMs) or AVA VAN 5 (for the others) from 2010 to 2024 (and a bit less than 30 certificate maintenances).

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    Dan Goodin, Ars Technica

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  • Powerful Spyware Exploits Enable a New String of ‘Watering Hole’ Attacks

    Powerful Spyware Exploits Enable a New String of ‘Watering Hole’ Attacks

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    In recent years, elite commercial spyware vendors like Intellexa and NSO Group have developed an array of powerful hacking tools that exploit rare and unpatched “zero-day” software vulnerabilities to compromise victim devices. And increasingly, governments around the world have emerged as the prime customers for these tools, compromising the smartphones of opposition leaders, journalists, activists, lawyers, and others. On Thursday, though, Google’s Threat Analysis Group is publishing findings about a series of recent hacking campaigns—seemingly carried out by Russia’s notorious APT29 Cozy Bear gang—that incorporate exploits very similar to ones developed by Intellexa and NSO Group into ongoing espionage activity.

    Between November 2023 and July 2024, the attackers compromised Mongolian government websites and used the access to conduct “watering hole” attacks, in which anyone with a vulnerable device who loads a compromised website gets hacked. The attackers set up the malicious infrastructure to use exploits that “were identical or strikingly similar to exploits previously used by commercial surveillance vendors Intellexa and NSO Group,” Google’s TAG wrote on Thursday. The researchers say they “assess with moderate confidence” that the campaigns were carried out by APT29.

    These spyware-esque hacking tools exploited vulnerabilities in Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android that had largely already been patched. Originally, they were deployed by the spyware vendors as unpatched, zero-day exploits, but in this iteration, the suspected Russian hackers were using them to target devices that hadn’t been updated with these fixes.

    “While we are uncertain how suspected APT29 actors acquired these exploits, our research underscores the extent to which exploits first developed by the commercial surveillance industry are proliferated to dangerous threat actors,” the TAG researchers wrote. “Moreover, watering hole attacks remain a threat where sophisticated exploits can be utilized to target those that visit sites regularly, including on mobile devices. Watering holes can still be an effective avenue for … mass targeting a population that might still run unpatched browsers.”

    It is possible that the hackers purchased and adapted the spyware exploits or that they stole them or acquired them through a leak. It is also possible that the hackers were inspired by commercial exploits and reverse engineered them by examining infected victim devices.

    “NSO does not sell its products to Russia,” Gil Lainer, NSO Groups vice president for global communications, told WIRED in a statement. “Our technologies are sold exclusively to vetted US & Israel-allied intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Our systems and technologies are highly secure and are continuously monitored to detect and neutralize external threats.”

    Between November 2023 and February 2024, the hackers used an iOS and Safari exploit that was technically identical to an offering that Intellexa had first debuted a couple of months earlier as an unpatched zero-day in September 2023. In July 2024, the hackers also used a Chrome exploit adapted from an NSO Group tool that first appeared in May 2024. This latter hacking tool was used in combination with an exploit that had strong similarities to one Intellexa debuted back in September 2021.

    When attackers exploit vulnerabilities that have already been patched, the activity is known as “n-day exploitation,” because the vulnerability still exists and can be abused in unpatched devices as time passes. The suspected Russian hackers incorporated the commercial spyware adjacent tools, but constructed their overall campaigns—including malware delivery and activity on compromised devices—differently than the typical commercial spyware customer would. This indicates a level of fluency and technical proficiency characteristic of an established and well-resourced state-backed hacking group.

    “In each iteration of the watering hole campaigns, the attackers used exploits that were identical or strikingly similar to exploits from [commercial surveillance vendors], Intellexa and NSO Group,” TAG wrote. “We do not know how the attackers acquired these exploits. What is clear is that APT actors are using n-day exploits that were originally used as 0-days by CSVs.”

    Updated at 2pm ET, August 29, 2024: Added comment from NSO Group.

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    Lily Hay Newman

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  • Our Favorite Outdoor Security Cams for Your Home or Business

    Our Favorite Outdoor Security Cams for Your Home or Business

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    We have tested several other outdoor security cameras. These are the ones we like that just missed out on a place above.

    Safemo Set P1 (2-Pack) for $350: I love the idea of a simple kit like this, where you just plug the hub in, connect it to your router, and install the pre-paired cameras. Each has an optional solar panel to keep the battery charged. The Safemo app is well-designed, video goes up to 4K, and this entirely local system boasts 32 GB of storage (expandable up to 4 TB). It even has locally processed person, vehicle, pet, and package detection. The person detection was mostly accurate (it occasionally flagged my cat), and the vehicle detection flagged my robot lawnmower (close enough) and an inflatable donut that blew across the backyard, but false positives were rare. What prevents me from wholeheartedly recommending this impressive debut is the lack of 2FA (Safemo says it is coming) and connectivity issues where one of the cameras would occasionally disconnect from the hub and be inaccessible in the app. This always righted itself without me moving anything, but worryingly, it happened a few times. If you plan to up the resolution to 4K from the default SD, you will need fast internet, especially to view the live feed, which I found was choppy and pixelated at 4K, though recorded videos were sharp and detailed.

    X-Sense Smart Security Camera for $50: This affordable camera comes with a solar panel to keep the battery topped off, a slot for a microSD card (up to 128 GB), and records 1080p video. There is also a spotlight and two-way audio, but, as the price suggests, the quality is limited. The 60-day cloud storage, AI recognition, smart notifications, and activity zones require a subscription starting from $5 per month. The live feed was quick to load, but some alerts were slow to come through, and it occasionally missed motion that other cameras picked up. That said, for this price and in the right spot, this camera could be worth a look.

    Imilab EC6 Dual 2K WiFi Plug-in Spotlight Camera for $180: With dual 2K lenses, this security camera can cover a fixed spot and simultaneously track a subject. The bottom camera offers pan/tilt controls. It works via the Xiaomi Home app, making it an easier sell if you already have a Xiaomi phone or other gadgets from the Chinese brand. You can insert a microSD card for local storage or subscribe for cloud storage. The person detection and tracking worked well in my tests. The video was mostly crisp, but movement was sometimes a bit jerky, and fast-moving subjects can get blurry. It does have WDR but could use HDR to prevent bright areas from blowing out.

    Arlo Essential Wireless Security Camera for $70: This is the most affordable way to try Arlo’s wares, and it’s a solid security camera. Setup is a breeze, the 1080p footage is clear, and the rich notifications are the best, but you need an Arlo Secure subscription ($8 per month for one camera, $13 for unlimited). Compared to our top pick, the Essential has a narrower field of view and lacks HDR, so it loses details in bright and dark areas. I also tried the Essential XL ($100), which is the same camera with a much larger battery (4x longer lasting).

    AlfredCam Plus for $50: The AlfredCamera app allows you to turn your old smartphones into security cameras, but the company also has its own line of budget cameras. The AlfredCam Plus has an IP65 rating, can record video at up to 2K, and comes with a 64-GB microSD card. You get a 9.8-foot cable with it, but you will need a power adapter. The ad-supported free version offers seven days of cloud storage for video clips. Sadly, you need a subscription at $6 a month or $30 a year to unlock 14-day cloud storage, smart features (including person detection, scheduling, and zones), and better quality video for the live feed and recordings.

    Ezviz H3C for $60: I had issues setting this wired camera up because it can only connect to 2.4-GHz Wi-Fi, but once up and running, it proved a decent performer. The Ezviz app has 2FA and allows fingerprint unlock, which is handy. There’s also onboard AI for person detection, a spotlight, black-and-white night vision, and two-way audio, though it’s laggy and poor quality. The video quality is decent at up to 2K, and the live feed is fast to load. All in all, it’s not bad for the money. I also tested the Ezviz EB8 4G (£299), which is quite similar to the H8 Pro we recommend above, except it can connect to 4G mobile networks—this means it doesn’t require Wi-Fi, though you will need a SIM card and cell service plan.

    Imou Knight Spotlight Camera for $180: A smart design and solid feature set make this an attractive security camera for the right spot. It can record at up to 4K with HDR, has a 600-lumen spotlight around the lens, and can take microSD cards up to 256 GB (sold separately) to record locally. The app offers a wide range of features, including detection zones, cross-line alerts, and human or pet detection, though the AI sometimes gets it wrong. Sadly, the low frame rate (15 fps) too often results in blurry footage, but this came close to snagging a spot above.

    Reolink Go PT Ultra for $220: If you need a wireless security camera that can connect to cellular 3G or 4G LTE networks, you could do worse than this offering from Reolink. It’s a pan-and-tilt camera that can record up to 4K video on a local microSD card (sold separately), or you can subscribe for cloud storage. It has a wee spotlight and decent color night vision, and it comes with a solar panel to keep the battery topped up. The detection is reliable but doesn’t always categorize subjects correctly. Loading time and lag will depend on the strength of the signal. Just make sure you check carrier compatibility and get a SIM card before you buy.

    Swann AllSecure650 4 Camera Kit for $700: This kit includes four wireless, battery-powered cameras and a network video recorder (NVR) that can plug into a TV or monitor via HDMI. The cameras can record up to 2K, and footage is crisp and detailed enough to zoom in on, though there is a mild fish-eye effect. The night vision is reasonably good, but the two-way audio lags and sounds distorted. I like the option to view all camera feeds simultaneously, the backup battery in the NVR makes it a cinch to swap batteries when a camera is running low, and everything is local with no need for a subscription. Unfortunately, the mobile app is poor, camera feeds sometimes take several seconds to load, and there doesn’t seem to be any 2FA. The NVR interface is also clunky to navigate with the provided mouse.

    Arlo Pro 4 for $140: This camera was our top pick, and it is still an excellent buy that is widely available. Its successor, the Pro 5, has slightly better battery life and enhanced color night vision, but there isn’t a huge difference. This camera provides crisp, clear footage; responds swiftly; and has an excellent detection and notification system, but you must also factor in the cost of an Arlo subscription starting from $8 per month for a single camera.

    Reolink Argus 3 Pro for $70: There’s a lot to like with this security camera, not least the affordable price. It offers 2K video, local or cloud storage, two-way audio, a siren, and person recognition. The live feed loads fast, and it’s cheap to buy a solar panel accessory for power. The app is a little confusing, but Reolink recently added 2FA. I also tested the Reolink Argus PT with solar panel ($104), which is a solid pan-and-tilt camera with an otherwise similar feature set. Both Reolink cameras also support dual-band Wi-Fi (2.4 GHz and 5 GHz).

    Eve Outdoor Cam for $242: This stylish floodlight camera must be wired in, and installation is tricky (you may want an electrician). It can replace an outdoor light to give you motion-activated light (up to 1,500 lumens), 1080p video (157-degree field of view), and two-way audio. But as a HomeKit camera, you will need an Apple HomeKit hub (Apple TV, HomePod, or iPad) and an iCloud+ storage plan. Sadly, the video and sound quality are average; it only works on 2.4-GHz Wi-Fi, and there’s no Android support.

    Toucan Wireless Outdoor Camera for $100: Toucan’s wireless camera resembles our top pick from Arlo with a smart magnetic mount and easy installation. The 1080p video is good in ideal conditions but struggles with mixed lighting (no HDR). The two-way audio is passable. The app works well and loads the live feed quite quickly, but this is cloud-only, which means you need to subscribe (from $3 per month) if you want tagged events, more than the last 24 hours recorded, or to download more than five videos per month.

    Toucan Security Light Camera for $120: You can simply plug this camera into an outlet, and it comes with an 8-meter waterproof cable. It has a motion-activated light (1,200 lumens), records 1080p video, and supports two-way audio. I found the footage quite detailed, but it struggled with direct sunlight. You can record locally on a microSD card (sold separately), and you get 24 hours of free cloud storage, but it has limitations. Plans start from $3 per month. Even with motion detection set to the lowest sensitivity, this camera triggered too often during testing, and there’s no way to filter for people, so I got frequent false positives (blowing leaves, moths, and birds all triggered alerts).

    Blurams Outdoor Lite 3 for $50: This is a feature-packed security camera for the price, with support for pan, tilt, and zoom functionality; spotlights; siren; motion tracking; continuous recording; and two-way audio. You can store footage locally on a microSD card (sold separately) or subscribe to a cloud plan. Video quality is reasonable, but the app is very glitchy and loading the live feed was inconsistent (sometimes it just buffered indefinitely).

    SimpliSafe Wireless Outdoor Security Camera for $150: A solid set of features, crisp 1080p video, and support for HDR sounds tempting, but you need a Simplisafe security system (9/10, WIRED recommends) and monitoring plan to make this camera worthwhile, making it too expensive for what you get. (The Arlo Pro 4 offers better-quality video and more features.) It may be a useful add-on for existing SimpliSafe customers, though.

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    Simon Hill, Adrienne So

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  • The US Navy Has Run Out of Pants

    The US Navy Has Run Out of Pants

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    The United States Defense Department has ideas about a dramatic strategy for defending Taiwan against a Chinese military offensive that would involve deploying an “unmanned hellscape” consisting of thousands of drones buzzing around the island nation. Meanwhile, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology announced a red-team hacking competition this week with the AI ethics nonprofit Humane Intelligence to find flaws and biases in generative AI systems.

    WIRED took a closer look at the Telegram channel and website known as Deep State that uses public data and secret intelligence to power its live-tracker map of Ukraine’s evolving front line. Protesters went to Citi Field in New York on Wednesday to raise awareness about the serious privacy risks of deploying facial recognition systems at sporting venues. The technology has increasingly been implemented at stadiums and arenas across the country with little oversight. And Amazon Web Services updated its instructions for how customers should implement authentication in its Application Load Balancer, after researchers found an implementation issue that they say could expose misconfigured web apps.

    But wait, there’s more! Each week, we round up the security and privacy news we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

    US Navy officials confirmed to Military.com this week that pants for the standard Navy Working Uniform (NWU) are out of stock at Navy Exchanges and are in perilously low supply across the sea service’s distribution channels. The Navy’s Exchange Service Command is “experiencing severe shortages of NWU trousers” both in stores and online, according to spokesperson Courtney Williams. Sailors have been noticing out-of-stock notifications online, which state that pants are “not available for purchase in any size.” Williams said that current stock around the world is at 13 percent and that the top priority right now is providing pants to new recruits at Recruit Training Command in Illinois, the Naval Academy Preparatory School in Rhode Island, and the officer training schools.

    The shortage seems to have resulted from issues with the Defense Logistics Agency’s pants pipeline. Military.com reports that signs currently inside Navy Exchanges say the shortage is “due to Defense Logistics Agency vendor issues.” Williams said the Command has “been in communication with DLA on a timeline for the uniform’s production and supply chain.”

    Mikia Muhammad, a spokesperson for the Defense Logistics Agency, told Military.com that the first pants restocks are scheduled for October, but these supplies will go to recruits and training programs. She said that Navy exchanges should expect “full support” beginning in January.

    A joint statement on Monday by the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency formally accused Iran of conducting a hack-and-leak operation against Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Trump himself had accused Iran in a social media post on August 10, following a report from Microsoft on August 9 about Iranian hackers targeting US political campaigns. The Iranian government denies the accusation.

    “The [Intelligence Community] is confident that the Iranians have through social engineering and other efforts sought access to individuals with direct access to the presidential campaigns of both political parties,” the US agencies wrote. “Such activity, including thefts and disclosures, are intended to influence the US election process.”

    Politico reported on August 10 that Iran had breached the Trump campaign, and an entity calling itself “Robert” had contacted the publication offering alleged stolen documents. The same entity also contacted The New York Times and The Washington Post hawking similar documents.

    The popular flight-tracking service FlightAware said this week that a “configuration error” in its systems exposed personal customer data, including names, email addresses, and even some Social Security numbers. The company discovered the exposure on July 25 but said in a breach notification to the attorney general of California that the situation may date as far back as January 2021. The company is mandating that all affected users reset their account passwords.

    The company said in its public statement that the exposed data includes “user ID, password, and email address. Depending on the information you provided, the information may also have included your full name, billing address, shipping address, IP address, social media accounts, telephone numbers, year of birth, last four digits of your credit card number, information about aircraft owned, industry, title, pilot status (yes/no), and your account activity (such as flights viewed and comments posted).” It also said in its disclosure to California, “Additionally, our investigation has revealed that your Social Security Number may have been exposed.”

    Since European law enforcement agencies hacked the end-to-end encrypted phone company Sky in 2021, the communications they compromised have been used as evidence in numerous EU investigations and criminal cases. But a review of court records by 404 Media and Court Watch showed this week that US agencies have also been leaning on the trove of roughly half a billion chat messages. US law enforcement has used the data in multiple drug-trafficking prosecutions, particularly to pursue alleged smugglers who transport cocaine with commercial ships and speedboats.

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    Lily Hay Newman

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  • An AWS Configuration Issue Could Expose Thousands of Web Apps

    An AWS Configuration Issue Could Expose Thousands of Web Apps

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    A vulnerability related to Amazon Web Service’s traffic-routing service known as Application Load Balancer could have been exploited by an attacker to bypass access controls and compromise web applications, according to new research. The flaw stems from a customer implementation issue, meaning it isn’t caused by a software bug. Instead, the exposure was introduced by the way AWS users set up authentication with Application Load Balancer.

    Implementation issues are a crucial component of cloud security in the same way that the contents of an armored safe aren’t protected if the door is left ajar. Researchers from the security firm Miggo found that, depending on how Application Load Balancer authentication was set up, an attacker could potentially manipulate its handoff to a third-party corporate authentication service to access the target web application and view or exfiltrate data.

    The researchers say that looking at publicly reachable web applications, they have identified more than 15,000 that appear to have vulnerable configurations. AWS disputes this estimate, though, and says that “a small fraction of a percent of AWS customers have applications potentially misconfigured in this way, significantly fewer than the researchers’ estimate.” The company also says that it has contacted each customer on its shorter list to recommend a more secure implementation. AWS does not have access or visibility into its clients’ cloud environments, though, so any exact number is just an estimate.

    The Miggo researchers say they came across the problem while working with a client. This “was discovered in real-life production environments,” Miggo CEO Daniel Shechter says. “We observed a weird behavior in a customer system—the validation process seemed like it was only being done partially, like there was something missing. This really shows how deep the interdependencies go between the customer and the vendor.”

    To exploit the implementation issue, an attacker would set up an AWS account and an Application Load Balancer, and then sign their own authentication token as usual. Next, the attacker would make configuration changes so it would appear their target’s authentication service issued the token. Then the attacker would have AWS sign the token as if it had legitimately originated from the target’s system and use it to access the target application. The attack must specifically target a misconfigured application that is publicly accessible or that the attacker already has access to, but would allow them to escalate their privileges in the system.

    Amazon Web Services says that the company does not view token forging as a vulnerability in Application Load Balancer because it is essentially an expected outcome of choosing to configure authentication in a particular way. But after the Miggo researchers first disclosed their findings to AWS at the beginning of April, the company made two documentation changes geared at updating their implementation recommendations for Application Load Balancer authentication. One, from May 1, included guidance to add validation before Application Load Balancer will sign tokens. And on July 19, the company also added an explicit recommendation that users set their systems to receive traffic from only their own Application Load Balancer using a feature called “security groups.”

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    Lily Hay Newman

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  • Geofence Warrants Ruled Unconstitutional—but That’s Not the End of It

    Geofence Warrants Ruled Unconstitutional—but That’s Not the End of It

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    The 2024 US presidential election is entering its final stretch, which means state-backed hackers are slipping out of the shadows to meddle in their own special way. That includes Iran’s APT42, a hacker group affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which Google’s Threat Analysis Group says targeted nearly a dozen people associated with Donald Trump’s and Joe Biden’s (now Kamala Harris’) campaigns.

    The rolling disaster that is the breach of data broker and background-check company National Public Data is just beginning. While the breach of the company happened months ago, the company only acknowledged it publicly on Monday after someone posted what they claimed was “2.9 billion records” of people in the US, UK, and Canada, including names, physical addresses, and Social Security numbers. Ongoing analysis of the data, however, shows the story is far messier—as are the risks.

    You can now add bicycle shifters and gym lockers to the list of things that can be hacked. Security researchers revealed this week that Shimano’s Di2 wireless shifters can be vulnerable to various radio-based attacks, which could allow someone to change a rider’s gears remotely or prevent them from changing gears at a crucial moment in a race. Meanwhile, other researchers found that it’s possible to extract the administrator keys to electronic lockers used in gyms and offices around the world, potentially giving a criminal access to every locker at a single location.

    If you use a Google Pixel phone, don’t let it out of your sight: An unpatched vulnerability in a hidden Android app called Showcase.apk could give an attacker the ability to gain deep access to your device. Exploiting the vulnerability may require physical access to a targeted device, but researchers at iVerify who discovered the flaw say it may also be possible through other vulnerabilities. Google says it plans to release a fix “in the coming weeks,” but that’s not good enough for data analytics firm and US military contractor Palantir, which will stop using all Android devices due to what it believes was an insufficient response from Google.

    But that’s not all. Each week, we round up the security and privacy news we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

    A US federal appeals court ruled last week that so-called geofence warrants violate the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. Geofence warrants allow police to demand that companies such as Google turn over a list of every device that appeared at a certain location at a certain time. The US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on August 9 that geofence warrants are “categorically prohibited by the Fourth Amendment” because “they never include a specific user to be identified, only a temporal and geographic location where any given user may turn up post-search.” In other words, they’re the unconstitutional fishing expedition that privacy and civil liberties advocates have long asserted they are.

    Google, which collects the location histories of tens of millions of US residents and is the most frequent target of geofence warrants, vowed late last year that it was changing how it stores location data in such a way that geofence warrants may no longer return the data they once did. Legally, however, the issue is far from settled: The Fifth Circuit decision applies only to law enforcement activity in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. Plus, because of weak US privacy laws, police can simply purchase the data and skip the pesky warrant process altogether. As for the appellants in the case heard by the Fifth Circuit, well, they’re no better off: The court found that the police used the geofence warrant in “good faith” when it was issued in 2018, so they can still use the evidence they obtained.

    The Committee on Foreign Investment in the US (CFIUS) fined German-owned T-Mobile a record $60 million this week for its mishandling of data during its integration with US-based Sprint following the companies’ merger in 2020. According to CFIUS, “T-Mobile failed to take appropriate measures to prevent unauthorized access to certain sensitive data,” in violation of a National Security Agreement the company signed with the committee, which assesses the national security implications of foreign business deals with US companies. T-Mobile said in a statement that technical issues impacted “information shared from a small number of law enforcement information requests.” While the company claims to have acted “quickly” and “in a timely manner,” CFIUS claims T-Mobile “failed to report some incidents of unauthorized access promptly to CFIUS, delaying the Committee’s efforts to investigate and mitigate any potential harm.”

    The 12-year saga that is the prosecution of Kim Dotcom inched forward this week with the New Zealand justice minister approving the US’s request to extradite the controversial entrepreneur. Dotcom created the file-sharing service Megaupload, which US authorities say was used for widespread copyright infringement. The US seized Megaupload in 2012 and indicted Dotcom on charges related to racketeering, copyright infringement, and money laundering. Dotcom has denied any wrongdoing but lost an attempt to block the extradition in 2017 and has been fighting it ever since. Despite the justice minister’s decision, Dotcom vowed in a post on X to remain in the country where he’s been a legal resident since 2010. “I love New Zealand,” he wrote. “I’m not leaving.”

    The growing scourge of deepfake pornography—explicit images that digitally “undress” people without their consent—may have finally hit a major legal roadblock. San Francisco’s chief deputy city attorney, Yvonne Meré—and the City of San Francisco by extension—has filed a lawsuit against the 16 most popular “nudification” websites. These sites and apps allow people to make explicit deepfake images of virtually anyone, but they have increasingly been used by boys to make sexual abuse material of their underage female classmates. While several states have criminalized the creation and distribution of AI-generated sexual abuse material of minors, Meré’s lawsuit effectively seeks to shut down the sites entirely.

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    Andrew Couts

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  • The Slow-Burn Nightmare of the National Public Data Breach

    The Slow-Burn Nightmare of the National Public Data Breach

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    Data breaches are a seemingly endless scourge with no simple answer, but the breach in recent months of the background-check service National Public Data illustrates just how dangerous and intractable they have become. And after four months of ambiguity, the situation is only now beginning to come into focus with National Public Data finally acknowledging the breach on Monday just as a trove of the stolen data leaked publicly online.

    In April, a hacker known for selling stolen information, known as USDoD, began hawking a trove of data on cybercriminal forums for $3.5 million that they said included 2.9 billion records and impacted “the entire population of USA, CA and UK.” As the weeks went on, samples of the data started cropping up as other actors and legitimate researchers worked to understand its source and validate the information. By early June, it was clear that at least some of the data was legitimate and contained information like names, emails, and physical addresses in various combinations.

    The data isn’t always accurate, but it seems to involve two troves of information. One that includes more than 100 million legitimate email addresses along with other information and a second that includes Social Security numbers but no email addresses.

    “There appears to have been a data security incident that may have involved some of your personal information,” National Public Data wrote on Monday. “The incident is believed to have involved a third-party bad actor that was trying to hack into data in late December 2023, with potential leaks of certain data in April 2024 and summer 2024 … The information that was suspected of being breached contained name, email address, phone number, Social Security number, and mailing address(es).”

    The company says it has been cooperating with “law enforcement and governmental investigators.” NPD is facing potential class action lawsuits over the breach.

    “We have become desensitized to the never-ending leaks of personal data, but I would say there is a serious risk,” says security researcher Jeremiah Fowler, who has been following the situation with National Public Data. “It may not be immediate, and it could take years for one of the many criminal actors to successfully figure out how to use this information, but the bottom line is that a storm is coming.”

    When information is stolen from a single source, like Target customer data being stolen from Target, it’s relatively straightforward to establish that source. But when information is stolen from a data broker and the company doesn’t come forward about the incident, it’s much more complicated to determine whether the information is legitimate and where it came from. Typically, people whose data is compromised in a breach—the true victims—aren’t even aware that National Public Data held their information in the first place.

    In a blog post on Wednesday about the contents and provenance of the National Public Data trove, security researcher Troy Hunt wrote, “The only parties that know the truth are the anonymous threat actors passing the data around and the data aggregator … We’re left with 134M email addresses in public circulation and no clear origin or accountability.”

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    Lily Hay Newman

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  • Your Gym Locker May Be Hackable

    Your Gym Locker May Be Hackable

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    Thousands of electronic lockers found in gyms, offices, and schools could be vulnerable to attacks by criminals using cheap hacking tools to access administrator keys, according to new research.

    At the Defcon security conference on Sunday, security researchers Dennis Giese and “braelynn” demonstrated a proof-of-concept attack showing how digital management keys could be extracted from lockers, copied, and then used to open other lockers in the same location. The researchers focused on various models of electronic locks from two of the world’s biggest manufacturers, Digilock and Schulte-Schlagbaum.

    Over the past few years, the researchers, who both have backgrounds in lock picking, have been examining various electronic locks that use numerical keypads, allowing people to set and open them with a PIN. The work comes on the back of various examples of hotel door locks being found to be hackable, vulnerabilities in high-security locks, and commercial safes being alleged to have backdoors.

    For the research, Giese and braelynn purchased electronic locks on eBay, snapping up those sold after some gyms closed during the Covid-19 pandemic and from other failed projects. Giese focused on Digilock, while braelynn looked at Schulte-Schlagbaum. Over the course of the research, they looked at legacy models from Digilock dating from 2015 to 2022 and models from Schulte-Schlagbaum from 2015 to 2020. (They also purchased some physical management keys for Digilock systems.)

    Showing how security flaws could be abused by a prepared hacker, the researchers say they can take the electronic lock apart, then extract the device’s firmware and stored data. This data, Giese says, can contain PINs that have been set, management keys, and programming keys. The manager key ID can be copied to a Flipper Zero or cheap Arduino circuit board and used to open other lockers, Giese says.

    “If you access one lock, we can open all of them in whatever the unit is—the whole university, the whole company,” Giese says. “We can clone and emulate keys very easily, and the tools aren’t that complicated.” Whoever owns the lockers manages them, Giese says.

    Ahead of developing this proof-of-concept attack, Giese says, it took some time and effort to understand how the locker systems function. They took the locks apart and used cheap debugging tools to access the devices’ erasable, programmable read-only memory, known as EEPROM. Often, in the locks they tested, this was not secured, allowing data to be pulled from the system.

    “From the EEPROM, we can pull out the programming key ID, all manager key IDs, and the user PIN/ User RFID UID,” Giese says. “Newer locks erase the set user PIN when the locker is unlocked. But the PIN remains if the locker was opened with a manager key/programming key.”

    The researchers say they reported the findings to both impacted companies, adding they had spoken to Digilock about the findings. Digilock tells WIRED it has issued a fix for vulnerabilities found. The researchers say Schulte-Schlagbaum did not respond to their reports; the company did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

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    Matt Burgess

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  • Thousands of Corporate Secrets Were Left Exposed. This Guy Found Them All

    Thousands of Corporate Secrets Were Left Exposed. This Guy Found Them All

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    If you know where to look, plenty of secrets can be found online. Since the fall of 2021, independent security researcher Bill Demirkapi has been building ways to tap into huge data sources, which are often overlooked by researchers, to find masses of security problems. This includes automatically finding developer secrets—such as passwords, API keys, and authentication tokens—that could give cybercriminals access to company systems and the ability to steal data.

    Today, at the Defcon security conference in Las Vegas, Demirkapi is unveiling the results of this work, detailing a massive trove of leaked secrets and wider website vulnerabilities. Among at least 15,000 developer secrets hard-coded into software, he found hundreds of username and password details linked to Nebraska’s Supreme Court and its IT systems; the details needed to access Stanford University’s Slack channels; and more than a thousand API keys belonging to OpenAI customers.

    A major smartphone manufacturer, customers of a fintech company, and a multibillion-dollar cybersecurity company are counted among the thousands of organizations that inadvertently exposed secrets. As part of his efforts to stem the tide, Demirkapi hacked together a way to automatically get the details revoked, making them useless to any hackers.

    In a second strand to the research, Demirkapi also scanned data sources to find 66,000 websites with dangling subdomain issues, making them vulnerable to various attacks including hijacking. Some of the world’s biggest websites, including a development domain owned by The New York Times, had the weaknesses.

    While the two security issues he looked into are well-known among researchers, Demirkapi says that turning to unconventional datasets, which are usually reserved for other purposes, allowed thousands of issues to be identified en masse and, if expanded, offers the potential to help protect the web at large. “The goal has been to find ways to discover trivial vulnerability classes at scale,” Demirkapi tells WIRED. “I think that there’s a gap for creative solutions.”

    Spilled Secrets; Vulnerable Websites

    It is relatively trivial for a developer to accidentally include their company’s secrets in software or code. Alon Schindel, the vice president of AI and threat research at the cloud security company Wiz, says there’s a huge variety of secrets that developers can inadvertently hard-code, or expose, throughout the software development pipeline. These can include passwords, encryption keys, API access tokens, cloud provider secrets, and TLS certificates.

    “The most acute risk of leaving secrets hard-coded is that if digital authentication credentials and secrets are exposed, they can grant adversaries unauthorized access to a company’s code bases, databases, and other sensitive digital infrastructure,” Schindel says.

    The risks are high: Exposed secrets can result in data breaches, hackers breaking into networks, and supply chain attacks, Schindel adds. Previous research in 2019 found thousands of secrets were being leaked on GitHub every day. And while various secret scanning tools exist, these largely are focused on specific targets and not the wider web, Demirkapi says.

    During his research, Demirkapi, who first found prominence for his teenage school-hacking exploits five years ago, hunted for these secret keys at scale—as opposed to selecting a company and looking specifically for its secrets. To do this, he turned to VirusTotal, the Google-owned website, which allows developers to upload files—such as apps—and have them scanned for potential malware.

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    Matt Burgess

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  • Flaws in Ubiquitous ATM Software Could Have Let Attackers Take Over Cash Machines

    Flaws in Ubiquitous ATM Software Could Have Let Attackers Take Over Cash Machines

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    There is a grand tradition at the annual Defcon security conference in Las Vegas of hacking ATMs. Unlocking them with safecracking techniques, rigging them to steal users’ personal data and PINs, crafting and refining ATM malware and, of course, hacking them to spit out all their cash. Many of these projects targeted what are known as retail ATMs, freestanding devices like those you’d find at a gas station or a bar. But on Friday, independent researcher Matt Burch is presenting findings related to the “financial” or “enterprise” ATMs used in banks and other large institutions.

    Burch is demonstrating six vulnerabilities in ATM-maker Diebold Nixdorf’s widely deployed security solution, known as Vynamic Security Suite (VSS). The vulnerabilities, which the company says have all been patched, could be exploited by attackers to bypass an unpatched ATM’s hard drive encryption and take full control of the machine. And while there are fixes available for the bugs, Burch warns that, in practice, the patches may not be widely deployed, potentially leaving some ATMs and cash-out systems exposed.

    “Vynamic Security Suite does a number of things—it has endpoint protection, USB filtering, delegated access, and much more,” Burch tells WIRED. “But the specific attack surface that I’m taking advantage of is the hard drive encryption module. And there are six vulnerabilities, because I would identify a path and files to exploit, and then I would report it to Diebold, they would patch that issue, and then I would find another way to achieve the same outcome. They’re relatively simplistic attacks.”

    The vulnerabilities Burch found are all in VSS’s functionality to turn on disk encryption for ATM hard drives. Burch says that most ATM manufacturers rely on Microsoft’s BitLlocker Windows encryption for this purpose, but Diebold Nixdorf’s VSS uses a third-party integration to run an integrity check. The system is set up in a dual-boot configuration that has both Linux and Windows partitions. Before the operating system boots, the Linux partition runs a signature integrity check to validate that the ATM hasn’t been compromised, and then boots it into Windows for normal operation.

    “The problem is, in order to do all of that, they decrypt the system, which opens up the opportunity,” Burch says. “The core deficiency that I’m exploiting is that the Linux partition was not encrypted.”

    Burch found that he could manipulate the location of critical system validation files to redirect code execution; in other words, grant himself control of the ATM.

    Diebold Nixdorf spokesperson Michael Jacobsen tells WIRED that Burch first disclosed the findings to them in 2022 and that the company has been in touch with Burch about his Defcon talk. The company says that the vulnerabilities Burch is presenting were all addressed with patches in 2022. Burch notes, though, that as he went back to the company with new versions of the vulnerabilities over the past couple of years, his understanding is that the company continued to address some of the findings with patches in 2023. And Burch adds that he believes Diebold Nixdorf addressed the vulnerabilities on a more fundamental level in April with VSS version 4.4 that encrypts the Linux partition.

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    Lily Hay Newman

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  • USPS Text Scammers Duped His Wife, So He Hacked Their Operation

    USPS Text Scammers Duped His Wife, So He Hacked Their Operation

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    Smith trawled Reddit and other online sources to find people reporting the scam and find URLs being used, which he subsequently published. Some of the websites running the Smishing Triad’s tools were collecting thousands of people’s personal information per day, Smith says. Among other details, the websites would request people’s names, addresses, payment card numbers and security codes, phone numbers, dates of birth, and bank websites. This level of information can allow a scammer to make purchases online with the credit cards. Smith says his wife quickly canceled her card, but noticed that the scammers still tried to use it, for instance with Uber. The researcher says he would collect data from a website and return to it a few hours later, only to find hundreds of new records.

    The researcher provided the details to a bank that had contacted him after seeing his initial blog posts. Smith declined to name the bank. He also reported the incidents to the FBI and later provided information to the United States Postal Inspection Service (USPIS).

    Michael Martel, a national public information officer at the USPIS, says the information provided by Smith is being used as part of an ongoing USPIS investigation and that the agency cannot comment on specific details. “USPIS is already actively pursuing this type of information to protect the American people, identify victims, and serve justice to the malicious actors behind it all,” Martel says, pointing to advice on spotting and reporting USPS package delivery scams.

    Initially, Smith says, he was wary about going public with his research as this kind of “hacking back” falls into a “gray area”: It may be breaking the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a sweeping US computer-crimes law, but he’s doing it against foreign-based criminals. Something he is definitely not the first, or last, to do.

    Multiple Prongs

    The Smishing Triad is prolific. As well as using postal services as lures their scams, the Chinese-speaking group has targeted online banking, e-commerce, and payment systems in the US, Europe, India, Pakistan, and the United Arab Emirates, according to Shawn Loveland, the chief operating officer of Resecurity, which has consistently tracked the group.

    The Smishing Triad sends between 50,000 and 100,000 messages daily, according to Resecurity’s research. Its scam messages are sent using SMS or Apple’s iMessage, the latter is encrypted. Loveland says the Triad is made up of two distinct groups—a small team led by one Chinese hacker that creates, sells, and maintains the smishing kit, and a second group of people who buy the scamming tool. (A backdoor in the kit allows the creator to access details of administrators using the kit, Smith says in a blog post.)

    “It’s very mature,” Loveland says of the operation. The group sells the scamming kit on Telegram for a $200-per month subscription, and this can be customized to show the organization the scammers are trying to impersonate. “The main actor is Chinese communicating in the Chinese language,” Loveland says. “They do not appear to be hacking Chinese language websites or users.” (In communications with the main contact on Telegram, the individual claimed to Smith that they were a computer science student.)

    The relatively low monthly subscription cost for the smishing kit means it’s highly likely, with the number of credit card details scammers are collecting, that those using it are making significant profits. Loveland says that using text messages, which immediately send people a notification, is a more direct and more successful way of phishing, compared to sending emails with malicious links included.

    As a result, smishing has been on the rise in recent years. But there are some tell-tale signs: If you receive a message from a number or email that you don’t recognize; if it contains a link to click on; and wants you to do something urgently, you should be suspicious.

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    Matt Burgess

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  • Inside the Dark World of Doxing for Profit

    Inside the Dark World of Doxing for Profit

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    Since the early 1990s, people have used doxing as a toxic way to strike digital revenge—stripping away someone’s anonymity by unmasking their identity online. But in recent years, the poisonous practice has taken on new life, with people being doxed and extorted for cryptocurrency and, in the most extreme cases, potentially facing physical violence.

    For the past year, security researcher Jacob Larsen—who was a victim of doxing around a decade ago when someone tried to extort him for a gaming account—has been monitoring doxing groups, observing the techniques used to unmask people, and interviewing prominent members of the doxing community. Doxing actions have led to incomes of “well over six figures annually,” and methods include making fake law enforcement requests to get people’s data, according to Larsen’s interviews.

    “The primary target of doxing, particularly when it involves a physical extortion component, is for finance,” says Larsen, who leads an offensive security team at cybersecurity company CyberCX but conducted the doxing research in a personal capacity with the support of the company.

    Over several online chat sessions last August and September, Larsen interviewed two members of the doxing community: “Ego” and “Reiko.” While neither of their offline identities is publicly known, Ego is believed to have been a member of the five-person doxing group known as ViLe, and Reiko last year acted as an administrator of the biggest public doxing website, Doxbin, as well as being involved in other groups. (Two other ViLe members pleaded guilty to hacking and identity theft in June.) Larsen says both Ego and Reiko deleted their social media accounts since speaking with him, making it impossible for WIRED to speak with them independently.

    People can be doxed for a full range of reasons—from harassment in online gaming, to inciting political violence. Doxing can “humiliate, harm, and reduce the informational autonomy” of targeted individuals, says Bree Anderson, a digital criminologist at Deakin University in Australia who has researched the subject with colleagues. There are direct “first-order” harms, such as risks to personal safety, and longer-term “second-order harms,” including anxiety around future disclosures of information, Anderson says.

    Larsen’s research mostly focused on those doxing for profit. Doxbin is central to many doxing efforts, with the website hosting more than 176,000 public and private doxes, which can contain names, social media details, Social Security numbers, home addresses, places of work, and similar details belonging to people’s family members. Larsen says he believes most of the doxing on Doxbin is driven by extortion activities, although there can be other motivations and doxing for notoriety. Once information is uploaded, Doxbin will not remove it unless it breaks the website’s terms of service.

    “It is your responsibility to uphold your privacy on the internet,” Reiko said in one of the conversations with Larsen, who has published the transcripts. Ego added: “It’s on the users to keep their online security tight, but let’s be real, no matter how careful you are, someone might still track you down.”

    Impersonating Police, Violence as a Service

    Being entirely anonymous online is almost impossible—and many people don’t try, often using their real names and personal details in online accounts and sharing information on social media. Doxing tactics to gather people’s details, some of which were detailed in charges against ViLe members, can include reusing common passwords to access accounts, accessing public and private databases, and social engineering to launch SIM swapping attacks. There are also more nefarious methods.

    Emergency data requests (EDR) can also be abused, Larsen says. EDRs allow law enforcement officials to ask tech companies for people’s names and contact details without any court orders as they believe there may be danger or risks to people’s lives. These requests are made directly to tech platforms, often through specific online portals, and broadly need to come from official law enforcement or government email addresses.

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    Matt Burgess

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  • A Flaw in Windows Update Opens the Door to Zombie Exploits

    A Flaw in Windows Update Opens the Door to Zombie Exploits

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    New research being presented at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas today shows that a vulnerability in Windows Update could be exploited to downgrade Windows to older versions, exposing a slew of historical vulnerabilities that then can be exploited to gain full control of a system. Microsoft says that it is working on a complex process to carefully patch the issue, dubbed “Downdate.”

    Alon Leviev, the SafeBreach Labs researcher who discovered the flaw, says he started looking for possible downgrade attack methods after seeing that a startling hacking campaign from last year was using a type of malware (known as the “BlackLotus UEFI bootkit”) that relied on downgrading the Windows boot manager to an old, vulnerable version. After probing the Windows Update flow, Leviev discovered a path to strategically downgrading Windows—either the entire operating system or just specifically chosen components. From there, he developed a proof-of-concept attack that utilized this access to disable the Windows protection known as Virtualization-Based Security (VBS) and ultimately target highly privileged code running in the computer’s core “kernel.”

    “I found a downgrade exploit that is fully undetectable because it is performed by using Windows Update itself,” which the system trusts, Leviev told WIRED ahead of his conference talk. “In terms of invisibility, I didn’t uninstall any update—I basically updated the system even though under the hood it was downgraded. So the system is not aware of the downgrade and still appears up-to-date.”

    Leviev’s downgrade capability comes from a flaw in the components of the Windows Update process. To perform an upgrade, your PC places what is essentially a request to update in a special update folder. It then presents this folder to the Microsoft update server, which checks and confirms its integrity. Next, the server creates an additional update folder for you that only it can control, where it places and finalizes the update and also stores an action list—called “pending.xml”—that includes the steps of the update plan, such as which files will be updated and where the new code will be stored on your computer. When you reboot your PC, it takes the actions from the list and updates the software.

    The idea is that even if your computer, including your update folder, is compromised, a bad actor can’t hijack the update process because the crucial parts of it happen in the server-controlled update folder. Leviev looked closely at the different files in both the user’s update folder and the server’s update folder, though, and he eventually found that while he couldn’t modify the action list in the server’s update folder directly, one of the keys controlling it—called “PoqexecCmdline”—was not locked. This gave Leviev a way to manipulate the action list, and with it the entire update process, without the system realizing that anything was amiss.

    With this control, Leviev then found strategies to downgrade multiple key components of Windows, including drivers, which coordinate with hardware peripherals; dynamic link libraries, which contain system programs and data; and, crucially, the NT kernel, which contains the most core instructions for a computer to run. All of these could be downgraded to older versions that contain known, patched vulnerabilities. And Leviev even cast a wider net from there, to find strategies for downgrading Windows security components including the Windows Secure Kernel; the Windows password and storage component Credential Guard; the hypervisor, which creates and oversees virtual machines on a system; and VBS, the Windows virtualization security mechanism.

    The technique does not include a way to first gain remote access to a victim device, but for an attacker who already has initial access, it could enable a true rampage, because Windows Update is such a trusted mechanism and can reintroduce a vast array of dangerous vulnerabilities that have been fixed by Microsoft over the years. Microsoft says that it has not seen any attempts to exploit the technique.

    “We are actively developing mitigations to protect against these risks while following an extensive process involving a thorough investigation, update development across all affected versions, and compatibility testing, to ensure maximized customer protection with minimized operational disruption,” a Microsoft spokesperson told WIRED in a statement.

    Part of the company’s fix involves revoking vulnerable VBS system files, which must be done carefully and gradually, because it could cause integration issues or reintroduce other, unrelated problems that were previously addressed by those same system files.

    Leviev emphasizes that downgrade attacks are an important threat for the developer community to consider as hackers endlessly seek paths into target systems that are stealthy and difficult to detect.

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    Lily Hay Newman

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