The days of chasing down white-hat security researchers with packs of lawyers like they were criminals is long behind us – or is it? A new story out of Canada suggests that “killing the messenger” is still the preferred response of some organizations when presented with inconvenient truths about shoddy and insecure software. According to a story in Sunday’s National Post, a 20 year-old student at Dawson College has been expelled after he discovered and responsibly disclosed a gaping security hole in a management platform used by Dawson and many of Quebec’s General and Vocational Colleges” (or CEGEPs), which server around 250,000 students. Ahmed Al-Khabaz, a student in Dawson’s Computer Science program discovered the flaw while designing a mobile application to give students easier access to the campus’s Omnivox program, which is used to manage a wide range of student services. In an interview with National Post, Al-Khabaz said that […]
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For Industrial, Medical Systems: Bugs Run In The Family
On the surface, the kinds of industrial control systems that run a power plant or factory floor are very different from, say, a drug infusion pump sitting bedside in a hospital intensive care unit. But two security researchers say that many of these systems have two important things in common: they’re manufactured by the same company, and contain many of the same critical software security problems. In a presentation at gathering of industrial control security experts in Florida, researchers Billy Rios and Terry McCorkle said an informal audit of medical devices from major manufacturers, including Philips showed that medical devices have many of the same kinds of software security holes found in industrial control system (ICS) software from the same firms. The research suggests that lax coding practices may be institutionalized within the firms, amplifying their effects. Rios (@xssniper), a security researcher at Google, and McCorkle (@0psys), the CTO of SpearPoint […]
New Phishing Toolkit Uses Whitelisting To Keep Scams Alive
Researchers at RSA say that a new phishing toolkit allows attackers to put a velvet rope around scam web pages – bouncing all but the intended victims. The new toolkit, dubbed “Bouncer,” was discovered in an analysis of attacks on financial institutions in South Africa, Australia and Malaysia, said Daniel Cohen, Head of Business Development for Online Threats Managed Services at RSA. The kit allows attackers to generate a unique ID for each intended victim, then embed that in a URL that is sent to the victim. Outsiders attempting to access the phishing page are redirected to a “404 page not found” error message, Cohen said. In phishing attacks, attackers pose as a legitimate online entity in an attempt to obtain a user’s username, password or other sensitive information. Phishing attacks often rely on imposter web sites to trick users into giving up their secret information. The discovery of “Bouncer” underscores the […]
University Course Will Teach Medical Device Security
The University of Michigan will be among the first to offer graduate students the opportunity to study the security of advanced medical devices. The course, EECS 598-008 “Medical Device Security” will teach graduate students in UMich’s Electrical Engineering and Computer Science program “the engineering concepts and skills for creating more trustworthy software-based medical devices ranging from pacemakers to radiation planning software to mobile medical apps.” It comes amid heightened scrutiny of the security of medical device hardware and software, as more devices connected to IP-based hospital networks and add wireless monitoring and management functionality. The new course comes amid rapid change in the market for sophisticated medical devices like insulin pumps, respirators and monitoring stations, which increasingly run on versions of the same operating systems that power desktops and servers. In 2011, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reported that software failures were the root cause of a quarter […]
Update: Plumbing Facebook, Researcher Finds Hole In Secure File Transfer Platform
Updated to include response from Accellion. 1/9/2013 A security researcher who was looking for vulnerabilities in Facebook’s platform instead stumbled on a much larger hole that could affect scores of firms who rely on a secure file transfer platform from Accellion. Writing on his blog on Monday, Israeli researcher Nir Goldshlager said he uncovered a security hole affecting Accellion’s Secure File Transfer service that could allow an attacker to take control of a user’s Secure File Transfer account with little more than the e-mail address associated with the account. Accellion Secure File Transfer is a service that allows enterprises to offer secure transfer and storage of large files (up to 100GB). In contrast to consumer-focused services like DropBox, Accellion offers comprehensive file tracking and reporting as well as data security features necessary to satisfy government regulations like HIPAA, GLBA, and SOX. Secure File Transfer is offered to companies as a private cloud, public […]
