software development

Episode 124: The Twitter Accounts Pushing French Protests. Also: social engineering the Software Supply Chain

In this week’s podcast (#124):  we speak with French security researcher Baptiste Robert about research on the social media accounts pushing the french “Yellow Vest” protests. Surprise, surprise: they’re not french. Also: Brian Fox of the firm Sonatype joins us to talk about the recent compromise of the Github event-stream project and why social engineering poses a real risk to the security of the software supply chain. 

Podcast Episode 91: Fighting Fake News with or without Facebook and whats with all the Cryptojacking?

In this episode of The Security Ledger Podcast (#91): with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg saying he will testify before Congress, we ask Harvard’s Matthew Baum about what Congressmen and women should ask him and how to best fight fake news. Also: Adam Kujawa of Malwarebytes updates us on that company’s latest quarterly threat report and helps us answer the question “what’s with all the cryptomining”?

Researchers Warn of Physics-Based Attacks on Sensors

Billions of sensors that are already deployed lack protections against attacks that manipulate the physical properties of devices to cause sensors and embedded devices to malfunction, researchers working in the U.S. and China have warned. 

Update: Five Billion Tests Later: IoT and Industrial Control System Protocols Raise Alarms

In-brief: Close to five billion “fuzzing” tests conducted during 2016 reveal protocols used by industrial control systems, vehicles and Internet of Things devices to be weaker, on average, with many crashing hundreds of times and revealing vulnerabilities that could be used by malicious actors. (Editor’s note: added comment by Chris Clark. Aug 9 2017 – PFR)

Code Tutorials Spread Application Flaws Far and Wide

In-brief: Researchers at universities in Germany, working with the security firm Trend Micro, discovered more than 100 vulnerabilities in GitHub code repositories simply by looking for re-used code from tutorials and other free code samples. The same method could be harnessed by cyber criminals or other sophisticated attackers to find and exploit vulnerabilities in software applications, the researchers warned.