Technology Archives

Technology

That LIFX Smart Lightbulb Hack Wasn’t Easy

July 7, 2014 Paul Roberts

If you’ve been following your Internet of Things security news, you probably read about the latest hack of a consumer-oriented ‘smart home’ device: Context Information Security’s analysis of security holes in LIFX-brand smart light bulbs. The top line on this is scary enough. As The Register reported: researchers at Context discovered that, by gaining access to a “master bulb” in LIFX deployments, they could control all connected lightbulbs and expose user network configurations. That’s scary – and recalls research on hacking Philips HUE light bulbs that was published last year. But read down in the Context research and you’ll realize that, while the LIFX technology wasn’t perfect, the job of hacking the technology wasn’t child’s play, either. LIFX connected its smart bulbs using a 6LoWPAN-based mesh network. The company made the mistake of transmitting most bulb-bulb communications in the clear, which made analyzing traffic sent between master- and slave bulbs easy. Context researchers found […]

FDA: Regulators Can’t Scale To Police Mobile Health Apps

July 2, 2014 Paul Roberts

A senior advisor to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) tossed cold water on speculation that the Agency might try to police mobile health and wellness applications, saying the FDA couldn’t possibly scale up to meet the challenge of policing the hundreds of new apps appearing every month. Correction: The article was changed to clarify Mr. Patel’s comments. He was not responding to a direct question about the FDA setting up an office to regulate mobile health applications. He was commenting on the possibility of creating a platform to evaluate and rate mobile health applications. Also, he said “It’s not do-able,” not “it’s not possible.” We apologize for any confusion created by the article. – PFR July 10, 2014. The sheer pace of innovation in the mobile health application space and the numbers of such applications already available on mobile marketplaces like the iTunes App Store and Google Play mean that many mobile health applications will escape scrutiny by federal […]

Microsoft Uses Courts To Take Down Malicious, Managed DNS Services

July 1, 2014 Paul Roberts

Microsoft Corp. has taken action against yet another cyber crime network, taking control of- and shutting down a managed DNS (domain name system) operated by the firm No-IP that were being abused by cyber criminals, the company said on Monday. The domains were associated with malware families named Jenxcus and Bladabindi that are believed to have infected on some 7.5 million systems, globally. The malicious programs – which are used to spy on the operators of infected systems – use Dynamic DNS services like NO-IP to communicate with command and control systems used to manage infected systems. Dynamic DNS makes the malicious systems more difficult to trace. In a post on Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit blog, Richard Domingues Boscovich, the company’s Assistant General Counsel said that the company had filed a civil case on June 19 naming two foreign nationals: Mohamed Benabdellah and Naser Al Mutairi along with a U.S. company, Vitalwerks Internet Solutions, LLC (doing […]

The Internet Of Things Will Need Millions Of Developers By 2020 – ReadWrite

June 30, 2014 Paul Roberts

Matt Asay over at ReadWriteWeb has an interesting piece that’s worth reading on the (coming) shortage of qualified application developers engendered by The Internet of Things. Asay cites a new report out from the firm VisionMobile that projects a shocking 57% CAGR (compound annual growth rate) in developers between now and the end of the decade. Much of that will be driven by opportunities in the IoT. Like past gold rushes, the riches in the IoT gold rush won’t go to the “miners” (read: thing makers) but to their suppliers – the 21st century Levi Strauss’s of the world who figure out a way to “stitch” Internet enabled devices together, Asay writes. In other words: value in the age of the IoT is created not by generating data, but by making sense of the (low value) data spewed out by billions of connected devices. (This isn’t exactly ground breaking – […]

Cisco: MS Word Macro Attacks Still Work Just Fine

June 30, 2014 Paul Roberts

We like to throw around the term ‘Advanced Persistent Threat’ casually these days to refer to a whole range of sophisticated and persistent attacks – usually on high value targets. But a blog post today by Cisco Systems makes clear that many otherwise sophisticated attackers do just fine with some pretty low tech and old school methods. Case in point: an attack Cisco is dubbing “String of Paerls-” a series of attacks on companies involved in research and what Cisco calls the ‘industrial manufacturing vertical.’ According to the report, the attacks start with a decidedly old school attack: a Microsoft Word document that includes a malicious Office Macro.”When the victim opens the Word document, an On-Open macro fires, which results in downloadin and executable and launching it on the victim’s machine.” Now, macro-based attacks are truly vintage. They first came to light in the late 1990s, with the Melissa virus – an early and successful […]