Technology Archives

Technology

APT or fANTasy: The Strange Story of BadBIOS

November 15, 2013 Paul Roberts

Yesterday over on Veracode’s blog I wrote about the ongoing saga of “BadBIOS” – a piece of malicious software that might be the most sophisticated virus ever written, or a figment of the imagination of Dragos Ruiu, the esteemed security researcher who says he discovered it on systems he owned. The story of BadBIOS reads like something out of science fiction. Ruiu has described it in interviews and blog posts as BIOS-based malware that can back door systems running a variety of operating systems – OS X, Windows and even OpenBSD. But it’s also described as an ephemeral kind of ‘we-don’t-know-what,’ that can’t be isolated or analyzed. One Twitter follower of Ruiu’s suggested designating it a “heisenbug” which he defined as “a software bug that seems to disappear or alter its behavior when one attempts to study it.” That would be funny if this weren’t deadly serious. For, really, one […]

Supply Chain Transparency Doesn’t Extend To Security

November 12, 2013 Paul Roberts

We live in an ever-more unstable world in which massive disruptions, whether natural or man-made, are a frequent occurrence. Companies that make everything from aircraft to mobile phones to cappuccino need to be nimble – sidestepping global calamities that might idle assembly lines or leave customers without their morning cup of coffee. As in other areas, the benefits of technology advancements like cheap, cloud based computing, remote sensors and mobility are transforming the way that companies manage their vast, global network of suppliers. These days, supply chain transparency is all the rage – allowing companies to share information seamlessly and in realtime with their downstream business partners and suppliers. Firms like the start-ups Sourcemap, and LlamaSoft are offering “supply chain visualization” technology that leverages a familiar formula these days: mobility, social networking, crowd-sourced intelligence, and “Big Data” analytics. [There’s more to read about supply chain security on The Security Ledger.] However, as […]

IT Pros: Internet Of Things Is A Governance Disaster

November 8, 2013 Paul Roberts

Not that we needed a survey to tell us this: but IT pros are seriously concerned about the risks posed by all the IP-enabled devices that are starting to connect to their corporate networks. That’s the conclusion of a survey of 2,013 members of ISACA, a worldwide association of information security professionals, which found almost unanimous agreement that the Internet of Things poses a governance problem for their networks, with increased security threats the most oft-cited governance issue raised by IoT adoption. The survey (PDF) also polled 4,000 consumers in the U.S., U.K., India and Mexico, finding that IT professionals were less sanguine than consumers about the transformative potential of the Internet of Things for enterprises. Just four in 10 agreed that the benefits of IoT adoption outweighed the risks, while half of the ISACA members polled felt that the benefits of IoT to consumers outweighed the risks. Around a quarter of […]

Ephemeral In-Memory Malware Common At High Value Targets

November 4, 2013 Paul Roberts

Computer security has always been a game of Spy vs. Spy, with the bad guys trying to stay one step ahead of the latest tactics and tools used to catch them. And that’s still true today, in an age of so-called “advanced persistent threats.” So what’s the next big thing in advanced malware? How about ghostly, ephemeral malware that never exists outside of memory and disappears whenever the infected system is rebooted? The security firm Triumfant issued a warning on Monday about what it calls “advanced volatile threats” or AVT. The malware is already a common component in attacks against high value targets, including government agencies and intelligence services John Prisco, Triumfant’s CEO and President told The Security Ledger. The terminology here is a bit tricky – as Prisco admits. Technically, almost every online attack begins in memory, where attackers seek to overwrite the memory space used by a […]

Week In Security: NSA Spies on Yahoo & Google, Adobe Hack and Healthcare.gov

November 3, 2013 Paul Roberts

There’s nothing like a Sunday morning for looking back over the week’s events and trying to make sense of at all – or at least what sense there is to be had. This Sunday was no different – especially after a week that saw continued revelations stemming from Edward Snowden’s leak of classified intelligence on NSA spying, the massive hack of software maker Adobe. Then there was the botched rollout of the federal Healthcare.gov marketplace – which morphed into an even bigger, uglier problem as the week progressed. To help me sort it all out, I called on Nick Selby, the CEO of StreetCred Software and an authority on cyber security, law enforcement, government procurement, Russia, Germany, aviation, travel journalism and all manner of other topics. I love talking to Nick because his wealth of life and professional experience make him predictably unpredictable when it comes to interpreting current events. […]