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What’s In Your Bucket? Data For The Taking In Amazon S3 Containers

Security is one of the main obstacles to greater cloud adoption. When it gets right down to it: companies that own sensitive data are reluctant to release control of it to a third party without ample reassurance that it won’t be lost or stolen. Given that’s the case, the results from an analysis of Amazon’s cloud-based Simple Storage Service (S3) by the security firm Rapid7 won’t ease privacy and security fears surrounding cloud-based storage and applications. In that study, Rapid7 researchers surveyed 12,328 Amazon S3 “buckets” – virtual containers for stored data. The results: 1,951 of those buckets were publicly accessible – around 1 of every 6. Within those 2,000-odd public buckets were 126 billion (with a “B”) files. That’s right – 126 billion. The sheer amount of data was too large for Rapid7 to audit each file individually, so the company sampled 40,000 publicly visible files and found that […]

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Spammers Using Yahoo, Google To Whitewash Links

If the gigantic distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against the spam blacklisting operation Spamhaus wasn’t proof enough: spammers have trouble steering around blacklists and other reputation-based filters. Even if the language in their message is generic enough to avoid detection, dropping a link to a known, malicious- or compromised domain is plenty to get an entire message dropped. Spammers without a legion of 100,000 bots at their fingertips have to get creative about getting their message into the target’s inbox. Lately, a method that’s drawing attention is to leverage low-security redirection services to whitewash a link to a ‘known-malicious’ or merely suspicious sites. Barracuda Networks said that it has captured spam attacks that are combining a Yahoo based URL shortening service with Google’s free Translate service to whitewash links in spam e-mail messages and evade automated detection. The message, which was sent to a Barracuda “honeypot” system  includes a […]

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With $Pi Million At Stake, Chrome Withstands Hacker Assault

With $3.14159 million in prize money at stake, Google’s Chrome OS has withstood attempts to hack it in the company’s semi-annual Pwnium contest in Vancouver, a Google spokeswoman told The Security Ledger. In a statement Thursday, Google spokeswoman Jessica Kositz said that the company did not receive any winning entries during the day-long contest, but that the company is evaluating work that may qualify for a partial prize:  a potentially infinite series of Google Wallet transfers in the amounts:  $1 followed by $.50 followed by $.25 followed by $.125 and so on. OK – We made that last part up. Pwnium runs alongside the better known pwn2own contest at CanSecWest. This year, Google is providing funding for both contests. However, in 2012 the company pulled its support for pwn2own, objecting to the lack of a requirement of “responsible disclosure” – in which entrants must disclose the details of their exploits to the […]

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Android Ecosystem: Still Fragmented, Insecure

The latest data from Google on use of its Android mobile operating systems highlights the challenge facing the company, with just over 16% of Android users running Versions 4.1 or 4.2 –  the latest versions of the OS, dubbed “Jelly Bean” more than six months after its release. In fact, fully 44% of Android users are still running the “Gingerbread” release – Versions 2.3.3 through 2.3.7, a two year-old version of the operating system that has known security vulnerabilities. This according to data released by Google on the Android  developer blog. The operating system data was culled from Android devices that accessed Google Play, the company’s mobile application marketplace, during a 14 day period that ended on March 4. The diversity of the Android ecosystem is a byproduct of Google’s go-to-market strategy for the mobile OS. Unlike Apple, which controls both the hardware and software for its iPhones and iPads […]

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FTC Forum Will Tackle Mobile Device Threats

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is continuing to focus its energies on protecting the growing number of consumers using smart phones and other mobile devices. Next up: a public forum to discuss threats to mobile devices. The FTC announced the one-day public forum on Friday and said it hopes to use the event to address problems like “malware, viruses and similar threats facing users of smartphones and other mobile technologies.” The event will take place on June 4th at the FTC’s offices on New Jersey Avenue NW in Washington, D.C. The public forum is just the latest effort by the nation’s leading watchdog to reign in a free-wheeling mobile application marketplace, and put stronger consumer and privacy protections in place. Earlier this month, the agency released a Staff Report that called on mobile OS, mobile device and mobile application firms to provide clearer guidelines to consumers about how their information […]

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