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Late To The Party, Microsoft Offers Mega Bounties For Software Bugs

June 19, 2013 Paul Roberts

Microsoft on Wednesday announced its first ever formal program to pay security researchers for finding software vulnerabilities in its newest products. The bug bounty program will launch on June 26 and be formally unveiled at the upcoming Black Hat Briefings hacker conference in Las Vegas at the end of July. And, though late to the party, Microsoft is making up for lost time by going large. The Redmond, Washington software maker will pay researchers up to $100,000 for “truly novel” exploitation techniques that defeat protections built into the very latest version of Windows, 8.1 Preview. It will additionally pay $50,000 for ideas for defensive strategies that accompany a bypass, raising the total potential purse for an exploit and accompanying remediation to $150,000. Additionally, Microsoft announced a short-term bounty program for its Internet Explorer 11 Preview, with the company paying up to $11,000 USD for critical vulnerabilities that affect Internet Explorer […]

Podcast: Project Prism – Has Uncle Sam Gone Rogue?

June 8, 2013 Paul Roberts

It was hard to escape the big news this week: revelations from The Guardian and The Washington Post about a program of widespread surveillance of online social networks and mobile phone use. The news, both the result of high-level leaks of classified information, has embroiled the Obama Administration in the most serious questions about domestic spying since the Nixon administration. To discuss the week’s events, Paul sat down with Ron Gula, the CEO of Tenable Network Security (and a former NSA security ninja) and Rick Forno, director of the University of Maryland Baltimore County’s Graduate Cybersecurity Program and a Junior Affiliate Scholar at the Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society (CIS). While neither guest was surprised to read about the government’s monitoring of cell phone activity or data from social networks, the latest reports lay bare the dimensions of the U.S. government’s domestic spying post 9/11, and raise serious […]

Missing in Action At BlackHat: The PC

June 3, 2013 Paul Roberts

Once the target of choice for hackers of all stripes, personal computers (PC) will be -at most- a side attraction at this year’s annual Black Hat Briefings show in Las Vegas, where presentations on ways to attack mobile devices and other networked “stuff” will take center stage. Just over ten percent of the scheduled talks and turbo talks at The Black Hat Briefings in early August (5 of 47) will be devoted to attacks against what might be considered “traditional” endpoints, like end user systems and servers running Microsoft’s Windows, Apple’s Mac OSX and Linux. By contrast, more than 30% will discuss security flaws and attacks against mobile phones or other “smart” devices including wireless surveillance cameras, home automation systems and smart meters. The dearth of PC-focused talks isn’t a new trend in and of itself. As far back as 2006, talks that explicitly discussed security issues with components of Microsoft’s […]

Monoculture 2.0: Will Android’s Rise Be A Security Nightmare?

May 31, 2013 Paul Roberts

There have been a bunch of interesting articles in recent weeks that highlight the rapid expansion of Google’s Android operating system from phones and tablets to all kinds of intelligent devices. They beg the question: is Android becoming the Microsoft Windows of the fast-emerging “Internet of Things.” And, if so, we might ask: ‘What are the security implications of that?’ First the skinny on Android’s growing dominance of the intelligent device sector. Ashlee Vance over at Businessweek.com delved into that with an article “Behind the Internet of Things is Android – and its everywhere.” Vance makes the point that Android is not only the choice for 75% of the handset makers these days – it’s also become the OS of choice for anyone making anything with a processor and a networking stack. The effect of that is akin to what Microsoft encountered when Windows went from being just another PC […]

Browser Plug-in Steals Facebook Logins, Pumps Spam For GM Cars

May 13, 2013 Paul Roberts

Microsoft is warning users of Google’s Chrome and The Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox web browsers that a malicious browser extension for those platforms attempts to steal Facebook account login information after it is installed. The attacks have mostly occurred in Brazil, Microsoft, and have been linked to spam campaigns promoting GM cars, like the Chevy Celta, an ultracompact car produced by General Motors do Brasil, according to a post on Microsoft’s Technet web site. Microsoft identified the malware bundled with the browser extensions as Febipos.A, a malicious Trojan. After being installed, the Trojan waits for the user to log in to Facebook before it springs to life. Febipos downloads commands from a remote website that instruct it to carry out a wide range of actions through the active Facebook account, including wall posts, sharing and “liking” pages, commenting on other users’ posts and inviting Facebook friends to a group chat. You […]