Black Hat

Snowden RSA Controversy Just One Of Many Facing Security Industry

In a little more than a week, executives from world’s leading technology firms will gather in San Francisco for the RSA Conference, the cyber security industry’s biggest show in North America. No hacker con, RSA is something akin to corporate speed dating for companies in the security industry. But, like so much else in the technology world, this year’s conference has become mired in controversy stemming from Edward Snowden’s leak of classified documents related to government surveillance. In December, Reuters broke the story that, among the documents leaked by Snowden was evidence that RSA, the security division of EMC and parent company to the conference, accepted a $10m payment from the NSA to implement what turned out to be a vulnerable encryption algorithm as the default option for its BSafe endpoint protection product. RSA, the security division of EMC, has denied the allegations that it accepted the money while knowing that […]

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When The Internet of Things Attacks! Parsing The IoT Botnet Story

I spent most of last week at a conference in Florida going deep on the security of critical infrastructure – you know: the software that runs power plants and manufacturing lines. (More to come on that!) While there, the security firm Proofpoint released a statement saying that it had evidence that a spam botnet was using “Internet of Things” devices. The company said on January 16 that a spam campaign totaling 750,000 malicious emails originated with a botnet made up of “more than 100,000 everyday consumer gadgets” including home networking routers, multi media centers, televisions and at least one refrigerator.” Proofpoint claims it is the “first time the industry has reported actual proof of such a cyber attack involving common appliances.” [Read: “Missing in action at Black Hat: the PC.”] Heady stuff – but is it true? It’s hard to know for sure. As with all these reports, it’s important […]

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Is 2014 The Year Uncle Sam Takes On Connected Device Security?

The Consumer Electronics Show – or CES- kicked off last week in Las Vegas. In the last decade, CES has become one of the premiere venues for consumer device makers to launch new products and to show off prototypes of technology they hope to introduce to the public. Home entertainment megafauna dominate the coverage of CES — there was Samsung’s 85-inch LED LCD model with 4K resolution that can transform from flat-screen to curved display. But this year’s show is also a showcase for the next wave of connected devices, including wearable technology, smart appliances and connected vehicles. All these new platforms raise important questions about security, privacy and reliability. I sat down to talk about some of those issues with Mark Stanislav, the lead security evangelist at the firm Duo Security. Mark is a frequent contributor to The Security Ledger who last joined us to provide an end of year […]

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Famed Hacker Barnaby Jack Died Of Accidental Overdose

Barnaby Jack, the world-renowned hacker who was found dead in his San Francisco apartment in July died of an accidental overdose of cocaine, heroin and prescription drugs, according to a report released by the San Francisco Medical Examiner’s office.  The news was first reported by the website theverge.com. Jack, a 36-year-old New Zealand resident was found unresponsive in bed, surrounded by bottles of pills, empty bottles of beer and champagne and evidence of “illicit drug use,” the Medical Examiner’s report states. Jack had traces of cocaine, heroin, Xanax, and Benadryl in his system at the time of death. Jack was one of the most gifted security researchers of his generation. The head of embedded device security at the firm IOActive, Jack electrified audiences with his demonstrations of vulnerabilities in devices such as ATMs and implantable insulin pumps. In a now-famous “Jackpotting” demonstration, he demonstrated a remotely exploitable hole affecting bank automated teller machines […]

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Fix From LG Ends Involuntary SmartTV Snooping, But Privacy Questions Remain

The electronics firm LG issued a software update for some “Smart TV” models that were discovered spying on owners, but the company still faces scrutiny over its privacy policy. The company issued a firmware update for its LG 42LN575V model television sets, which were the subject of scrutiny last week after a UK-based technology consultant using the handle “DoctorBeet” discovered that his LG television was transmitting information about his viewing habits to company servers without his consent. The blogger, “DoctorBeet” (aka Jason Huntley, of Yorkshire, England) first wrote about his discovery on November 18, setting off a small firestorm of controversy. An analysis by Huntley uncovered a number of sketchy or outright illegal data harvesting behaviors. Among them: His LG television sent information on which channels he viewed to an LG-owned web domain. (The domain in question was not in service at the time.) The LG television relayed information on […]

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