mobile devices

Exclusive: Apple Store Favorite IZON Cameras Riddled With Security Holes

It’s another day, another face-palm moment for the home surveillance camera industry. Just one month after the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) settled a complaint with the maker of SecurView, a line of poorly secured home surveillance cameras, a researcher at the firm Duo Security has found a slew of even more serious security holes in the IZON Camera – a popular product that is sold in Apple Stores and Best Buy, among others. A review by The Security Ledger found dozens of such systems accessible via the public Internet, in some cases allowing anyone to peer into the interiors of private residences and businesses. Mark Stanislav, the Security Evangelist at the firm Duo Security, presented the details of a security audit of the IZON camera at a security conference in New York on Tuesday. Stanislav documented troubling security lapses including a wide-open configuration with exposed ports for accessing the device […]

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Microsoft Tests Glass Competitor. But Do Wearables Threaten Privacy, Social Norms?

Forbes has a really interesting article a couple of days back that posited the huge dislocations caused by wearable technology – including front-on challenges to social norms that are thousands of years in the making and contemporary notions of privacy. The applications for wearable technology like Google Glass are too numerous to mention. Just a few include “heads up” displays for surgeons in the operating room. Teachers (or their students) could benefit from having notes displayed in their field of vision, rather than having to resort to printed notes or the (dreaded) Powerpoint slide. But the devil is in the details of the wearable technology, Forbes argues. Unlike external devices – pagers, mobile phones, smart phones – wearable tech is more intimately connected to ourselves: in constant contact with our bodies and notifying us with vibrations and sounds in ways that it may be difficult to ignore, Forbes argues. Indelicately implemented, […]

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News Roundup: Plundering The Internet Of Things

There were two interesting pieces on the fast-evolving topic of security and the Internet of Things that are worth reading. The first is a long piece by Bob Violino over at CSO that takes the pulse of the IoT and security question right now. The big picture: its early days, but that there are some troubling trends.   The vast expansion of IP-enabled devices is matched by a lack of security know-how at device makers, Violino writes. And, as the environment of “smart devices” grows, the interactions between those devices become more difficult to anticipate – especially as devices start sharing contextual data and taking actions based on that data. “As machines become autonomous they are able to interact with other machines and make decisions which impact upon the physical world,” notes Andrew Rose, a principal analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass. Rose says. “But these are coded by […]

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Google: Android Infections Are Literally One-In-A-Million

The emergence of malicious software for Google’s Android operating system has been one of the biggest security stories of the last two years. But Google is arguing that much of that reporting is hype, saying its own data shows hardly any evidence of infections of mobile devices running Android. Speaking at the recent Virus Bulletin Conference in Berlin, Google mobile researcher Adrian Ludwig presented data that suggests the number of true infections from malicious software are vanishingly small – even in the unregulated independent Android marketplaces. But mobile security experts wonder if Google’s data isn’t burying legitimate security concerns about its mobile operating system. The explosion of Android malware has been so well documented as to become almost a truism in the security world. McAfee in August reported a 35 percent growth in Android malware that included “SMS-stealing banking malware, fraudulent dating and entertainment apps, weaponized legitimate apps and malicious […]

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At MIT Conference, Warnings of Big Data Fundamentalism

A senior Microsoft researcher issued a stern warning about the negative consequences of the current mania for data harvesting saying that a kind of “fundamentalism” was emerging regarding the utility of what’s been termed “Big Data” that could easily lead to a Orwellian future of ubiquitous surveillance and diminished freedom. Speaking to an audience of around 300 technology industry luminaries at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s annual Emerging Technology (EMTECH) conference, Kate Crawford, a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research in Boston said that the technology industry’s fetish for “Big Data” had blinded it to the limits of analytics, and the privacy implications of wholesale data harvesting. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT’s) annual Emerging Technologies (EMTECH) conference, a high-gloss event that throws entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and academics together to talk ‘big ideas’ on TED-inspired sets. Crawford’s speech, coming on the heels of a talk about transforming healthcare with big data […]

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