Interview

McAfee sideshow eclipses Defcon’s real security breakthroughs | Security – InfoWorld

The onetime technology wunderkind, who left a job working for Lockheed to turn his curiosity about computer viruses into a thriving, global corporation showed up at two Las Vegas hacker cons last week: B-Sides Las Vegas and DEFCON. He offered some off-the-cuff rebukes to firms like Google. He also rambled long and hard about the dark forces that pursue him: the U.S. government, the government of Belize, Central American drug cartels and script kiddies desperate for his (virtual) scalp. Everywhere he goes, people take his picture. Who are they working for? The phones and computers he buys are bugged. His movements are being tracked. Those in attendance were admonished to beware of government snooping — especially via mobile applications. “Without privacy there is no freedom,” McAfee intoned.   Listening to McAfee rant, it’s easy to forget there were plenty of folks walking the halls of Defcon, Black Hat, and B-Sides […]

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Vulnerable Mobile Software Management Tool Reaches Into IoT

You could be forgiven for never having heard of Red Bend Software. The company is small – just 250 employees- and privately held. Red Bend’s headquarters is a suite of offices in a nondescript office park in Waltham, Massachusetts, just off Route 128 – America’s “Silicon Highway.” But the company’s small profile belies a big footprint in the world of mobile devices. Since 2005, more than 2 billion devices running the company’s mobile management software have been sold worldwide. Today, the Red Bend is believed to control between 70 and 90 percent of the market for mobile software management (MSM) technology, which carriers use to service mobile devices. The software enables mobile carriers to do critical tasks, including firmware-over-the-air (FOTA) software updates, mobile device configuration and other on-device changes.  Red Bend counts many of the world’s leading companies in the mobile, enterprise and manufacturing sectors as clients, including Intel, Qualcomm, Samsung, Sharp, LG, Sony, Huawei, China Mobile and Lenovo. For the most part, Red […]

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PasswordsCon Preview: Passwords Are Dead. Long Live Passwords.

I had an opportunity to sit with Per Thorsheim, co-founder of PasswordsCon about next week’s Passwords14 Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. If you haven’t checked it out before, PasswordsCon is the world’s premiere technical conference that is just focused on the security of passwords and pin codes. PasswordsCon is a one-of-a-kind event: bringing together folks whose specialty is cracking and defeating password security with security experts whose interest is in shoring up protections for sensitive data. This year’s conference, which is sharing space with the B-Sides Las Vegas Conference on August 5 and 6. PasswordsCon has earned a reputation for being the launching pad for some eye-popping new tools for password cracking. Back in 2012, we reported on a 25 GPU device that radically lowered the bar to cracking even the strongest passwords protected with weaker encryption algorithms, like Microsoft’s LM and NTLM, obsolete. Among other things, the Conference will feature […]

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Hacker Summer Camp: Security Cons Blossom In The Desert

The mercury is expected to top 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40 C) in Las Vegas next week. And that could mean only one thing: it’s conference time for some of the world’s top computer hackers.   Indeed, next week brings the 22nd installment of the DEFCON hacker conference in Las Vegas, and the 18th of Black Hat, DEFCON’s younger, more straight-lace sibling. But, while Black Hat and DEFCON are still the main attraction on the Las Vegas strip, they’re hardly the only shows in town. B-Sides Las Vegas, an alternative mini-con, is in its fifth year and is attracting many of the “cool kids” in the security community to do presentations and demos on Tuesday and Wednesday, August 5 and 6th over at the Tuscan Suites and Casino. Running alongside B-Sides is Passwords 14, a conference that started in Norway and is in its second year on U.S. soil. As its name would […]

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FDA: Regulators Can’t Scale To Police Mobile Health Apps

A senior advisor to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) tossed cold water on speculation that the Agency might try to police mobile health and wellness applications, saying the FDA couldn’t possibly scale up to meet the challenge of policing the hundreds of new apps appearing every month. Correction: The article was changed to clarify Mr. Patel’s comments. He was not responding to a direct question about the FDA setting up an office to regulate mobile health applications. He was commenting on the possibility of creating a platform to evaluate and rate mobile health applications.  Also, he said “It’s not do-able,” not “it’s not possible.” We apologize for any confusion created by the article. – PFR July 10, 2014. The sheer pace of innovation in the mobile health application space and the numbers of such applications already available on mobile marketplaces like the iTunes App Store and Google Play mean that many mobile health applications will escape scrutiny by federal […]

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