Editor’s note: This is reposted from Veracode’s blog. Just in time for the holidays, I received an e-mail by way of Electric Imp. If you’re not familiar with the “Imp,” (my phrase, not theirs), it’s a PaaS that makes it easy to build and connect smart devices. Among the cool gift ideas Electric Imp was promoting: a whole line of products produced by the company Quirky along with GE under the “Wink: Instantly Connected” products banner and available at Best Buy and other stores. There’s Egg Minder, an Internet-connected egg tray that tracks how many eggs you have left in your fridge, and how fresh each of them is. Not your thing? How about Nimbus? It’s a “customizable Internet-connected dashboard that lets you “track the data that affects your life, from commute times and weather to social media and more.” Nimbus looks like someone ripped the gauges out of a […]
Patching
How Connected Consumer Devices Fail The Security Test
The Internet of Things leverages the same, basic infrastructure as the original Internet – making use of protocols like TCP/IP, HTTP, Telnet and FTP. But the devices look and act very differently from traditional PCs, desktops and servers. Many IoT devices run embedded operating systems or variants of the open source Linux OS. And many are low-power and many are single function: designed to simply listen and observe their environment, then report that data to a central (cloud based repository). But IoT devices are still susceptible to hacking and other malicious attacks, including brute force attacks to crack user names and passwords, injection attacks, man in the middle attacks and other types of spoofing. Despite almost 20 years experience dealing with such threats in the context of PCs and traditional enterprise networks, however, too many connected devices that are sold to consumers lack even basic protections against such threats. […]
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 […]
Ephemeral, In-Memory Attack Used With New IE 0Day
It was just last week that we wrote about research from the security firm Triumfant that found evidence for the growing use of ephemeral “diskless” malware. That point was driven home over the weekend, with a report from the firm Fireeye that found a new Internet Explorer zero day vulnerability was being used in conjunction with a disk-less variant of the Hydraq (aka “McRAT”) Trojan horse program. Fireeye first called attention to the existence of attacks exploiting new, “zero day” (or previously unknown) vulnerabilities in the Internet Explorer web browser on Friday. The company discovered the malicious activity on the web site of a “strategically important website” that was being used as a “watering hole” to attack visitors who were “interested in national and international security policy.” The company described two IE vulnerabilities: an information leakage hole and an IE out-of-bounds memory access vulnerability. The information leak affects Windows XP […]
Report: Adobe Data Breach Ten Times Bigger Than First Reported
The huge security breach at software maker Adobe is even bigger than first reported, with more than 150 million credentials stolen, including records on up to 38 million active customers, according to a report by Brian Krebs at the web site Krebsonsecurity.com. Krebs said in a story posted Tuesday that Adobe’s initial estimates that user names and passwords for around three million customers was well short of the actual number taken by hackers who breached the company’s network. Citing a file posted by the website Anonnews.org, Krebs said the actual number of affected Adobe accounts stolen is much larger: 150 million username and hashed password pairs including credentials for 38 million “active” accounts, according to Adobe spokesperson Heather Edell. Edell told Krebs that Adobe has just completed a campaign to contact active users whose user IDs and encrypted passwords were stolen (including this author). Those customers are being encouraged to change […]
