The days of chasing down white-hat security researchers with packs of lawyers like they were criminals is long behind us – or is it? A new story out of Canada suggests that “killing the messenger” is still the preferred response of some organizations when presented with inconvenient truths about shoddy and insecure software. According to a story in Sunday’s National Post, a 20 year-old student at Dawson College has been expelled after he discovered and responsibly disclosed a gaping security hole in a management platform used by Dawson and many of Quebec’s General and Vocational Colleges” (or CEGEPs), which server around 250,000 students. Ahmed Al-Khabaz, a student in Dawson’s Computer Science program discovered the flaw while designing a mobile application to give students easier access to the campus’s Omnivox program, which is used to manage a wide range of student services. In an interview with National Post, Al-Khabaz said that […]
Malware
For Industrial, Medical Systems: Bugs Run In The Family
On the surface, the kinds of industrial control systems that run a power plant or factory floor are very different from, say, a drug infusion pump sitting bedside in a hospital intensive care unit. But two security researchers say that many of these systems have two important things in common: they’re manufactured by the same company, and contain many of the same critical software security problems. In a presentation at gathering of industrial control security experts in Florida, researchers Billy Rios and Terry McCorkle said an informal audit of medical devices from major manufacturers, including Philips showed that medical devices have many of the same kinds of software security holes found in industrial control system (ICS) software from the same firms. The research suggests that lax coding practices may be institutionalized within the firms, amplifying their effects. Rios (@xssniper), a security researcher at Google, and McCorkle (@0psys), the CTO of SpearPoint […]
Lights Out For Java: Experts Say Turn It Off – And Leave It Off
Security experts from around the globe are warning Internet users to disable Java while browsing the web, after attacks using a previously unknown (“zero day”) vulnerability in Java began to surface, as part of multi-purpose “exploit kits” that are used to launch attacks from hostile or compromised web sites. The exploit works on all versions of Java 7, including update 10 – the latest release from Oracle, which now manages the Java technology, after acquiring it with the assets of Sun Microsystems, according to an analysis by the firm Alienvault, which said that the exact nature of the vulnerability wasn’t known because the exploit was heavily obfuscated to slow down security researchers. According to this report from Krebsonsecurity, the first word of the new exploit came by way of underground forums, where the administrators of popular exploit kits like Blackhole and the Nuclear exploit kits added the Java exploit as […]
Microsoft Rushes Fix for IE Hole Used in Attacks on DC’s Elite
Microsoft issued an emergency fix for its Internet Explorer web browser on Monday, just days after security researchers reported finding a previously unknown (zero day) vulnerability in IE that was being used in targeted attacks against members of Washington D.C.’s media, government and policy elite. Microsoft’s Security Response Center (MSRC) released the fix for IE versions 6, 7 and 8 on Monday following reports of sophisticated and targeted attacks using the vulnerability were detected on the web site of the Council of Foreign Relations, a leading think tank whose members include senior government officials. In a Security Advisory (#2794220), Microsoft described the flaw as a “remote code execution vulnerability” in code that governs the way that “Internet Explorer accesses an object in memory that has been deleted or (improperly) allocated.” The vulnerability could allow a malicious attacker to create a malicious web page that would exploit the vulnerability to corrupt memory in […]
In Iran, New Data Wiping Malware on the Loose
Iran’s Computer Emergency Response Team (IR-CERT) issued a warning on Sunday about a newly discovered malicious program that is erasing hard drives on infected systems in that country – just the latest data-destroying malware to appear there. IR-CERT said that an investigation by its Maher center found that the malware “wipes files on different drives in various predefined times,” including disk partitions and user profiles. However, the malware isn’t widespread and doesn’t appear linked to “other sophisticated targeted attacks,” the alert said – in a possible reference to the Stuxnet and Flame malware, both of which targeted Iranian critical infrastructure. Subsequent analysis by independent security firms confirmed most of the details of the IR-CERT warning. Writing on Monday, Jamie Blasco of the firm Alien Vault said the malware was “just another wiping malware” and “very simple,” and could have been delivered in a variety of ways – from USB drive […]
