man in the middle attack

NSA Headquarters Fort Meade

How The UK’s HACIENDA Program Targeted Entire Countries

The folks over at Heise/c’t Magazin revealed leaked, classified documents to report on HACIENDA, a GCHQ program to deliver country-wide Internet reconnaissance for so-called “five eyes” nations, including the US (NSA), Canada and Australia. And, as Bruce Schneier points out – its not clear that these documents were from Edward Snowden’s trove of classified NSA materials. HACIENDA involves the large-scale use of TCP “port” scans to profile systems connected to the Internet, in addition to profiling of enabled applications. According to Heise, which published a classified slide deck. GCHQ claimed to have canvassed 27 countries through the program. A list of targeted services includes ubiquitous public services such as HTTP and FTP, SSH (Secure Shell protocol) and SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol). The Heise report, prepared by Julian Kirsch, Christian Grothoff, Monika Ermert, Jacob Appelbaum, Laura Poitras and Henrik Moltke claim that HACIENDA’s goal was to perform active collection and map vulnerable services across […]

Redbend-Samsung

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 […]

Report: Thieves Can Hack and Disable Your Home Alarm System | WIRED

Wired’s Kim Zetter reports on (independent) reports by two researchers that show how home alarm setups can be hacked remotely, from as far away as 250 yards. The vulnerabilities could allow a malicious actor to suppress alarms or create multiple, false alarms that would render the system unreliable (and really annoying). Zetter profiles the work of Logan Lamb, a security researcher at Oak Hill Ridge National Lab who conducted independent research on  three top brands of home alarm systems made by ADT, Vivint and a third company that asked to remain anonymous. She also cites work by Silvio Cesare, who works for Qualys who studied common home alarm systems sold in Australia, including devices manufactured by Swann, an Australian firm that also sells its systems in the U.S. Both discovered a litany of similar problems, Zetter reports: The systems use radio signals to report when monitored doors and windows are opened, but fail to encrypt or authenticate the signals being […]

Researchers Warn Of Flaws In Popular Password Managers

Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley have published a paper describing security holes in five, web-based password managers including LastPass, My1login and Roboform. According to the paper  (PDF), four out of the five password managers inadvertently leaked a user’s credentials for stored web sites due to all-too-common web based security flaws like Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) and Cross Site Scripting (XSS). The researchers, Zhiwei Li, Warren He, Devdatta Akwawe and Dawn Song, all of the University of California Berkeley, said that they disclosed the holes in August of last year and that all of the affected firms and that all but one – NeedMyPassword – have since patched the vulnerabilities. All the password managers tested were found to contain one of a short list of security problems. Either they were vulnerable to classic web-based holes (like XSS), or they were found to be susceptible to user interface-focused attacks, like […]

For Smart TVs, Malware May Hide In Broadcast Content

Researchers at Columbia University have published research showing how new technology that combines broadband and broadcast content could enable a wide range of traditional and novel cyber attacks on smart televisions and other devices: forcing them to interact with malicious web pages, harvesting credentials or carrying out denial of service attacks. The paper, published in May, explores potential attacks on combined broadcast-broadband devices that use an industry specification called Hybrid Broadcast-Broadband Television (HbbTV). According to the researchers, Yossef Oren and Angelos D. Keromytis, the HbbTV specification combines broadband technologies like HTML and broadcast features in an insecure manner. The vulnerabilities affect a wide range of smart entertainment devices, including smart televisions, in Europe and the United States. “This enables a large-scale exploitation technique with a localized geographical footprint based on radio frequency (RF) injection, which requires a minimal budget and infrastructure and is remarkably difficult to detect,” the researchers write. “The technical complexity and […]