In-brief: Tune in to our conversation with Dell CISO Alan Daines on Friday, May 29th at 1:00 PM ET. Click the image above to register!
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The Security of Things: Video Available
We held our first ever security and Internet of Things event back in May. The Security of Things Forum took place in Cambridge, MA (“Our Fair City”) on May 7 and brought together about 100 thought leaders and entrepreneurs for a day of discussion and debate about how best to prepare for the explosion of connected devices in the enterprise, the home, the public sector and public spaces. Since then we’ve made a couple of these sessions public: the keynote presentation by In-Q-Tel CISO Dan Geer, and a panel on enterprise risk and IoT, chaired by INEX Advisors’ founder Chris Rezendes. Attendees have had access to all the sessions, as well. But now we’re throwing the doors open to the public and making all the conference sessions available to the public, as well as some 1:1 interviews with our speakers. We invite you all to head on over and check […]
Unpatchable USB Malware Now Open Source | WIRED
Andy Greenberg over at Wired has an interesting piece of news coming out of last week’s Derbycon hacker conference in Louisville, Kentucky. According to Greenberg and Wired, researchers Adam Caudill and Brandon Wilson showed off their own version of Karsten Nohl and Jakob Lell’s BadUSB malware, and that they’d released the code on Github. Their presentation raises the stakes for USB manufacturers to fix the BadUSB problem or leave hundreds of millions of users vulnerable, Greenberg writes. At a presentation at the Black Hat Briefings in August, Nohl and Lell, both of Security Research Labs (SRLabs), showed how the controller chips inside common USB devices can be reprogrammed, allowing USB peripherals to impersonate other kinds of devices. Among other things, Nohl demonstrated how a BadUSB infected device could emulate a USB keyboard, issuing commands to a connected machine using the permissions of the logged-in user. Alternatively, an infected USB could spoof a […]
Exploding Gas Tanks: Risk, Liability and Internet of Things
We like to construct Hollywood friendly plots around a lot of the seminal moments in our collective history. For Civil Rights, we like to picture the integration of Little Rock High School, Rosa Parks’ courageous protest on a Montgomery bus or the March on Washington. For environmentalism, we talk about Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring or, maybe, the burning Cuyahoga River in Cleveland. (This vintage news footage of the 1969 fire calls it the fire that “sparked the environmental movement” without any apparent irony.) For automobile safety, we imagine Ralph Nader and the image of a 1972 crash test that shows the gas tank of the Ford Pinto exploding in a rear impact collision, engulfing both cars in flames. But those memories are often way oversimplified. Little Rock and the Montgomery bus boycott were just two battles in a fight for civil rights that went back to the end of the Civil War. Likewise, the Cuyahoga […]
Hack Tool Authors Deny Link To Celeb Photo Leaks
With some of Hollywood’s biggest stars issuing statements on Monday condemning the leak of personal photographs online, attention has turned to identifying the source of the leaks. But more than 24 hours after the photos appeared, there are more questions than answers about its source. Early attention has focused on an automated tool that exploited an apparent vulnerability in Apple’s FindMyiPhone feature. But by Monday, there were denials from the makers of that tool that it played any role in the massive privacy breach that saw photos of A-list celebrities like Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton and others leaked online. Within hours of the photos’ appearance on the image sharing site 4chan, attention shifted to the cause of the leak and the coincidence of the leaked photos with the publication of iBrute, a simple tool available on GitHub in recent days. According to this published report by Owen Williams over at TheNextWeb, the […]
