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What Hollywood Can Teach Us: Passwords Matter More Than Ever

September 3, 2014 Paul Roberts

Andrey Belenko had what you might call a ‘brush with infamy’ earlier this week after a presentation he took part in on the security of Apple’s iCloud became a set piece in the news media scramble to identify the source of a huge trove of leaked celebrity photos – many depicting Hollywood A-List stars in various states of undress. “It’s not the kind of attention you want to receive,” said Belenko, a security researcher with the firm ViaForensics. “It’s all really creepy stuff.” Belenko’s link to the celebrity hacking scandal was a matter of happenstance. He was scheduled to give a presentation at a small, St. Petersburg multi-media conference, Chaos Constructions, over the weekend. Belenko was presenting research he had conducted a year earlier on the security of Apple’s KeyChain technology and iCloud – a talk he had given twice before in the last year. Prior to his talk, Belenko […]

Wateringhole Attack Targets Auto and Aerospace Industries | AlienVault

September 3, 2014 Paul Roberts

If you’re in the automotive, manufacturing or aerospace industries: beware. Hackers are targeting you and your colleagues with sophisticated, watering-hole style attacks. That, according to a blog post by Jamie Blasco, a noted security researcher at the firm AlienVault. Blasco has written a blog post describing what he says is a compromise of a website belonging to a publisher of “software used for simulation and system engineering” in the three vertical industries. According to Blasco, after compromising the web site, the attackers added code that loaded a malicious Javascript program dubbed “Scanbox” that is used for reconnaissance and exploitation of web site visitors. [Read more Security Ledger coverage of watering hole attacks here.] Scanbox installs malicious software on the computers it infects – typically keyloggers that record users’ interactions with the infected site and capture online credentials like usernames and passwords. However, the framework also does extensive reconnoitering of victim computers: compiling an in-depth […]

Hack Tool Authors Deny Link To Celeb Photo Leaks

September 2, 2014 Paul Roberts

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 […]

ICREACH: How the NSA Built Its Own Secret Google -The Intercept

August 26, 2014 Paul Roberts

The online publication The Intercept has a fascinating story on the National Security Agency’s “Google-like” search engine, which was created to chew through almost a trillion records containing “metadata:” the cell phone calls, email messages, geo-location data and other online communications the agency has harvested. The story exposes a tool called ICREACH. Author Ryan Gallagher cites classified documents obtained by The Intercept that provide what he calls hard evidence that the NSA has, through ICREACH “made massive amounts of surveillance data directly accessible to domestic law enforcement agencies” including the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Drug Enforcement Administration. Read more via The Intercept with: ICREACH: How the NSA Built Its Own Secret Google -The Intercept.

Tesla Looks to Build Out Internal Hacking Team| Car and Driver Blog

August 22, 2014 Paul Roberts

Car and Driver has an interesting news item today on Tesla’s continuing efforts to build an internal team of software hackers to shore up the security of its connected cars. C&D reports that Tesla is looking to hire up to 30 full-time employees from the hacking community, and used the recent DEFCON hacking conference in Las Vegas to recruit talented software hackers, reverse engineers and the assorted polymaths who attend. Tesla gave out tokens that could be exchanged for a tour of the Tesla factory at the show. “Our security team is focused on advancing technology to secure connected cars, setting new standards for security, and creating new capabilities for connected cars that don’t currently exist in the automotive industry,” Tesla spokeswoman Liz Jarvis-Shean told C&D. California-based Tesla has already been making the rounds of security conferences. It also made headlines for hiring Kristin Paget, a well-respected hardware hacker […]