The Security Ledger with Paul F. Roberts

Recent Posts

Update: Researchers Use Weezer Tune To Knock Defibrillators Offline

May 21, 2013 Paul Roberts

Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to include comment from Medtronic and from the researchers. A bit more on that: I spoke to the fine researchers who conducted this study. They are concerned that people might casually read the headline or first couple paragraphs and conclude that listening to Weezer will kill them. Listening to Weezer will not kill you. Listening to Weezer will not interfere with your implanted defibrillator if used under normal conditions. Their experiment (and my article) make this clear, but you do have to read down a bit in the article to get that, and I know not everyone does that. In any case, the health benefits of using an implanted defibrillator in accordance with your doctor’s instructions, far outweigh any risk from EMI or other electronic tampering. – PFR 5/22/2013. Listening to Weezer could kill you. Literally. That’s the conclusion of an unusual experiment […]

Future Will Bring More Drones, More Drone Hacks

May 20, 2013 Paul Roberts

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, or UAVs (aka “drones”) are evolving – and fast. Just within the last five years, drones have morphed from stealthy and secretive military gear used for hunting down terrorists in the hills of Afghanistan and Yemen, to widely available consumer technology. The “consumerization” of UAV technology has created a lot of opportunities for Cool! – like this video of a UAV flying over (and almost in to) Niagra Falls. But it has also led to some problems. In March, a UAV “quadrcopter” came within a couple hundred feet of striking an Alitalia flight trying to land at JFK Airport in New York. More concerning: the FAA is set to license tens of thousands of drones for use over the U.S., many by law enforcement or private security firms. That has prompted warnings about a huge breach of privacy for U.S. citizens. But one security researcher warns that […]

Traffic Safety Agency Calls Vehicle Cyber Security Standards

May 17, 2013 Paul Roberts

The U.S. Government’s lead agency for vehicle safety has told Congress that more research into “vehicle cyber security” to address the threats to a coming generation of networked automobiles that connect to the public Internet and to each other. In testimony before Congress on Thursday, David Strickland, the chief Administrator for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) told a Senate Committee that the electronics systems are “critical to the functioning” of modern autos, and are becoming increasingly interconnected, leading to “different safety and cyber security risks.” The agency is requesting $2 million in the 2014 budget to research “vehicle electronics and emerging technologies” with an eye to developing requirements for the safety and reliability of vehicle controls. “With electronic systems assuming safety critical roles in nearly all vehicle controls, we are facing the need to develop general requirements for electronic control systems to ensure their reliability and security,” Strickland […]

AppSec And The Ghost In The Supply Chain

May 16, 2013 Paul Roberts

Tomorrow afternoon, Security Ledger, with help from our sponsor Veracode, will record its first video conversation. The show’s name: Talking Code (#talkingcode). The topic: application security, and – in particular – securing the supply chain. Joining me for the discussion will by Chris Wysopal, the co-founder and CTO of Veracode and Joshua Corman, the Director of Security Intelligence at Akamai Inc. Two things: you can send us questions or comments on Twitter. Our discussion will be filmed in studio, not live, but we’ll be tweeting comments live and engaging in realtime via Twitter. Just use the hashtag #talkingcode to pose questions. Say the term “supply chain,” and people immediately think of automobile and electronics manufacturers, who must assemble products from components makers scattered around the globe. These days, however, its not just manufacturers who have to worry about supply chains. Almost every company has a “supply chain” in one form or […]

New Search Engine Wants To Be A Google For Code

May 15, 2013 Paul Roberts

Researchers at The University of Cambridge in the UK have created a Google-like search engine that can peer inside applications, analyzing their underlying code. The search tool, named “Rendezvous,” has applications for a number of problems. It could be used to help reverse engineer potentially malicious files, copyright enforcement or to find evidence of plagiarism within applications, according to a blog post by Ross Anderson, a Professor of Security Engineering at the Laboratory. Rendezvous was unveiled in a seminar on Tuesday by Wei Ming Khoo, a doctoral student in the Security Group working at the University of Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory. The engine, which can be accessed here, allows users to submit an unknown binary, which is decompiled, parsed and compared against a library of code harvested from open source projects across the Internet. Code reuse has become a pressing security issue. The application security firm Veracode has named reused […]