Search Results for "third party software"

Tripping Over Heartbleed’s Long Tail

The news about the dreadful Heartbleed OpenSSL vulnerability keeps pumping – almost a month since it first made headlines. But now that other, equally scary security news is stealing the headlines (like the nasty Internet Explorer vulnerability that was announced this week, Heartbleed is taking a back seat. So where do things stand? I think its safe to say that we’re entering a phase that might be considered Heartbleed’s ‘long tail.’ On the one hand: there’s evidence of good news. The Register reported today that data collected by the firm Qualys suggests that almost all websites that were vulnerable to Heartbleed three weeks ago are now patched and no longer vulnerable. The Register’s John Leyden quotes Ristic, the director of engineering at Qualys, putting the percent of web sites, globally, that are still vulnerable to Heartbleed at 1 percent. That’s great news – but I don’t think its the end of the story […]

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Heartbleed For Poets And Other Must-Reads

It’s H-Day + 2 – two full days since we learned that one of the pillars of online security, OpenSSL, has contained a gaping security hole for the past two years that rendered its protections illusory. As I wrote over on Veracode’s blog today: this one hurts. It exposes private encryption keys, allowing encrypted SSL sessions to be revealed. Trend Micro data suggests around 5% of one million Internet top-level domains are vulnerable.  IOActive notes that Heartbleed also appears to leave data such as user sessions subject to hijacking, exposes encrypted search queries and leaves passwords used to access online services subject to snooping, provided the service hasn’t updated their OpenSSL instance to the latest version. In fact, its safe to bet that the ramifications of Heartbleed will continue to be felt for months – even years to come. In the meantime, there is a lot of interesting coverage and […]

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Web to Wheels: Tesla Password Insecurity Exposes Cars, Drivers

We’ve interviewed security researcher Nitesh Dhanjani before. In the last year, he’s done some eye-opening investigations into consumer products like the Philips HUE smart lightbulbs. We did a podcast with Nitesh in December where we talked more generally about security and the Internet of Things. Now Dhanjani is in the news again with research on one of the most high-profile connected devices in the world: Tesla’s super-smart electric cars. In a presentation at Black Hat Asia on Friday, he  released findings of some research on the Tesla Model S that suggests the cars have a weakness common to many Web based applications: a weak authentication scheme. (A PDF version of the report is here.) Specifically: Tesla’s sophisticated cars rely on a decidedly unsophisticated security scheme: a six-character PIN. Dhanjani’s research discovered a variety of potentially exploitable holes that would give even an unsophisticated attacker a good chance at breaking into […]

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Google Readies SDK For Wearable Tech

Google will soon release a software development kit (SDK) for adapting its Android mobile operating system to wearable technology such as smart watches, according to statements by Sundar Pichai, Google’s Senior Vice President of Android, Chrome and Apps.   Pichai was speaking over the weekend at the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas. He said that the SDK for wearables will be available sometime in the next two weeks and is intended to help flesh out the company’s vision for how wearable technology should work. The news was first reported here by The Guardian. Wearables are just another “platform” on which small, powerful sensors will be deployed, he said. “Sensors can be small and powerful, and gather a lot of information that can be useful for users. We want to build the right APIs for this world of sensors,” he is quoted saying. [Read more Security Ledger coverage […]

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Internet of Dings: Verizon Shelves Home Automation Service

The news this week that search giant Google completed its acquisition of smart-home device maker NEST prompting at least one news outlet to proclaim that the “New Internet of Things Wave” has been set in motion. (Umm…new?) But there’s a cautionary note in the business headlines: news that Verizon shuttered its Verizon Home Monitoring service. Matt Hamblen over at Computerworld.com has the news and the confirmation from Verizon, which launched in 2012 and was designed to sink that company’s hooks deeper into wired homes. Verizon provided a common hardware platform for home automation and entertainment systems to plug into and talk to each other. Users could manage devices remotely from their computer, mobile device or from their televisions using FiOS TV. It comprised video surveillance, environmental control and physical security. In commercials, Verizon trumpeted it as the “ultimate 21st century green energy home control.” Verizon charged users $10 a month […]

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