Tag: critical infrastructure

Must Read: How Russian Hackers Stole the Nasdaq – Businessweek

If there’s one story you should read this week, its Michael Riley’s extensive report over at Businessweek on the 2010 compromise of systems belonging to the Nasdaq stock exchange, “How Russian Hackers Stole the Nasdaq.” The incident was extensively reported at the time, but not in great depth. Obviously, the parties involved weren’t talking. And Nasdaq’s public statements about the compromise woefully downplayed its severity, as Riley’s report makes clear. Among the interesting revelations: the Nasdaq may have fallen victim to a third-party compromise – similar to the hack of Target earlier this year. In the case of Nasdaq, investigators from the FBI, NSA and (eventually) CIA found discovered that the website run by the building management company responsible for Nasdaq’s headquarters at One Liberty Plaza had been “laced with a Russian-made exploit kit known as Blackhole, infecting tenants who visited the page to pay bills or do other maintenance.” What’s clear is […]

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Google Unveils Project Zero Hacking Team

Google has unveiled an all-star team of hackers and security researchers it is calling “Project Zero.” According to a post on Google’s security blog, the company is hoping to use its security research muscle to investigate the security of “any software depended upon by large numbers of people, paying careful attention to the techniques, targets and motivations of attackers.” Research like Google employee Neel Mehta’s, which helped expose the “Heartbleed” vulnerability in OpenSSL is a good example of the kinds of stuff Project Zero will do. Researchers will devote their time to finding and reporting software vulnerabilities and researching new exploits, mitigations and “program analysis.” The company said it plans to disclose any vulnerabilities it finds to the vendor first, then to the public in an external database. The public can monitor “time to patch” (given that the vulnerability is disclosed ahead of a patch). Project Zero brings Google’s elite hackers under […]

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Intel Promotes ‘Trustlets’ To Secure Embedded Devices

The integrity of data stored on- and transmitted between Internet-connected embedded devices is one of the biggest technical hurdles standing in the way of widespread adoption of Internet of Things technology. For one thing: embedded devices like wearable technology and “smart” infrastructure are often deployed on simple, inexpensive and resource constrained hardware. Unlike laptops or even smart phones, these are purpose-built devices that, by design, run for long periods in remote deployments, with extremely constrained features and low power consumption that is the result of limited processing power and memory. [Read Security Ledger’s coverage of connected vehicles.] Now Intel is promoting a platform that it says can bridge the gap and provide robust security features even for resource-constrained Internet of Things devices like wearables and connected vehicles. Back in April, the Intel Labs  unveiled the results of joint research with Technische Universität Darmstadt in Germany. The researchers have developed a platform, dubbed TrustLite […]

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Zombie Zero Underscores Supply Chain Threat

A security start-up, TrapX Security, made a splash this week with the story of a new piece of malware, Zombie Zero, which wormed its way into logistics and shipping firms on shipping scanners sold by a Chinese firm. The malware was discovered during a trial demonstration of TrapX’s technology at a shipping and logistics firm. It was implanted on embedded versions of Windows XP that ran on the scanning hardware and in a software image that could be downloaded from the manufacturing firm’s website. “This malware was shipped to large logistics companies embedded in the operating system,” Carl Wright, an Executive Vice President at TrapX told The Security Ledger. TrapX declined to name the firm on whose behalf it worked or the manufacturer whose scanners were compromised. It said 16 of 64 scanners sold to the victim firm were found to contain malware. Published reports also note that malware say scanners with another variant of the same malware […]

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Google Warns Of Dodgy Digital Certificates Issued By India

Beware of Google domains bearing gifts – especially gifts from India. On Tuesday, Google’s Adam Langley took to the company’s security blog to warn about unauthorized digital certificates that have been issued by India’s National Informatics Centre (NIC) and used to vouch for “several Google domains.” Google notified the NIC, as well as India’s Controller of Certifying Authorities (or CCA) and Microsoft about the discovery and the certificates have been revoked, Langley said. As Cory Doctorow noted over at BoingBoing.net, most operating system vendors and browser makers don’t trust NIC-issued certificates as a matter of course. However, NIC holds intermediate CA (certificate authority) certificates that are trusted by India’s CCA, and CCA-trusted certificates are included in Microsoft’s Root Store, meaning applications running on Windows as well as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser would have trusted the bogus NIC certificates. Google said that Chrome users on Windows would not have been victims of the […]

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