encryption Archives

Tag: encryption

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 […]

The Internet of Things: Legal Woes for CIOs | CIO

August 22, 2014 Paul Roberts

Stephanie Overby over at CIOs has an interesting piece today on the legal pitfalls that Internet of Things adoption may hold for chief information officers (CIOs). While the prospect of more, intelligent devices holds great promise for organizations across the economy, Overby notes that there are also risks – especially when it comes to the wholesale harvesting of customer data. “Many of the legal issues are not well understood even by sophisticated privacy practitioners,” the article quotes Christopher Wolf, a partner at the law firm Hogan Lovells saying. “In the world of sensors rather than computer screens, the legal issues are challenging.” CIOs are advised to consider “self-regulating” around issues like privacy, security and consent, to stay on the right side of the evolving law. CIOs should scrutinize every decision to collect user information and ask whether the benefits to collecting the data outweigh the potential costs, especially in the event of […]

Report: Community Health Hack Linked To Heartbleed OpenSSL Hole

August 20, 2014 Paul Roberts

The security firm TrustedSec said in a blog post on Tuesday that a recent hack of the healthcare network Community Health Services was the result of an attack on the so-called “Heartbleed” vulnerability in OpenSSL. According to TrustedSec, attackers targeted vulnerable VPN (virtual private network) software from Juniper networks in a breach that affected an estimated 4.5 million patients. TrustedSec cited a “trusted and anonymous source close to the CHS investigation” in its blog post. It said attackers were able to glean user credentials from memory on a CHS Juniper device by exploiting the Heartbleed vulnerability. Those credentials were used to login via the VPN to CHS’s network, then move laterally to the servers containing the patient data. [Read more Security Ledger coverage of the Heartbleed vulnerability here.] A separate report by Bloomberg attributed the attack to hackers in China, though it did not provide any evidence linking the attackers to a specific Chinese […]

Report: Android Shield Adds Invisible Encryption To Mobile Apps

August 19, 2014 Paul Roberts

Wired reports on a team from Georgia Tech that has designed software that acts as an overlay on Android smartphones’ communication applications, encrypting communications to and from those apps, while mimicking their user interface. The researchers describe the technology as a “transparent window” over apps that prevents unencrypted messages from leaving the user’s device. “The window acts as a proxy between the user and the app. But the beauty of it is that users feel like they’re interacting with the original app without much, if any, change,” says Wenke Lee, the Georgia Tech professor who led the developers. “Our goal is to make security that’s as easy as air. You just breathe and don’t even think about it.” The researchers call their prototype Mimesis Aegis, or M-Aegis, Latin for “mimicry shield.” They plan to present their research at the Usenix Security conference this week. Read more via Wired: This Android Shield Could […]