Tag: hacks

Six Hours, $4500: The Short Life and Quick Death Of A Facebook Bug

A security researcher based in Indonesia disclosed yet another Facebook bug this weekend – one that would allow an attacker to obtain the primary e-mail address associated with any Facebook account. Hours after informing the social network about the bug, however, it was closed and the researcher, Roy Castillo, was $4,500 richer. Castillo, a white hat vulnerability researcher based in The Philippines, disclosed the bug in Facebook’s Developer Application Roles Page in a post on his blog on Saturday.  When exploited, it allowed an attacker to discover the primary Facebook email address of any account – even those with the email privacy setting on “Only Me,” Castillo wrote.   Attackers would need a Facebook Developer account and some basic programming knowledge to take advantage of the vulnerability, in which Facebook mistakenly disclosed the e-mail address associated with a unique Facebook user ID. After discovering the buy on June 25th, Castillo […]

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Security Lapse Has Tumblr Asking IPhone, IPad Users To Update -Now!

Tumblr, the blogging and content sharing web site issued an urgent warning to those using its mobile application for Apple iPhones and iPads to update their Tumblr application – ASAP – after it was apparently found to be transmitting user names and passwords in the clear. In a blog post on Tuesday, Derek Gottfrid, the Vice President of Product at the New York City-based firm, said that the company had issued an update to the iOS version of Tumblr’s mobile application to fix an issue that allowed Tumblr passwords to be sniffed in transit on certain versions of the iOS Tumblr application for iPhone and iPad. Gottfrid did not explain the reason for the sudden update. However, a report by the UK publication The Register claims that the rush update came after Tumblr was made aware that the iOS versions of its application was not using SSL (Secure Socket Layer) […]

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Emergency Alert System: Vulnerable Systems Double, Despite Zombie Hoax

You’d think that the prospect of a zombie invasion would prompt our nation’s broadcasters and others who participate in the Emergency Alert System (EAS). Just the opposite is true. Months after a bogus EAS message warning about a zombie uprising startled residents in Michigan, Montana and New Mexico,  the number of vulnerable EAS devices accessible from the Internet has increased, rather than decreased, according to data from the security firm IOActive. In a blog post Thursday, Mike Davis, principal research scientist at IOActive said that a scan of the public Internet for systems running versions of the Monroe Electronics software  found almost double the number of vulnerable systems in July – 412 – as were found in April, when an IOActive scan of the public Internet using the Shodan search engine found only 222 vulnerable systems. IOActive first notified Monroe Electronics about vulnerabilities in its DASDECS product in January of […]

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Updated: Exploit Code Released For Android Security Hole

A security researcher has published what he claims is a proof of concept program that exploits a  security hole that affects hundreds of millions of Android mobile devices.* Pau Oliva Fora, a security researcher for the firm Via Forensics, published a small, proof of concept module that exploits the flaw in the way Android  verifies the authenticity of signed mobile applications. The flaw was first disclosed last week by Jeff Forristal, the Chief Technology Officer at Bluebox Security, ahead of a presentation at the Black Hat Briefings in August. Oliva Fora posted his “quick and dirty” proof of concept on GitHub, a code sharing website, on Monday. The simple program leverages APKTool, a common, open source tool for reverse engineering Android applications – decompiling and then recompiling their contents. APKTool is widely used for analyzing and making modifications to closed binaries. His script allows a user to select an Android […]

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Security Must-Do’s For Facebook Graph Search

Facebook finally pulled the covers off its much-anticipated (or dreaded) Graph Search feature on Monday, after about six months in beta. The new search feature greatly expands the kinds of information Facebook users can access on other users of the social network, making it easy, for example, to cross reference data stored in Facebook profiles. For example, users can easily call up a list of their “friends who live in Boston” and like the show “Arrested Development.” Fun! But, as has been noted, Graph Search is also a social engineer’s dream, because it lays bare lots of information – data – that Facebook users shared, casually, and without a thought of how it might be used in combination with other data they shared. For example, researchers have shown that they can use knowledge of a Facebook user’s “Likes” to “automatically and accurately predict a range of highly sensitive personal attributes including: […]

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