Tag: reports

This Week In Security: Poking Holes In Two Factor Authentication

It was another busy week in the security world. There was big news on the legal front, as The U.S. Supreme Court took steps to protect the data stored on mobile devices from warrantless searches by police. (That’s good news.) But the week also plenty of concerning stories about the security of data stored on mobile phones, tablets and the like. One of the stories that gained a lot of attention was DUO Security’s report on a flaw in PayPal’s two factor authentication feature that could expose the accounts of  security-conscious PayPal users. As The Security Ledger reported, DUO researcher Zach Lanier discovered a flaw in mobile APIs published by PayPal that would allow anyone with a valid PayPal user name and password to sidestep two-factor authentication when accessing PayPal accounts that had that option enabled. After DUO went public with information on the flaw, PayPal disabled two factor authentication […]

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Google’s Nest Labs Joins Race to Define Platform for the Internet of Things – NYTimes.com

The New York Time’s BITS blog has an interesting look at the companies that are gearing up to compete against Google in the home automation market.   Google has picked up its investment in so-called “smart home” technology, from the acquisition of Nest, the smart thermostat maker, and DropCam a maker of wireless cameras used for home monitoring and surveillance. The Times notes the entry of firms like Quirky, which has the backing of major retailers like Home Depot and manufacturers like General Electric, Honeywell and Philips. That company announced a new spin-off firm, Wink, that will focus on software. There’s also (of course) Apple, which last week announced HomeKit, a new platform for home automation products that leverages the company’s iOS mobile platform. For its part, Google and Nest have alliances with companies like Whirlpool, Jawbone and Mercedes-Benz. The company seems to be focusing on getting cool products to market that […]

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Researchers Sidestep Paypal Two-Factor Authentication

Researchers at DUO Security claim to have found a way of bypassing a two factor authentication feature that secures logins to Paypal.com, eBay’s online payment service. The vulnerability could allow an attacker who has stolen a Paypal customer’s user name and password to gain access to the account, even though the customer had enabled the more secure two-factor authentication option. DUO described the problem in a blog post early Wednesday. According to researcher Zach Lanier, Paypal has published an API (application program interface) for its Security Key two-factor authentication technology that contains a vulnerability that would allow even a non-technical hacker to bypass the second factor when accessing a Paypal customer’s account. An attacker only needs a victim’s PayPal username and password in order to access a two-factor protected account and send money. “The protection offered by the two-factor Security Key mechanism can be bypassed and essentially nullified,” the company wrote in […]

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Update: Another IPMI Mishap? Researcher Claims Supermicro Devices Vulnerable

There’s more bad news for companies that rely on the Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) to manage servers and other hardware in their IT environments. Specifically: researcher Zachary Wikholm over at Cari.net has published evidence of what he says is a head-slapping vulnerability affecting devices that use IPMI Base Management Controllers (BMCs) made by the firm SuperMicro. According to Wikholm, servers equipped with Supermicro BMCs store a password file, PSBlock, in plain text and – making matters worse- leave it open to the world on port 49152. “You can quite literally download the BMC password file from any UPnP enabled Supermicro motherboard running IPMI on a public interface,” he wrote. Baseboard Management Controllers (BMCs) are small, embedded systems attached to a system’s motherboard that manage IPMI communications. Wikholm says that Supermicro has fixed the problem in the latest version of its IPMI firmware. However, companies are often reluctant to flash […]

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Code Spaces Probably A ‘Target of Opportunity’

The spectacular collapse this week of Code Spaces, a cloud-based code repository, may have been the result of a an unspectacular “opportunistic” hack, rather than a targeted operation, according to one cloud security expert. The sudden demise of the online application repository has sent shock waves through the tech industry, laying bare what some say are lax practices among many cloud-based application and infrastructure providers. But the attack itself was almost certainly the result of a larger, indiscriminate cyber criminal campaign, said Jeff Schilling, the Chief Security Officer of Firehost, a Texas-based secure cloud provider. “This is something we pretty frequently: companies get held ransom with a DDoS attack, and if that doesn’t work, (the attackers) will resort to doing other things,” Schilling told The Security Ledger. But Code Spaces almost certainly wasn’t the only company the extortionists worked on, Schilling said. Instead, the company was likely caught up in a wide net […]

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