reports Archives

Tag: reports

IoT And Big Data To Create Insurance Industry Winners, Losers

April 26, 2014 Paul Roberts

This blog writes a lot about risk and the Internet of Things. Specifically: we talk about how smart, sensor rich, connected devices create all kinds of new risks for enterprises and consumers. It goes without saying that feature development (and adoption) are running well ahead of pesky issues like secure design and deployment or data privacy. Smart companies are trying to put some brakes on that trend. (Witness Google prohibiting sensitive health data from its Android Wear platform.) But, by and large, companies are plowing ahead into IoT technologies without a lot of consideration of the risks. But there’s one industry where risk _is_ the business: the insurance industry. And there, the thinking about the potential of Internet of Things is decidedly bullish. In fact, a recent report from the financial services research firm Celent (paywall) suggests that broad adoption of IoT technologies will revolutionize the way insurance companies market and sell to […]

Web to Wheels: Tesla Password Insecurity Exposes Cars, Drivers

March 31, 2014 Paul Roberts

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 […]

Analysis Finds Blurry Lines Between Rovio, Advertisers

March 28, 2014 Paul Roberts

Rovio, the maker of the massively popular Angry Birds, makes no secret about collecting personal data from those who download and play its games. But an analysis from the advanced threat detection firm FireEye is helping to expose the extend of data harvesting, and also to sketch out the blurry line that separates Rovio and third-party advertising networks it contracts with. In a blog post on Thursday, FireEye analysts Jimmy Suo and Tao Wei described the findings of an investigation into the interaction between Rovio’s mobile applications, including the latest version of Angry Birds, and third party ad networks such as Jumptap and Millenial Media. Using FireEye’s Mobile Threat Prevention (MTP), the two gathered and analyzed network packet capture (PCap) information and analyzed the workings of Angry Birds and its communications with third-party ad networks. The two were able to reveal a multi-stage information sharing operation, tracking code paths from the reverse-engineered […]

Perverse Security Incentives Abound In Mobile App Space

March 24, 2014 Paul Roberts

Security problems abound in the mobile device space – and many of them have been well documented here and elsewhere. While mobile operating systems like Android and iOS are generally more secure than their desktop predecessors, mobile applications have become a major source of woe for mobile device owners and platform vendors. To date, many of the mobile malware outbreaks have come by way of loosely monitored mobile application stores (mostly in Eastern Europe and Russia). More recently, malicious mobile ad networks have also become a way to pull powerful mobile devices into botnets and other malicious online schemes. But my guests on the latest Security Ledger podcast point out that mobile application threats are poised to affect much more than just mobile phone owners. Jon Oberheide, the CTO of DUO Security and Zach Lanier, a researcher at DUO, note that mobile OS platforms like Android are making the leap […]

Mobile Metadata, Google Dorking Expose Your Secret Life

March 13, 2014 Paul Roberts

A study of more than 500 mobile phone owners by researchers at Stanford University suggests that call records and other “metadata” stored on our phones can easily be used to infer a wealth of sensitive information about phone owners – laying bare details of private lives that many would prefer to keep hidden. The findings of the study were outlined in a blog post by researcher Patrick Mutchler on Wednesday. Researchers concluded that the data collected from the phones was very accurate in painting a picture of the phone’s owner, including their work, social interests and medical conditions. That was true even across a small sample population monitored for just a few weeks. In the study, researchers placed an application, MetaPhone, on Android smartphones belonging to 546 participants and collected a wide range of information including device logs, social network information and call records for analysis. In all, researchers collected calls […]