In this week’s podcast: researcher Kevin Fu of University of Michigan discusses his work on attacks that use physics to manipulate connected devices. Also: Mark Loveless of DUO discusses his research into how poor implementation of wireless protocols make personal security trackers a privacy risk. And have we seen peak ransomware? Adam Kujawa of the firm Malwarebytes joins us to talk about the findings of that company’s State of Malware Report.
In-brief: Intel has warned users not to install patches it released for the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities in its processors, asking them to wait until it issues new software, which it’s working on now. Finding out your device has vulnerabilities is bad enough, but finding out the patched issued to fix them are “complete and utter garbage,” according to Linux creator Linus Torvalds, is even worse. This is what faced users of devices with Intel processors on Monday when Intel warned them not to install the patches the company already had released for the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities. In a blog post, Navin Shenoy, Intel’s executive vice president and general manager of the Data Center Group, said the company had identified the root cause of a frequent-reboot problem that was affecting customers who’d installed its patches for these vulnerabilities. In the meantime, don’t install the patches nor tell customers or […]
In this week’s Security Ledger Podcast episode, the UK -based policy think tank Chatham House warned last week that aging nuclear weapons systems in the U.S., the U.K. and other nations are vulnerable to cyber attacks that could be used to start a global conflagration. We talk with Eddie Habbibi of PAS Global about what can be done to secure hackable nukes. Also: with CES raging in Las Vegas last week, we go deep with security researcher Jay Harris on flaws in connected toys being sold to children.
Despite their availability on mobile networks and thus increased exposure to outside security threats, SCADA apps remain highly insecure and vulnerable to attack, putting critical industrial control systems at immediate and increased risk, researchers at IOActive and Embedi have found.
Google has come forward to claim responsibility for discovering a pair of serious security holes in Intel processors that run almost 9 in 10 computers in the world. And worse: the company has echoed a statement by Intel yesterday that the flaws are not specific to that company’s chips. Contrary to published reports, a blog post on the Google Security Blog by Matt Linton, a Senior Security Engineer at Google and Pat Parseghian, a Technical Program Manager said that flaws dubbed “Specter” (PDF) and “Meltdown” (PDF) are not limited to chips by Intel, but exist in central processing unit (CPU) chips by a wide range of vendors including Intel, AMD and ARM. Google discovered the flaws The flaws were discovered by Jann Horn, a researcher for Google’s Project Zero security team, discovered the flaw and showed how malicious actors could game a common CPU feature known as “speculative execution” to […]
