software Archives

Tag: software

Supply Chain Risk: Raspberry Pi Device Used for War Shipping

October 7, 2014 Paul Roberts

An interesting post on supply chain security over at Security Affairs. The post looks at a new approach to supply chain surveillance (and, presumably, attacks): ‘war shipping.’ War shipping is, of course, a play on the ‘war driving’ scene from the early days of consumer wifi, in which cars outfitted with antennae would canvas whole cities, documenting open wi-fi hotspots that could be used to grab some free Internet. In this case, Security Affairs notes a shippable board-sized package designed by security expert Larry Pesce of Paul’s Security Weekly (fka Pauldotcom). The device can be contained in a standard UPS shipping box and delivered to a target network to passively surveil or even attack it. The kit is built on a Raspberry Pi b_ with an AWUS051NH wireless card, a cheap battery charger, kismet and custom software. Pesce demonstrated the device at Derbycon, a Louisville, Kentucky based event last month. The device includes both […]

Whack-A-Bash: New Vulnerabilities add to Patch Confusion

September 29, 2014 Paul Roberts

The good news about the rapid, industry response to the revelations about exploitable security holes in GNU Bash (Bourne Again Shell) (aka “Shellshock”) is that Linux users had a fix in hand almost as soon as they became aware of the problem those patches addressed. The bad news about the quick fixes for the two issues, CVE-2014-6271 and CVE-2014-7169, from the likes of Red Hat, Ubuntu, Debian and others is that – in being early- they fail to fix the problems we don’t yet know about. And that’s what we’re seeing in the wake of last week’s storm of patches: a steady drip-drip of disclosures that suggest that Bash may contain other problems worthy of new fixes. Within hours of the disclosure of the first holes, there were problems discovered by Red Hat Product Security researcher Todd Sabin, who found additional “off by one” errors in Bash that were assigned CVE-2014-7186 and CVE-2014-7187 and […]

Infographic: Possible Attacks on The Internet of Things

September 24, 2014 Paul Roberts

The folks over at Trend Micro have put together a nice infographic that reminds us that all those smart devices connected to the Internet communicate through some well worn channels, namely: standard communications protocols like Wi-Fi, Ethernet and Bluetooth that connect devices to each other and the global Internet, as well as HTTP that are used to transmit data to and from cloud based resources like management interfaces. Of course those standard protocols also leave IoT devices vulnerable to a wide range of commodity attacks: from brute force password cracking on web based management consoles to Man in the Middle attacks that can sniff out authentication credentials and hijack sessions. Trend’s infographic does a good job of depicting the various layers in the IoT stack and some of the likely attack vectors for each layer. It also gives advice on how to protect yourself (use encryption, patch software vulnerabilities, disable unused ports). Nothing ground breaking […]

Report: Home Depot Fallout Reveals History of Lax Security, Hiring

September 23, 2014 Paul Roberts

Its a truism in cyber security that behind every great hack often lies a string of bad decisions and missed opportunities. Its also true that when you dig into the details of damaging cyber incidents, the root causes are personal and psychological as often as they are technical in nature. Organizations -even sophisticated and wealthy organizations – end up making bad decisions for all the wrong reason: failing to properly assess their risk, or pursuing short term savings when long term investment is needed. Home Depot learned via law enforcement that a breach of transaction data exposed as many as 52 million credit card transactions, the largest retail credit card breach to date. But as more comes out about the breach at home improvement giant Home Depot, it starts to look a lot more like the root causes there may have started in the HR department rather than the data center. The […]

The Key to Security in the Internet of Things – IEEE Spectrum

September 19, 2014 Paul Roberts

IEEE Spectrum has an article that provides a nice overview of security and privacy issues on the Internet of Things. The article by Mark Anderson highlights a number of the issues that have cropped up on these pages as well, namely: the rush to market in the consumer IoT space (much of it driven by crowd funding sites like IndieGoGo and Kickstarter) the lack of a strong business case for (consumer) manufacturers to build security into IoT products the tendency of large manufacturers to pursue siloed security standards that thwart efforts to build devices interconnect with other IoT infrastructure (other devices, routers, etc.) So far efforts to coordinate IoT development around a single platform or set of standards have been reduced to predictable turf battles: Google’s Thread versus multi-vendor efforts like TheAllSeen Alliance, The Open Interconnect Consortium, The Industrial Internet Consortium versus Apple HomeKit and HealthKit and others. In the […]