Thomas Brewster over at Forbes has an interesting story this week on a $10,000 bounty that’s being offered for anyone who can hack Tesla’s Model S sedan. The contest is open to all registered attendees of SyScan Conference in Beijing, which takes place later in July. (Conference web site is here.) According to Brewster, the contest is not endorsed by Tesla, nor is the company cooperating in any way. The conference features a number of hacking demonstrations, including at least one on hacking cars: this presentation on strategies for securing Controller Area Network (CAN) based systems – CAN is the most commonly used networking protocol in automobiles. Tesla – which makes the most wired cars on the road – have flirted with both hackers and mod-ers in the past. Notably: this article mentions one car owner’s hack of Tesla’s (really nice) on board touch screen interface. That prompted a warning from […]
Tag: software
That LIFX Smart Lightbulb Hack Wasn’t Easy
If you’ve been following your Internet of Things security news, you probably read about the latest hack of a consumer-oriented ‘smart home’ device: Context Information Security’s analysis of security holes in LIFX-brand smart light bulbs. The top line on this is scary enough. As The Register reported: researchers at Context discovered that, by gaining access to a “master bulb” in LIFX deployments, they could control all connected lightbulbs and expose user network configurations. That’s scary – and recalls research on hacking Philips HUE light bulbs that was published last year. But read down in the Context research and you’ll realize that, while the LIFX technology wasn’t perfect, the job of hacking the technology wasn’t child’s play, either. LIFX connected its smart bulbs using a 6LoWPAN-based mesh network. The company made the mistake of transmitting most bulb-bulb communications in the clear, which made analyzing traffic sent between master- and slave bulbs easy. Context researchers found […]
DHS Warns Energy Firms Of Malware Used In Targeted Attacks
The Department of Homeland Security warned firms in the energy sector about new, targeted malware infecting industrial control systems and stealing data. DHS’s ICS CERT, the Industrial Control Systems Computer Emergency Response Team, said it is analyzing malware associated with an ICS-focused malware campaign. The malicious software, dubbed “Havex” that was being spread by way of phishing emails and so-called “watering hole” attacks that involved compromises of ICS vendor web sites. DHS was alerted to the attacks by researchers at the security firms Symantec (which dubbed the malware campaign “Dragonfly”) and F-Secure (“Havex”) -a remote access trojan (or RAT) that also acts as an installer (or “downloader”) – fetching other malicious applications to perform specific tasks on compromised networks. One of those additional payloads is a Trojan Horse program dubbed Karagany (by Symantec) that has been liked to prior attacks on energy firms. According to Symantec, the malware targeted energy grid operators, major electricity generation firms, […]
The Internet Of Things Will Need Millions Of Developers By 2020 – ReadWrite
Matt Asay over at ReadWriteWeb has an interesting piece that’s worth reading on the (coming) shortage of qualified application developers engendered by The Internet of Things. Asay cites a new report out from the firm VisionMobile that projects a shocking 57% CAGR (compound annual growth rate) in developers between now and the end of the decade. Much of that will be driven by opportunities in the IoT. Like past gold rushes, the riches in the IoT gold rush won’t go to the “miners” (read: thing makers) but to their suppliers – the 21st century Levi Strauss’s of the world who figure out a way to “stitch” Internet enabled devices together, Asay writes. In other words: value in the age of the IoT is created not by generating data, but by making sense of the (low value) data spewed out by billions of connected devices. (This isn’t exactly ground breaking – […]
Cisco: MS Word Macro Attacks Still Work Just Fine
We like to throw around the term ‘Advanced Persistent Threat’ casually these days to refer to a whole range of sophisticated and persistent attacks – usually on high value targets. But a blog post today by Cisco Systems makes clear that many otherwise sophisticated attackers do just fine with some pretty low tech and old school methods. Case in point: an attack Cisco is dubbing “String of Paerls-” a series of attacks on companies involved in research and what Cisco calls the ‘industrial manufacturing vertical.’ According to the report, the attacks start with a decidedly old school attack: a Microsoft Word document that includes a malicious Office Macro.”When the victim opens the Word document, an On-Open macro fires, which results in downloadin and executable and launching it on the victim’s machine.” Now, macro-based attacks are truly vintage. They first came to light in the late 1990s, with the Melissa virus – an early and successful […]
