Tag: vulnerabilities

Must Read: How Russian Hackers Stole the Nasdaq – Businessweek

If there’s one story you should read this week, its Michael Riley’s extensive report over at Businessweek on the 2010 compromise of systems belonging to the Nasdaq stock exchange, “How Russian Hackers Stole the Nasdaq.” The incident was extensively reported at the time, but not in great depth. Obviously, the parties involved weren’t talking. And Nasdaq’s public statements about the compromise woefully downplayed its severity, as Riley’s report makes clear. Among the interesting revelations: the Nasdaq may have fallen victim to a third-party compromise – similar to the hack of Target earlier this year. In the case of Nasdaq, investigators from the FBI, NSA and (eventually) CIA found discovered that the website run by the building management company responsible for Nasdaq’s headquarters at One Liberty Plaza had been “laced with a Russian-made exploit kit known as Blackhole, infecting tenants who visited the page to pay bills or do other maintenance.” What’s clear is […]

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Google Unveils Project Zero Hacking Team

Google has unveiled an all-star team of hackers and security researchers it is calling “Project Zero.” According to a post on Google’s security blog, the company is hoping to use its security research muscle to investigate the security of “any software depended upon by large numbers of people, paying careful attention to the techniques, targets and motivations of attackers.” Research like Google employee Neel Mehta’s, which helped expose the “Heartbleed” vulnerability in OpenSSL is a good example of the kinds of stuff Project Zero will do. Researchers will devote their time to finding and reporting software vulnerabilities and researching new exploits, mitigations and “program analysis.” The company said it plans to disclose any vulnerabilities it finds to the vendor first, then to the public in an external database. The public can monitor “time to patch” (given that the vulnerability is disclosed ahead of a patch). Project Zero brings Google’s elite hackers under […]

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Researchers Warn Of Flaws In Popular Password Managers

Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley have published a paper describing security holes in five, web-based password managers including LastPass, My1login and Roboform. According to the paper  (PDF), four out of the five password managers inadvertently leaked a user’s credentials for stored web sites due to all-too-common web based security flaws like Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) and Cross Site Scripting (XSS). The researchers, Zhiwei Li, Warren He, Devdatta Akwawe and Dawn Song, all of the University of California Berkeley, said that they disclosed the holes in August of last year and that all of the affected firms and that all but one – NeedMyPassword – have since patched the vulnerabilities. All the password managers tested were found to contain one of a short list of security problems. Either they were vulnerable to classic web-based holes (like XSS), or they were found to be susceptible to user interface-focused attacks, like […]

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Intel Promotes ‘Trustlets’ To Secure Embedded Devices

The integrity of data stored on- and transmitted between Internet-connected embedded devices is one of the biggest technical hurdles standing in the way of widespread adoption of Internet of Things technology. For one thing: embedded devices like wearable technology and “smart” infrastructure are often deployed on simple, inexpensive and resource constrained hardware. Unlike laptops or even smart phones, these are purpose-built devices that, by design, run for long periods in remote deployments, with extremely constrained features and low power consumption that is the result of limited processing power and memory. [Read Security Ledger’s coverage of connected vehicles.] Now Intel is promoting a platform that it says can bridge the gap and provide robust security features even for resource-constrained Internet of Things devices like wearables and connected vehicles. Back in April, the Intel Labs  unveiled the results of joint research with Technische Universität Darmstadt in Germany. The researchers have developed a platform, dubbed TrustLite […]

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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 […]

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