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.
In this week’s Security Ledger podcast, Joe Unsworth has been covering the semiconductor space for Gartner for 15 years, but he’s never seen anything like Meltdown and Spectre, the two vulnerabilities that Google researchers identified in a wide range of microprocessors. In this podcast, Joe comes in to talk with us about what the flaws will mean for major chip vendors. Also: we kick off 2018 with a pair of predictions for the New Year from two of the smartest guys in the information security business. Lawyer and Lawfare blogger Paul Rosenzweig speaks with us about the year ahead including the possibility of a data war between the US and the EU. Also: Experian VP for Consumer Protection Mike Bruemmer comes in to talk to us about that company’s Data Breach Industry Forecast for 2018.
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 […]
Security researchers warned of a serious vulnerability in a GPS service by the China-based firm ThinkRace exposes sensitive data in scores of GPS services, more than two years after the hole was discovered and reported to the firm. (Update: added comment from John van den Oever, the CEO of one2track B.V – PFR 1/3/2018)
In this, our final episode of 2017, we look back at our most popular segments from the past year – many of which touched on issues that (surprise, surprise) crossed the boundary between information security and politics. Among the most popular segments were discussions of hacking the U.S. election systems, a primer on the cyber capabilities of North Korea with Crowd Strike, a conversation of the case against the Russian firm Kaspersky Lab and an interview with the guy who helps make the hacking scenes in the USA Network’s Mr. Robot look so real.
