2015-07-16

Free sites learn programming

I feel every security practitioner should at least have some basic programming skills. I have seen CISO's make useless comments like, "x% of all security risks are due to poor coding". Well yes, since this is a huge arena in itself, and anyway forms bulk of the effort to setup any technology portal.

Some free sources to learn

2015-07-12

Hacking Team Hacked

Who: Hacking Team is an Italian, controversial company which builds and sells spywares to Governments. Even though they used to deny it, we now know for sure that they were supplying to oppressive regimes, such as Sudan, Saudi, Iraq, etc. A full list of their clients is here.

Damage: About 400+ GB of corporate data is leaked on torrents (and here), and the source-code of their tool is loaded up on github.

Consequences: The 0-day exploits which they were exploiting, are now in the wild - can be used by anyone. However, Adobe immediately released the patch for their Flash player

Their most notorious tool was called Remote Control System (a 2014 report is here), and they apprantly had a few more, especially one that one relied on hijacking jailbroken iPhones.

Furthermore, their twitter and other online accounts were also hijacked. The primary reason here, is because of hilariously weak passwords:
The root passwords for Hacking Team's servers were inexplicably weak for their purpose. One of the passwords was simply "P4ssword,".
Other passwords grabbed from Hacking Team founder Christian Pozzi included "wolverine" and "universo," and other variations of dictionary words like "Passw0rd".
By: A hacker (crusader?!) who goes by the name of PhineasFisher has taken credit for the disclosure.

Update 25-Jul-15:
Another tool discovered in the dump, which was used to compromise Android devices.

UK Govt Bans Encrypted IM Apps

A pity to see how the government agencies perceive encryption and privacy of citizens.
Speaking earlier today, David Cameron, announced his plans for new surveillance laws which could spell the end of popular services such as WhatsApp and Snapchat.
Explaining his reason, the Prime Minister said: “In our country, do we want to allow a means of communication between people which we cannot read?”
"My answer to that question is no we must not."

2015-07-03

North America is out of IPv4

Yikkess, you hear about this day will come one day, and here we are. Time to beef up the effort on v6.

Avionics Security

There have been a few news posts around technical security of the systems on an aircraft. I agree with Chris Roberts was even detained and investigated by the FBI, and later banned from United Airlines. There are stories about his tweet, which sounds more like a joke, and there are stories about him being able to hack the systems and force the plan to fly sideways.

Leaving aside the conflicting news articles, I agree with Bruce Schneier.
The real issue is that the avionics and the entertainment system are on the same network. That's an even stupider thing to do.

Apple, Linux (not Windows) most vulnerable OS in 2014

My confidence level in this article is small - it says:

A whopping average of 19 security vulnerabilities were reported every day in 2014. The top spot for vulnerabilities in operating systems no longer goes to Microsoft Windows; in fact, Windows isn't even listed in the top three. Instead, the most vulnerable OS was Apple Mac OS X, followed by Apple iOS and Linux kernel. 

Access WiFi From 2.5 miles away!

A $200 device, which will help with anonymity (and much more I am sure)!
Proxyham is comprised of a WiFi-enabled Raspberry Pi computer, along with a three antennas setup. One antenna is used to connect to a source Wi-Fi network at a public place, and the other two antennas are used to transmit the Wi-Fi signal at a 900 MHz frequency.
By relying on a 900 MegaHertz radio connection, ProxyHam effectively connects to a far-away Wi-Fi, with a range of between 1 and 2.5 Miles, depending upon certain interference factors.

2015-07-02

Huge Samsung Galaxy security flaw

A bit late in blogging about this topic:
Samsung Galaxy S6, S5, S4 and S4 Mini phones have a massive flaw that allows an attacker to take over the device. It's in the keyboard code, of all places, thanks to a custom SwiftKey build. There are about 600 million of these things in circulation, it's thought.
The patch has been released now by Samsung.