antiworm

Rumor has it that Apple will include a new security feature (possibly known to the developers in Apple as "Rootless") in the upcoming releases iOS 9 and OS X 10.11. Although details are sparse, it looks like Apple may have implemented what other UNIX systems call "namespaces" (See this nice discussion of namespaces on Linux ). Most of the public speculation about the rumor concerns a possible end to jailbreaking , a sport which has fallen on hard times with successful jailbreaks coming fewer and farther between. Since the defects which enable jailbreaking are inherently open to malware, Apple's ongoing efforts to find and fix these bugs with the LLVM/Clang compiler's ever-more-diligent static analyzer make it harder for the jailbreak community to find a toehold. However, a namespaces-like security architecture might fix one of the biggest issues that leads people to desire a jailbroken iPhone. When iOS was created, the system extension features were ...

This was not RSA's lucky day. This will be one to keep an eye on. RSA Hacked by automated attack [Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

In a simple demonstration, a hapless team discovers the truth. "Your server is vulnerable. It's already been cracked. Oh, and by the way, it's already distributing malware for a botnet." A Big Case of Oops! Attitude of management in many organizations is one of the biggest barriers to improved security on the internet. People simply don't want to believe that their systems are vulnerable. Denial is pervasive, and affects organizations from the biggest of the Fortune 500 or Federal government agencies, down to modestly sized companies, local governments, and non-profit corporations. The attitude of the unnamed client described at the "Following the White Rabbit" blog (link above) is all too common. I suspect that an underlying cause is that people want to believe several things that worked pretty well from an evolutionary perspective, but don't work very well on the internet. When everybody around is a bunch of cave dwellers, consumed entirely with...

Phishing has matured. The bad guys are now so adept at mimicking the actual emails sent by PayPal, that PayPal support apparently cannot tell the actual PayPal email apart from the Phishing emails. PayPal mistakes own email for phishing attack [The Register] PayPal admits to Phishing Users [eset.com] I've wondered for years why the phishing emails were often so terribly lame. The ideal strategy would seem to be to read some actual emails from the intended target, and mimmic those as closely as possible. The traditional excuse offered by the security community is that the emails appear often to be generated by people who speak English as a second language, but that doesn't seem like it would be such a limiting factor, given the ease with which the translations could be corrected, even anonymously, using clever internet tricks, even fairly simple ones. The real answer seemed to be that the text content of the email didn't much matter, as people don't read them very ...

It was only a matter of time before it became possible to create fake DNA evidence. That time is now. DNA Evidence Can be Fabricated [New York Times] Think it's bad when somebody steals your identity, drains your bank account, and spends thousands of dollars on credit cards they opened with your name on it? This run of the mill identity theft can cost you thousands of dollars, and many years to clean up. It pales in comparison to what will happen if biometric data becomes commonly used as proof of identity. Sometimes also called bio-print (like fingerprint) or bio-identity mechanisms, such things as retina scans and fingerprint scans are already in use, or even common use. DNA scans are likely to become possible several years from now, as the technology to read DNA is evolving rapidly. An entire genome can be sequenced by three people and equipment costing a few hundred thousand dollars, in a very short period of time, several days. When it become possible to read DNA in more or...

If you ever doubted that the lock on your door was in place to keep out the kids, doubt no more. This fascinating article details one of the world's top lock pickers. The Ultimate Lock Picker Hacks Pentagon, Beats Corporate Security for Fun and Profit A good friend of mine has been picking locks as a hobby most of his life. This is a skill that can be learned by any bright, patient person. It's a safe bet there are more people around who know how to pick locks than there are people getting paid to rethink the lock and key.

Microsoft plans to issue an "out of band" patch today, e.g. a patch released on a day other than "Patch Tuesday". Microsoft Security Bulletin Advance Notification Thw defect, which hasn't been publicly described just yet, apparently exists in every version of Windows that anyone who is likely to patch anything actually uses: Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, and Windows Vista. Microsoft describes this update as "critical" which means they know it can be remotely exploited without user intervention (and without exploit chaining, which they don't yet consider to be critical.)

The flaws discovered in DNS recently by Dan Kaminsky have existed for years. He linked several of them together, a concept known as " exploit chaining " to reveal a much more serious flaw. His technique makes it possible to hijack and misdirect a user's web browser to a malicious web site, even in cases where the user types the correct URL. ' That, of course, completely makes a fool of Verisign's Ken Silva, chief technology officer, who's been running around to the press saying irresponsible if not utterly foolish things like: "We have anticipated these flaws in DNS for many years and we have basically engineered around them." Kudos to Mr. Kaminsky, for working in private with the major vendors of DNS server software, who had patches ready to go before the flaw was announced. This kept the script kiddies from having a field day with the vulnerabilities, which were endemic to nearly all DNS servers. Apparently there remain some issues not yet addr...

Security training for application developers is an under-funded activity in most of the organizations that build software. Fixing security defects in custom applications remains an underfunded activity, even after defects are identified. Why does this continue to be the case? It can be easier to find defects for a customer in a security penetration test than it is to convince the customer that the problem is serious enough to fix. Sometimes this is because the incentives are messed up. I'm not the only person who has observed that the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) seem to have given Federal agencies a much higher incentive to find problems and write lengthy, complicated reports on those problems, than to fix them. Other times, managers may not understand the technical details of various vulnerabilities, or may be interested in a certain category of defects, while wearing blinders to other types of defects, particularly outside their comfort zone. If ...

If you haven't noticed, somehow lately computer keyboards and laptops in the Windows PC world are sporting a little pad for reading fingerprints. Notice the fine print at the bottom of this page, which I'll quote here in case it goes away: Microsoft Fingerprint Reader "The Fingerprint Reader should not be used for protecting sensitive data such as financial information, or for accessing corporate networks. We continue to recommend that you use a strong password for these types of activities." Why do you suppose Microsoft and all those hardware makers would go to all the trouble to add a fingerprint reader to laptops and keyboards, and then advise you not to use it? Probably because they know something that the average consumer probably doesn't: these devices can be spoofed. It's only a matter of time before there are clear, step by step instructions available on the internet for lifting a fingerprint and applying it to a model finger for spoofing purposes. H...

I haven't seen the original paper, but this article claims that researchers at Google and Georgia Institute of Technology estimate that there are 68,000 rogue DNS servers on the net. Use of Rogue DNS Servers on Rise Rogue DNS is one of the services provided by the zillions of malware, virus, worm, and rootkit infested zombie PC systems on the internet at any given time. The interesting part of this trick is that zombie PC systems might get "cleaned up" after an infestation has been detected, but their DNS configuration might (OK, probably does in nearly every case) remain pointing to a rogue DNS server, which occasionally, but not always, provides fraudulent data back to requesting clients. This is yet another reason why infested PC systems must be re-installed from clean original media whenever possible, in case you didn't have enough reasons already. The paper: Corrupted DNS Resolution Paths: The Rise of a Malicious Resolution Authority David Dagon, Chris Le...