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Cybersecurity is a fairly common buzz word used in Washington these days. It is tossed around to scare people that are ignorant of the way computer systems work so that legislation that is exceptionally pro-corporate friendly and anti-consumer can be pushed through. The latest of these is the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act. This handy little bit of law just passed through the US senate on the 28th (74 to 21) and allow corporations to share customer data with the US government and other companies without any consequences for doing so. This effectively removes any recourse customers or users have about the sharing of their personal information.

It seems that someone may have found a way around at least one of the latest hot fixes for OpenSSL. According to some talk around the darker places on the internet, a rehash of metadata can allow a malicious individual to get around the latest hot fix designed to stop someone from bypassing the CA check in OpenSSL. The original flaw was found to exist during certificate validation. When OpenSSL checks the certificate chain it will try to build an alternate route if the first attempt fails. Due to a flaw in the way this is done can allow a “bad guy” to actually force some of the secondary checks to be bypassed and allow an invalid cert to pass.

Just when you thought it was safe to use your credit card we are hearing rumblings of a breach at Hilton. According to Brian Kerbs and some of our own sources a payment card breach has taken place and the only unique feature about this was that all of the affected cards were used at a Hilton Property. This is not just the regular Hilton Logo properties, but also includes Embassy Suites, Doubletree, Hampton Inn and Suites, Waldorf Astoria Hates and Resorts, and potentially others. The exact timing of the breach is unclear at the moment, but could go as far back as November 2014.

Security and malware research company, Kaspersky has recently released a paper describing what they say is the “ultimate level of anonymity” used by any malicious hacking group. In their report they describe a new attack by the group Ouroboros as “exquisite”. This is the same group that was linked to the Turla malware last year so we are not talking about amateurs or script kiddies. The attack uses commercial satellites’ unencrypted communication channels to send and receive traffic to their C&C servers.