Displaying items by tag: Black Hat 2014

Black Hat 2014  Las Vegas, NV - The thought of a network breach or targeted attack is what keeps most systems admins up at night and constantly irritated to boot. The need to man the walls and make sure the moat is filled all the time is exhausting and nearly impossible in today’s moderns and increasingly distributed networks and business models. It makes the thought of a breach not a “what if”, but a “when”. This is becoming the new way of thinking about security. As we have talked about in the past people are no longer thinking they can keep everyone out, but are concentrating on quickly identifying and mitigating the inevitable breach.

Security should be a priority in any company, but it should be even more paramount in places where lives are at risk. So we have to wonder how someone ever allowed a security flaw in aircraft inflight systems that would allow for someone to compromise the aircraft. This is the claim of security researcher Ruben Santamarta has made and he plans to prove it at Black Hat 2014.

It is always a bad day when you find out there is a problem. Even if it is as simple as your coffee pot not working (ok bad choice for many). Things are made worse when you find out it is a problem that just cannot easily be fixed or worked around. This is the case in a new Android based vulnerability that was discovered by Blue Box Security (the same guys that found the Master Key issue) a few months ago.

The TOR Project has been the go-to group when it comes to anonymity. This group and their TOR browser bundle are used by millions of people daily and not just to surf for illegal items or porn. In many cases the use of TOR allows dissidents in countries with oppressive governments to maintain connections to the outside world and also communicate. In areas like China TOR and their obfuscator project allow free access to the internet despite the great firewall of China.