Displaying items by tag: Flaws

A day after we published an article on how deficient most developers are when it comes to properly planning for security we are hearing about a new bug that infects one of the core components of an operating system. Dubbed Bash or Shellshock this new flaw affects the shell in an OS. The shell in an OS is what allows you to interact with systems. When you run an application it will often run code through the shell to give you the desired result.

The P0wn2Own competition is getting s sibling. Now we are not talking about the competition sponsored by Google or even Microsoft. We are talking about a knockdown drag out competition to hammer the (lack of) security in residential and SOHO routers. The competition will be called SOHOpelessly Broken and will kick off at DEF CON 22 this year. Interestingly enough it is sponsored by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Independent Security Evaluators (ISE).

We talk a lot about security on DecryptedTech and with good reason, there are a ton of threats out there and this list just keeps getting longer. This is why we tend to get annoyed with large corporations when they either skimp on security or botch the job. This is apparently the case in with eBay owned PayPal. For a while PayPal has been highlighting their 2FA (Two Factor Authentication) as a great way to protect your financial data and it is… unless you screw up the implementation.

passwords stolen thanks to a BMC chip with a fairly serious Universal Plug-n-Play feature. According to security researcher Zachary Wikholm, there is s a flaw in the IPMI BIOS on the WPCM450 BMC (Baseboard Management Controller) that Supermicro uses on their boards (with the exception of very newest ones).

Microsoft is joining the ranks of Symantec and McAfee in a very special group. This is a group of companies whose anti-malware products can be/have been attacked directly. According to a security update Microsoft says that a specifically crafted file can stop the service from working until manually removed.

To say I am leery of The Cloud would be to make a very mild understatement. Ever since the first true cloud services hit the market (and were hacked) I have been concerned with the continued push to get more people onboard while little attention is paid to actually securing these services and the user data they contain. In a conversation I recently had, I brought up the fact that we are only in June and already have had 7 major breaches. Security (or the lack of) is a big issue, yet we do not see the companies building and selling “The Cloud” making the changes needed to protect what is already out there.

After taking a pretty big hit from the HeartBleed bug OpenSSL I back in the new for an additional six bugs that put user data at risk. Security researchers have discovered a number of additional bugs in OpenSSl that can be used to allow malicious persons to spy on communication. Fortunately for the masses (about two thirds of internet sites use OpenSSL) these new bugs are not as easy to exploit as Heartbleed was.

After last week experts from Gibson Security found security holes in the application Snapchat, on the internet appeared web page under a name SnapchatDB! where there is allegedly database with usernames of Snapchat users and their associated phone numbers.

About a month ago we reported on an statement by the FTC in regards to a security flaw in certain models of TRENDNet IP cameras. The statement was a “what he said” move considering that all of the items they talked about have already been done by TRENDNet. We also noted that the FTC was less concerned about the actual presence of flaws than they were with a product being labeled as secure when it was not. At the time of the statement we remarked that the flaws found in TREDNNet products were very common in embedded devices. In fact we recently reported that a similar flaw exists in many residential firewalls and routers. It seems that companies building products with an embedded OS just do not know how to keep things secure.

Researchers from the firm MWR Labs found a way to exploit vulnerabilities in Chrome, and how to bypass the security mechanisms in Windows 7, which enabled them to perform arbitrary actions on the victim's computer.