NTSB Investigation of Fatal Driverless Car Accident

Autonomous systems are going to have to do much better than this. The Uber car that hit and killed Elaine Herzberg in Tempe, Ariz., in March 2018 could not recognize all pedestrians, and was being driven by an operator likely distracted by streaming video, according to documents released by the...

Retailer Orvis.com Leaked Hundreds of Internal Passwords on Pastebin

Orvis, a Vermont-based retailer that specializes in high-end fly fishing equipment and other sporting goods, leaked hundreds of internal passwords on Pastebin.com for several weeks last month, exposing credentials the company used to manage everything from firewalls and routers to administrator...

Twitter temporarily disables 'Tweeting via SMS' after CEO gets hacked

Twitter today finally decided to temporarily disable a feature, called 'Tweeting via SMS,' after it was abused by a hacking group to compromise Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey last week and sent a series of racist and offensive tweets to Dorsey's followers. Dorsey's Twitter account was compromised last...

Corporate IoT – a path to intrusion

Several sources estimate that by the year 2020 some 50 billion IoT devices will be deployed worldwide. IoT devices are purposefully designed to connect to a network and many are simply connected to the internet with little management or oversight. Such devices still must be identifiable,...

Corporate IoT - a path to intrusion

Several sources estimate that by the year 2020 some 50 billion IoT devices will be deployed worldwide. IoT devices are purposefully designed to connect to a network and many are simply connected to the internet with little management or oversight. Such devices still must be identifiable,...

Corporate IoT - a path to intrusion

Several sources estimate that by the year 2020 some 50 billion IoT devices will be deployed worldwide. IoT devices are purposefully designed to connect to a network and many are simply connected to the internet with little management or oversight. Such devices still must be identifiable,...

Facebook Agrees to Pay $5 Billion Fine and Setup New Privacy Program for 20 Years

The Federal Trade Commission FTC today officially confirmed that Facebook has agreed to pay a record-breaking $5 billion fine over privacy violations surrounding the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Besides the multibillion-dollar penalty, the company has also accepted a 20-year-long agreement that...

Protecting Yourself from Identity Theft

I don't have a lot of good news for you. The truth is there's nothing we can do to protect our data from being stolen by cybercriminals and others. Ten years ago, I could have given you all sorts of advice about using encryption, not sending information over email, securing your web connections,...

Michael Cohen's House Testimony: 5 Key Takeaways from the Prepared Statement

Michael Cohen's testimony before the House Oversight committee tells a new story about Trump and Russia...

Friday Squid Blogging: Japanese Squid-Fishing Towns in Decline

It's a problem: But now, fluctuations in ocean temperatures, years of overfishing and lax regulatory oversight have drastically depleted populations of the translucent squid in waters around Japan. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I...

The PCLOB Needs a Director

The US Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board is looking for a director. Among other things, this board has some oversight role over the NSA. More precisely, it can examine what any executive-branch agency is doing about counterterrorism. So it can examine the program of TSA watchlists, NSA...

State Government Online Payment Service Exposes 14M Customers

Details on more than 14 million customer records have been exposed thanks to a security oversight at GovPayNow.com, which as its name implies provides a platform for online payment systems for state and local governments. The company, which according to its website “handles more than 2.1 million...

DEF CON 2018: Apple 0-Day (Re)Opens Door to ‘Synthetic’ Mouse-Click Attack

LAS VEGAS – By tweaking just two lines of code, a researcher stumbled on an Apple zero-day that could allow a local attacker to virtually “click” a security prompt and thus load a kernel extension on systems running Apple’s latest High Sierra operating system. Kernel access on a Mac gives an...

Totally Pwning the Tapplock Smart Lock

TL;DR – How to open a Tapplock over BLE in under two seconds: Totally Pwning the Tapplock Smart Lock A couple of weekends ago, a YouTuber called JerryRigEverything posted a teardown of a “smart” padlock, called the Tapplock. He discovered that, using a sticky GoPro mount, he could remove the back...

Japan's Directorate for Signals Intelligence

The Intercept has a long article on Japan's equivalent of the NSA: the Directorate for Signals Intelligence. Interesting, but nothing really surprising. The directorate has a history that dates back to the 1950s; its role is to eavesdrop on communications. But its operations remain so highly...

Nortek Linear eMerge E3 Series

CVSS v3 9.8 ATTENTION: Remotely exploitable/low skill level to exploit. Vendor: Nortek Equipment: Linear eMerge E3 Series Vulnerability: Command Injection AFFECTED PRODUCTS The following Linear eMerge, an access control interface, versions are affected: Linear eMerge E3 series Versions V0.32-07e...

White House Releases VEP Disclosure Rules

The U.S. government took steps toward offering more transparency into the Vulnerabilities Equities Process. On Wednesday it released of the “Vulnerabilities Equities Policy and Process” PDF charter that outlines how the government will disclose cyber security flaws and when it will keep them...

Rockstar Games: insecure redirect in https://www.rockstargames.com

In this report, the researcher identified an insecure redirect from HTTPS to HTTP, going from the Social Club subdomain to the main site. SSL/TLS configuration issues are out of scope, but this was an oversight that needed to be fixed. Our thanks to the researcher for pointing this out to us...

Ashley Madison to Pay $11.2 Million to Data Breach Victims

Ashley Madison, an American most prominent dating website that helps people cheat on their spouses has been hacked, has agreed to an $11.2 Million settlement for roughly 37 million users whose personal details were exposed in a massive data breach two years ago. Though the parent company of Ashle...

HackerOne: Adding or removing a new non-preferred payout method does not trigger an e-mail or account notification

While we previously sent an e-mail to the user when their preferred payout method was modified, we did not send a notification when adding or removing a new non-preferred payout method. This oversight was pointed out by this report...