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...

Today’s File Security is So ’80s, Part 3: Dynamic Peer Groups – 3 Examples from Customer Data

In the first two parts of this series, we discussed why permissions management, the traditional approach to file security, no longer works and introduced a new approach to file security that leverages machine learning to build dynamic peer groups based on how users actually access files. In this...

Policy Experts Push To Make Vulnerability Equities Process Law

The U.S. government’s role in vulnerability disclosures is a vital part of our national security and should be codified in law, said a group of policy experts at a panel discussion last week at the RSA Conference. The panelists argued that the government’s current process of vulnerability use and...

Trump Cyber Executive Order Calls for 60-Day Review

President Donald Trump cited the hack of the Democratic National Committee as a “good example” for the need of a stronger cyber security measures for both the private and public sector. “The Democratic National Committee was hacked successfully, very successfully, and terribly successfully,” Trum...

White House Approves New Rules for Sharing of Raw Intelligence Data

President Obama last week approved a change in the way the National Security Agency shares raw signals intelligence data with the rest of the U.S. intelligence community, a shift that privacy experts worry will erode the civil liberties of Americans. An unclassified document released by the Offic...

New Relic: Potential sub-domain hijacking

Hey New Relic Security team, I noticed what appeared to be a configuration oversight and I wanted to mention it to you. The following domains are currently pointing to Fastly: fr.newrelic.com 151.101.192.207 es.newrelic.com 151.101.0.207 When you visit them, you should see something like this:...

Mac Malware Can Secretly Spy On Your Webcam and Mic – Here's How to Stay Safe

Apple Mac Computers are considered to be much safer than Windows at keeping viruses and malware out of its environment, but that’s simply not true anymore. It's not because Mac OS X is getting worse every day, but because hackers are getting smart and sophisticated these days. The bad news for Ma...

Fallout Over OPM Breach Report Begins

Wednesday’s bombshell report on the U.S. Office of Personnel Management breaches that exposed sensitive data belonging to more than 22 million people has sparked a cavalcade of finger pointing, politicking and squabbling over who knew what first. The scathing report by Republicans on the U.S. Hou...

LocalTapiola: Non-secure requests to www.lahitapiola.fi are not automatically upgraded to HTTPS

To reproduce, send a HEAD request to http://www.lahitapiola.fi like so: curl -I http://www.lahitapiola.fi HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently Date: Fri, 19 Aug 2016 22:11:59 GMT Location: http://www.lahitapiola.fi/henkilo Cache-Control: max-age=60 Expires: Fri, 19 Aug 2016 22:12:59 GMT Content-Type:...

Multiple Vulnerabilities Identified in 'Utterly Broken' BHU Routers

Researchers have identified a router so fraught with vulnerabilities and so “utterly broken” that it can be exploited to do pretty much anything. An attacker could bypass its authentication, peruse sensitive information stored in the router’s system logs and even use the device to execute OS...