IoT security: how Microsoft protects Azure Datacenters

Azure Sphere first entered the IoT Security market in 2018 with a clear mission—to empower every organization on the planet to connect and create secure and trustworthy IoT devices. Security is the foundation for durable innovation and business resilience. Every industry investing in IoT must...

IoT forecast: Running antivirus on your smart device?

In 2016, threat actors pulled off a basic but devastating botnet attack that harnessed the power of the Internet of Things IoT. After gathering a list of 61 default username and password combinations for IoT devices, threat actors scanned the Internet for open Telnet ports and, when they found a...

IoT Cybersecurity Improvement Act Passed, Heads to President's Desk

Security experts are applauding the recent stamp of approval by the U.S. Senate on a groundbreaking internet-of-things IoT security regulatory effort. The IoT Cybersecurity Improvement Act, which was led in bipartisan sponsorship by Reps. Will Hurd R-Texas and Robin Kelly D-Ill., would require th...

This Week in Security News: Ransomware Gang is Raking in Tens of Millions of Dollars and Microsoft Patch Tuesday Update Fixes 17 Critical Bugs

Welcome to our weekly roundup, where we share what you need to know about cybersecurity news and events that happened over the past few days. This week, learn about a ransomware group that walked away with 2,200 Bitcoin: More than $33 million based on the current Bitcoin exchange rate. Also, read...

National Cybersecurity Awareness Month: Security Pros Offer Top Tips for Staying Safe Online

Held every October, CISA’s National Cybersecurity Awareness Month NCSAM aims to educate organizations and individuals about the ever-changing field of cybersecurity and encourage proper security practices. In honor of this event, we rounded up six key tips from our network of experts to help you...

IoT Device Takeovers Surge 100 Percent in 2020

Connected cameras, refrigerators and other seemingly-mundane internet-of-things IoT devices are a cybercriminal favorite this year, with new research showing a sharp increase 100 percent in IoT infections observed on wireless networks. IoT devices are now responsible for 32.72 percent of all...

Healthcare security update: death by ransomware, what’s next?

A recent ransomware attack which played a significant role in the death of a German woman has put into focus both the dangers and the importance of cybersecurity today. But it has also led some to point fingers as to who was responsible. As usual, playing the blame game helps no one, but it does...

Male Chastity Device Comes with Massive Security Flaws

Researchers at Pen Test Partners recently uncovered concerning security issues with a connected male chastity device and are calling on the entire connected sex toy industry — known as “teledildonics” — to make security a priority. The Qiui Cellmate chastity cage has a Bluetooth lock that could...

Why we invite security researchers to hack Azure Sphere

Fighting the security battle so our customers don’t have to IoT devices are becoming more prevalent in almost every aspect of our lives—we will rely on them in our homes, our businesses, as well as our infrastructure. In February, Microsoft announced the general availability of Azure Sphere, an...

Concluding the Azure Sphere Security Research Challenge, Microsoft Awards $374,300 to Global Security Research Community

The Azure Sphere Security Research Challenge brought together 70 researchers from 21 countries to help secure Azure Sphere customers and expand Microsoft’s partnerships with the global IoT security research community. During the three-month Azure Sphere Security Research Challenge, researchers...

Concluding the Azure Sphere Security Research Challenge, Microsoft Awards $374,300 to Global Security Research Community

The Azure Sphere Security Research Challenge brought together 70 researchers from 21 countries to help secure Azure Sphere customers and expand Microsoft’s partnerships with the global IoT security research community. During the three-month Azure Sphere Security Research Challenge, researchers...

Chaos in a cup: When ransomware creeps into your smart coffee maker

When the fledgling concept of the Internet of Things IoT was beginning to excite the world almost a decade ago, perhaps no coffee lover at that time wouldve imagined including the coffee machine in the roster of internet-connected devices—even in jest. True, the simple, utilitarian coffee machine...

SAS@Home is back this fall

The world during the pandemic prepares many surprises for us. Most of them are certainly unpleasant: health risks, inability to travel or meet old friends. One of these unpleasant surprises awaited us in the early spring, when the organizing team of the beloved SAS conference were forced to...

Looking for sophisticated malware in IoT devices

One of the motivations for this post is to encourage other researchers who are interested in this topic to join in, to share ideas and knowledge and to help build more capabilities in order to better protect our smart devices. Research background Smart watches, smart home devices and even smart...

Mozi Botnet Accounts for Majority of IoT Traffic

The Mozi botnet, a peer-2-peer P2P malware known previously for taking over Netgear, D-Link and Huawei routers, has swollen in size to account for 90 percent of observed traffic flowing to and from all internet of things IoT devices, according to researchers. IBM X-Force noticed Mozi’s spike with...

Four More Bugs Patched in Microsoft’s Azure Sphere IoT Platform

Details tied to a pair of remote code execution bugs in Microsoft’s IoT security platform called Azure Sphere were released Monday. Also made public were specifics associated with two additional privilege escalation flaws impacting the same cloud security platform. Public disclosure of all four o...

Researchers Warn of Flaw Affecting Millions of IoT Devices

Researchers are urging connected-device manufacturers to ensure they have applied patches addressing a flaw in a module used by millions of Internet-of-Things IoT devices. If exploited, researchers speculated that the flaw could allow attackers to knock out a city’s electricity or even overdose a...

CVE-2020-14936

CVE-2020-14936 concerns Contiki-NG 4.4–4.5, where the SNMP agent contains a buffer overflow in snmp_oid_decode_oid() triggered during SNMP request processing. The function does not sufficiently validate target-buffer capacity when writing parsed OID values, risking overwriting memory beyond the i...

CVE-2020-14934

Buffer overflows were discovered in Contiki-NG 4.4 through 4.5, in the SNMP agent. The function parsing the received SNMP request does not verify the input message's requested variables against the capacity of the internal SNMP engine buffer. If the number of variables in the request exceeds the...

CVE-2020-14934

CVE-2020-14934 affects Contiki-NG 4.4–4.5 where the SNMP agent’s parsing of SNMP requests does not verify the number of requested variables against the internal buffer capacity. If the request contains more variables than the allocated buffer, a memory write goes out of bounds, potentially overwr...