WATCHOUT - If you are a cat or sunset lover - Hackers love you

Snippet:

Hackers are issuing commands to machines infected with the Zbot malware using popular images of sunsets and cats, according to security firm Trend Micro.

"Using steganography, a list of banks and financial institutions that will be monitored is hidden inside the image. The list includes institutions from across the globe, particularly in Europe and the Middle East."
The images can spread in a variety of ways. They can be shared as standalone malicious files that send out commands to infected machines, or inserted into web pages and set to automatically target visitors to the site.

The link below has more details:

http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2331885/hackers-spreading-zbot-malware-using-cat-and-sunset-pictures

- Apple iOS Security Paper

Snippets:

Every iOS device has a dedicated AES 256 crypto engine built into the DMA path between the flash storage and main system memory, making file encryption highly efficient

Data Protection is implemented by constructing and managing a hierarchy of keys, and builds on the hardware encryption technologies built into each iOS device. Data Protection is controlled on a per-file basis by assigning each file to a class; accessibility is determined by whether the class keys have been unlocked.

The passcode is “tangled” with the device’s UID, so brute-force attempts must be per- formed on the device under attack. A large iteration count is used to make each attempt slower. The iteration count is calibrated so that one attempt takes approximately 80 milliseconds. This means it would take more than 5½ years to try all combinations of a six-character alphanumeric passcode with lowercase letters and numbers

Link Below:

http://images.apple.com/iphone/business/docs/iOS_Security_Feb14.pdf

Smart devices spying on us (And why is that a surprise)

As  (smart) devices get better and as we use them more and more in our day-to-dya life  , they will obviously retain more and more information about us. The combination of "Internet Of Things", collusion between vendors and governments and insecure design of products is going to make it easy for "Big Brother" or anyone with not-so-good intention to extract these information.

Moral of the story: We can't have it both ways. This is the downside and only in my opinion, privacy laws can offer us some protection

The link below has more details:

http://www.polygon.com/2014/2/28/5456940/our-game-consoles-are-likely-spying-on-us-and-this-is-business-as

Is it "whole food" or "hole food" (I mean, with a lot of holes about their scientific explanantion)

Still, there’s a lot in your average Whole Foods that’s resolutely pseudoscientific. The homeopathy section has plenty of Latin words and mathematical terms, but many of its remedies are so diluted that, statistically speaking, they may not contain a single molecule of the substance they purport to deliver.

Nearby are eight full shelves of probiotics—live bacteria intended to improve general health. I invited a biologist friend who studies human gut bacteria to come take a look with me. She read the healing claims printed on a handful of bottles and frowned. “This is bullshit,” she said

 a significant portion of what Whole Foods sells is based on simple pseudoscience. And sometimes that can spill over into outright anti-science 

The link below has more details:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/23/whole-foods-america-s-temple-of-pseudoscience.html

We are all aware of Patent trolls, how about, Patent delay for 45 years.

Gilbert P. Hyatt, the dogged inventor isn't some gadfly in a garden shed. He's probably made more than $150 million from a deal with Royal Philips, the Dutch electronics maker, to license 23 of his patents, including the 1990 one. Intel Corp. co-founder Robert Noyce invested in Hyatt's first company in the 1960s, according to Hyatt.

He has taken the patent office to court more than 10 times to force the agency to reconsider rejections of some of his applications. He even won a case at the Supreme Court in 2012 over what type of evidence can be presented in district court.

To me , the following sensible line

"I respect Gilbert Hyatt's work — the process of engineering is difficult," Bassett said in a telephone interview. "But innovations are more than ideas. The broader context matters. If Gilbert Hyatt had never existed, I believe the microprocessor would have developed in the same way that it did."

The link below has more details:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-wp-blm-news-bc-inventor01-20140301,0,255272.story

Are you aware of this Billion dollar Hacker Club?

                 

One of the group’s former members had just sold their company (WhatsApp) for $19 billion.

Napster co-founder Shawn Fanning (“napster”) is known to have been a member

Many other former members of this elite hacking crew have become leaders in the Internet security and related industries, founding or working in senior roles at companies such as Cloudmark, Duo Security, Hotmail, Google, Yammer, Veracode, CloudVolumes, Symantec, SecurityFocus, Immunet, and Sourcefire.

The link below has more details:

http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/02/w00w00/

20th Century was Nuclear Threat from nations; 21st Century is Malware from Nation States

We better  get used to these types of headlines.   

Well, you can figure out the reason

G Data bases its case for Russian government involvement on the complexity of the malware and the presence of Cyrillic words in the malware sample

Uroburos is a rootkit made of two files, "a driver and an encrypted virtual file system," that can "take control of an infected computer, execute arbitrary commands, and hide system activities." The malware is highly dangerous, MN alleges, because its structure is "modular" and "flexible," meaning that new malicious functions can be added to it easily.

The link below has more details:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-57619748-83/security-firm-claims-russian-government-makes-malware