Wednesday, April 2, 2014

njRat (not New Jersey Rat) Malware - infect 24K computers, and is used by 487 groups.



This is the downside of (evil)code that can easily be ported or shared.


According to the article:-

"Symantec analysed 721 samples of njRAT and uncovered a fairly large number of infections, with 542 control and command (C&C) server domain names found and 24,000 infected computers worldwide," read the post.

"Nearly 80 percent of the C&C servers were located in regions in the Middle East and North Africa, including Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, the Palestinian Territories and Libya. 

The malware grants hackers basic powers, such as the ability to download and execute additional malware on infected systems, execute shell commands, read and write registry keys, capture screenshots, log keystrokes and hijack control of webcams.


The link below has more information:-


Wearable Tech - A third of the "early adopters" turn into "early droppers"



Apparently, Marketing and Hype and reality are not in sync here.

I find one of the reasons funny (obviously painful to the buyer)

The other came from someone who definitely wanted it, and used it - but was disappointed when it was superseded within months by the newer version, released by Samsung at Mobile World Congress. "Is that the old one?" the owner was asked by informed friends


According to the article:- 

The advert was blunt: a second-hand Samsung Galaxy Gear smartwatch for sale, priced at "£100 ONO". For a device which cost £299 in September, surely that's a bargain?

Yet after a week advertised on the intranet of an non-technical organisation with more than 10,000 staff, it was still unsold

That observation is strengthened by research from Endeavour Partners in the US, which found that one-third of American consumers who have owned a wearable product stopped using it within six months. What's more, while one in 10 American adults own some form of activity tracker, half of them no longer use it.


The link below has more information:-

"Ephemeral"Apps promise to delete your records - Is it true?



My thought is , if the app is free then you are their product so , they will need to know more about you so they can sell your information to advertisers.

Even then, if they delete (after they analyze and before backing it up), it would still be nice.

According to Bruce, some apps don't do that


According to the article:- 

The problem is that these new "ephemeral" conversations aren't really ephemeral the way a face-to-face unrecorded conversation would be. They're not ephemeral like a conversation during a walk in a deserted woods used to be before the invention of cell phones and GPS receivers.

At best, the data is recorded, used, saved and then deliberately deleted. At worst, the ephemeral nature is faked. While the apps make the posts, texts or messages unavailable to users quickly, they probably don't erase them off their systems immediately. They certainly don't erase them from their backup tapes, if they end up there.


Ephemeral conversation is easy to promise but hard to get right. In 2013, researchers discovered that Snapchat doesn't delete images as advertised; it merely changes their names so they're not easy to see. 


If the government demanded copies of those conversations -- either through a secret NSA demand or a more normal legal process involving an employer or school -- the companies would have no choice but to hand them over.

Even worse, if the FBI or NSA demanded that American companies secretly store those conversations and not tell their users, breaking their promise of deletion, the companies would have no choice but to comply.

That last bit isn't just paranoia.

We know the U.S. government has done this to companies large and small. Lavabit was a small secure e-mail service, with an encryption system designed so that even the company had no access to users' e-mail. Last year, the NSA presented it with a secret court order demanding that it turn over its master key, thereby compromising the security of every user.


Of course, the typical Snapchat user doesn't care whether the U.S. government is monitoring his conversations. He's more concerned about his high school friends and his parents. But if these platforms are insecure, it's not just the NSA that one should worry about.

We need ephemeral apps, but we need credible assurances from the companies that they are actually secure and credible assurances from the government that they won't be subverted.



The link below has more information:-

Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Email addresses of LinkedIn users exposed via a web browser add-on tool



I hope you are not using the same Email address for all your important accounts. (Are you?)

As usual, LinkedIn is defensive and goes the usual route of threatening Sell Hack. 
Why not take the easy way of conding securely, that should save a lot of trouble.


According to the article:- 

Sell Hack is available as a free extension to the Chrome browser that, once installed, will pop up a "hack in" button on LinkedIn profiles.

Sell Hack insisted that the the tool was created for marketing professionals and that all data is publicly available.

But the social network for professionals did not agree.

"We are doing everything we can to shut Sell Hack down. On 31 March LinkedIn's legal team delivered Sell Hack a cease-and-desist letter as a result of several violations," a spokesman told the BBC.

The link below has more information:-



Update-1



The plug-in seems to collecting publicly available data and it looks like LinkedIn is trying to help the users but, I am not sure anything can be done since, the data is anyway public.

(from: http://www.tripwire.com/state-of-security/top-security-stories/sell-hack-plug-really-reveal-email-addresses-linkedin/ )

And that is likely the case, according to Yahoo columnist Alyssa Bereznak, who writes that the application reveals the account holders email address “by running through an algorithm while you’re on a person’s LinkedIn page. The algorithm checks publicly available data to produce that person’s email address, or at least its very best guess.”

(Here is the scary part)
Why all the fuss if the Sell Hack does not compromise LinkedIn’s security? Apparently when the plug-in is installed, users must grant it permissions which allow the software to monitor users’ activity and harvest data.

“The catch is, even after you’ve used SellHack, the extension is able to watch your activity on the site and collect the information of any direct connection whose page you’ve decided to visit,” wrote Bereznak. “What it’s using this information for is unclear.”

(SIEM) Monitoring - Where do we start (or restart).


Most vendors would like to add a lot of devices to your SIEM, display a lot of alerts and reports and vanish. In simple term your SIEM becomes GIGO (Garbage In Garbage Out)


Here is a sensible check list from Dr. Anton Chuvakin which can be a good starting point.



Follow this link:-
http://www.securitywarriorconsulting.com/security-incident-log-review-checklist.html

Awesome Real-time Cyber Threat map from Kaspersky



It is both real-time and interactive


http://cyberwar.kaspersky.com/

HP introduces "SmartShopper" - Should it be called "SmartStalker"



We are used to "Targeted Ads" in emails, now they can follow us and continue to nag us via iPhone.


According to the article:- 

Hewlett Packard has unveiled a new mobile app dubbed SmartShopper  has the ability to send location-based smartphone offers to customer’s iPhones in real time

Dominic Wilde, a VP within HP’s networking division, told Techworld in California last week: “It has very accurate location capabilities so that we can identify a device down to 2m, which is 60 percent better than anything else on the market today. In best case, even down to 1m.”


The link below has more information:-