2018 is a bad year for Intel - SGX can help attackers hide and execute malware without requiring any root privileges, or operating system modifications

Schwarz says his malware does not exploit any vulnerability in SGX. Rather it takes advantage of the fact that Intel considers software-based side-channel attacks on SGX as not possible and therefore out of scope. Side channel attacks gather and use information about some aspect of a system's physical operation to attack and expose sensitive data.

SGX is a security mechanism that Intel introduced with its Skylake processor architecture. It is designed to protect code and data from leaks and disclosure. As Schwarz notes in a technical paper, SGX uses secure enclaves working in hardware-isolated memory areas to protect application secrets from hardware attacks. Such enclaves can be used to securely store hardware-encrypted passwords, password managers, cryptographic keys, bitcoin wallets, and other secrets.

The exploit against SGX itself is harder to mount than a regular zero-day exploit, Schwarz concedes. But for someone with a background in micro-architectural attacks, it is perfectly doable

https://www.darkreading.com/vulnerabilities---threats/intel-sgx-can-be-used-to-hide-execute-malware/d/d-id/1331211?

Did your Oculus’s Rift headsets have stopped working - minor issue, they just forgot to update an expired certificate (really ???)

Someone at Oculus screwed up pretty badly today: An expired certificate appears to have soft-bricked all of the company’s Rift VR headsets, with users still unable to fire up software on the devices and no word of an incoming fix from the company yet.

The embarrassing issue has left the company’s flagship device unusable. This comes as the company continues to deliver major software updates that it announced at its most recent developer conference.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/07/all-of-oculuss-rift-headsets-have-stopped-working-due-to-an-expired-certificate/

Alexa laughs - Why is it creepy?, I thought it was due to an extra dose of AI

Your Alexa-enabled device may lapse into a sudden fit of giggles


But reported situations of unprompted laughter in silent homes are obviously quite creepy. Some users have resorted to unplugging their Echo devices to ensure that Alexa cannot interject anything, ominous or not

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/03/unprompted-creepy-laughing-from-alexa-is-freaking-out-echo-users/

Cars with Internet bring Internet related risks to cars - Are the car manufacturers ready for the challenge?

Many parts of cars — like the accelerator pedal or the turn signal — are designed to feel mechanical despite being run by tiny microprocessors that are connected through a network within the vehicle. Even so, vehicle software security hasn't really been a concern because cars have always been isolated and self-contained entities

Now that they connect to the Internet, they expose a new attack surface


Autonomous driving isn't limited to making knowledge workers' windshield time more productive. Logistics companies, for example, will benefit tremendously from autonomous vehicles, but imagine an attacker compromising and shutting down those vehicles: the results would be disastrous not only to the logistics company but to all of the businesses that rely on them as a vendor

https://www.darkreading.com/endpoint/connected-cars-pose-new-security-challenges/a/d-id/1331166?_mc=sm_dr&hootPostID=55d0e82932ac4cae8ebf0aee77f0657e

Does your phone support 4G LTE - What can hackers do - Nothing much just Spy, Track, Spoof and Spam

A new research paper  recently published by researchers at Purdue University and the University of Iowa details 10 new cyber attacks against the 4G LTE

1. Authentication Synchronization Failure Attack
2. Traceability Attack
3. Numb Attack
4. Authentication Relay Attack
5. Detach/Downgrade Attack
6. Paging Channel Hijacking Attack
7. Stealthy Kicking-off Attack
8. Panic Attack
9. Energy Depletion Attack
10. Linkability Attack

https://thehackernews.com/2018/03/4g-lte-network-hacking.html

Fileless Malware is coming - Are you ready? Here are a few pointers that could help

1. Patching
2. Least Privilege (App and User)
3. Restrict PowerShell (Constraint Language Mode)
4. Blacklisting / Redirect - Site / URL
5. Behavior Monitoring(Super Users)
6. Human Error (Training )

http://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Security-Think-Tank-How-to-tackle-fileless-malware-attacks

A web service running as root user - This happened for HTTPS certificate reseller (Trustico). Guess what - their website goes down. I wonder why?

The vulnerability could be leveraged by miscreants to execute arbitrary commands on the website's host server. A lack of input sanitization allowed carefully crafted commands, submitted as a URL in a web form, to be run on the underlying Linux-powered system, as root no less, meaning anyone who found and exploited the bug could take over the dot-com's web servers.

On Thursday morning, Serbian security researcher Predrag Cujanović tweeted details of a critical flaw in Trustico's website. The site was pulled offline – it just returns a 503 error



https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/01/trustico_website_offline/