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Month: March 2017

ComputerWorldIndependent
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Mirai is the hydra of IoT security: Too many heads to cut off

Credit to Author: Michael Kan| Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2017 04:05:00 -0700

Efforts to stop Mirai, a malware found infecting thousands of IoT devices, have become a game of whack-a-mole, with differing opinions over whether hackers or the security community are making any headway.

The malicious code became publicly available in late September. Since then, it’s been blamed for enslaving IoT devices such as DVRs and internet cameras to launch massive distributed denial-of-service attacks, one of which disrupted internet access across the U.S. in October.

The good news: Last month, police arrested one suspected hacker who may have been behind several Mirai-related DDoS attacks.

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IndependentKrebs
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If Your iPhone is Stolen, These Guys May Try to iPhish You

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2017 05:17:33 +0000

KrebsOnSecurity recently featured the story of a Brazilian man who was peppered with phishing attacks trying to steal his Apple iCloud username and password after his wife’s phone was stolen in a brazen daylight mugging. Today, we’ll take an insider’s look at an Apple iCloud phishing gang that appears to work quite closely with organized crime rings — within the United States and beyond — to remotely unlock and erase stolen Apple devices. Victims of iPhone theft can use the Find My iPhone feature to remotely locate, lock or erase their iPhone — just by visiting Apple’s site and entering their iCloud username and password. Likewise, an iPhone thief can use those iCloud credentials to remotely unlock the victim’s stolen iPhone, wipe the device, and resell it. As a result, iPhone thieves often subcontract the theft of those credentials to third-party iCloud phishing services. This story is about one of those services.

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ComputerWorldIndependent
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WikiLeaks dump spotlights CIA spying powers

Credit to Author: Michael Kan| Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2017 10:51:00 -0700

Has the CIA ever spied on you? That’s a key question swirling around the WikiLeaks document dump that allegedly details the U.S. agency’s secret hacking tools.

The documents themselves don’t reveal much about who the CIA might have snooped on. But the agency certainly has the power to spy on foreigners outside the U.S., said Paul Pillar, a former deputy counterterrorism chief with the CIA.

That’s its job after all: To collect foreign intelligence. But even so, the CIA is pretty selective with its targets.   

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ComputerWorldIndependent
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Of course your TV’s spying on you

Credit to Author: Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols| Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2017 10:22:00 -0700

Julian Assange, Wikileaks’ founder and Russian propagandist, must be proud of himself. In his latest “revelation” that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) can hack Apple and Android smartphones, PC operating systems and smart TVs, he has people throwing fits about how awful the CIA is.

Please. Give me a break.

Wikileaks uncovered nothing really new. Zero. Zilch.

As my fellow Computerworld writer buddy Mike Elgin said, “The Wikileaks/CIA stories simply remind us anything with a camera, microphone or IP address could theoretically be hacked.”

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ComputerWorldIndependent
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How much are vendor security assurances worth after the CIA leaks?

Credit to Author: Lucian Constantin| Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2017 08:40:00 -0700

Following the recent revelations about the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s cyberespionage arsenal, software vendors reiterated their commitments to fix vulnerabilities in a timely manner and told users that many of the flaws described in the agency’s leaked documents have been fixed.

While these assurances are understandable from a public relations perspective, they don’t really change anything, especially for companies and users that are the target of state-sponsored hackers. The software they use is not less safe, nor better protected, than it was before WikiLeaks published the 8,700-plus CIA documents last Tuesday.

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