Author: Robby Pedrica
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Are you BIASed?
A new vulnerability in the authentication component of the Bluetooth wireless protocol has been uncovered by a group of researchers. The issue is not relating to a bug but rather the specification itself. “The Bluetooth standard includes both a legacy authentication procedure and a secure authentication procedure, allowing devices to authenticate to each other using…
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NAS and SMR collide
A ‘brief’ primer on NAS TL;DR move to the next section if you find this boring … NAS, being the (mostly) cheaper cousin to SANs, is used pervasively everywhere from SOHO environments to large corporates. Netapp (Network Appliance) basically invented the category in the 90’s with their F-series of units combining SMB and NFS access,…
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RDP – the gift that keeps on giving
It’s long been known (at least in security circles) that the RDP protocol, as well as client and server implementations, are horribly broken. While a BlueKeep (the most recent RDP vulnerability) worm has yet to surface, brute-force password attacks on RDP services are a dime a dozen and occurring at a rapid rate. PoC code…
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The great web developer con
Another day, another dodgy web developer story. The premise: We would like to offer you a website design for X amount. But to do so, we need to transfer your domain to us. This tale is a pretty old one but it appears to be flourishing – the lure of a good once-off price for…
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DMARC: optimising email delivery
Email is a fickle thing … There are a huge amount of dependencies involved in what seems like a small task – sending an email. What started out as a simple method of exchanging messages has morphed over the years into a cobbled-together monster as needs changed and especially businesses required a more robust and…
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Security – Hell in a handbasket
The last 2 weeks have really been a bad time for security news and one has to hope things will change for the better; if not, the headline says it all! BlueKeep Microsoft released a security patch 2 weeks ago related to Windows Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) which is used to remote access Windows systems.…
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Symantec’s negative day defense
For when zero-day protection is not enough – Symantec are now prescient! WTF does "negative day defense" even mean?! pic.twitter.com/r1Q2L7GbOg — Jake Williams (@MalwareJake) May 28, 2019
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Vuln mitigation and INtel MDS – the spectre looms
Spectre and Meltdown a have been with us for just over a year now and even with all the predictions of dire consequences, we have yet to see any in-the-wild code snippets or attacks beyond theoretical POCs. So the question to ask is whether we should be losing a lot of hardware performance (most of…
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A lesson in supply chain attacks
What happens when the websites we visit and the companies we depend on to provide us with information, are compromised? Supply chain attacks go to the root of information we depend on rather than attack us directly. A recent attack on the Asus infrastructure paints the exact scenario for supply chain attacks. Attackers compromised an…
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2018 the year of the hacked router
I’ve spoken in depth on consumer (and some enterprise) router security issues. In brief summary, these devices are pieces of scrap that are full of vulnerabilities and very seldom get updated to fix issues. It’s no coincidence that this year has seen an exponential growth in attacks on routers as well as botnets making use…
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(S)RUM
Veronica Schmitt, a senior digital forensic scientist at DFIRLABS, recently featured on Paul’s Security Weekly, showcasing the Microsoft SRUM system tool (System Resource Utilization Monitor). SRUM was first introduced in Windows 8, and was a new feature designed to track system resource utilization such as CPU cycles, network activity, power consumption, etc. Analysts can use…
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VPNFilter and other neat tricks
The Spectre and Meltdown attacks that came to light at the beginning of the year have been the main focus of this year’s security issues however there has been a lot more going on than that. On that note though, additional Spectre variations have been found (we’re up to v4 now); as well, the BSD…
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Loki god of …?
In the field of IT Security, one learns very quickly that there’s always another security risk around the corner. An old favourite, the Loki Botnet, is back for another bite of the pie shortly after the fun with WannaCry a week ago. ( Loki a god in Norse mythology, was sometimes good and sometimes bad.…
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Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and your digital data
The recent Facebook/CA fiasco should be known to most people by now but here is a brief rundown in case you’re unaware. Aleksander Kogan, a Russian-American researcher, worked as a lecturer at Cambridge University, which has a Psychometrics Centre. The Centre advises to be able to use data from Facebook (including “likes”) to ascertain people’s personality traits.…
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Meltdown and Spectre – hardware gone wild!
We’ve had some big doozies over the last 2 years from a security point of view, but the latest CPU hardware-related bugs called Spectre and Meltdown, that started making headlines early last week, surely take the cake. One has to be careful though in classifying these as bugs, because those affected would say these were…