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Hack in the box: Hacking into companies with “warshipping”
by Peter Reutemann 13 Aug '19

13 Aug '19

'Penetration testers have long gone to great lengths to demonstrate the potential chinks in their clients' networks before less friendly attackers exploit them. But in recent tests by IBM's X-Force Red, the penetration testers never had to leave home to get in the door at targeted sites, and the targets weren't aware they were exposed until they got the bad news in report form. That's because the people at X-Force Red put a new spin on sneaking in—something they've dubbed "warshipping." Using less than $100 worth of gear—including a Raspberry Pi Zero W, a small battery, and a cellular modem—the X-Force Red team assembled a mobile attack platform that fit neatly within a cardboard spacer dropped into a shipping box or embedded in objects such as a stuffed animal or plaque. At the Black Hat security conference here last week, Ars got a close look at the hardware that has weaponized cardboard. We've looked at such devices, typically referred to as "drop boxes," before. Ars even used one in our passive surveillance of an NPR reporter, capturing his network traffic and routing a dump of his packets across the country for us to sift through. Covert drop boxes (once a specialty of Pwnie Express) have taken the form of "wall wart" device chargers, Wi-Fi routers, and even power strips. And mobile devices have also been brought to play, allowing "war walking"—attacks launched remotely as a device concealed in a bag, suitcase, or backpack is carried nonchalantly into a bank, corporate lobby, or other targeted location. But unless you're trying to get your daily steps in, IBM X-Force Red Global Managing Partner and Head Charles Henderson told Ars that you can just let a shipping company do the work for you. "There have been people that have shipped cell phones, things like that," Henderson noted. "The thing that's cool about this is, this is the wall of the box. It can be easily built into the cardboard. If you get a phone shipped to you, you're suspicious of it. If you get a box or maybe a plaque that says you're the new [chief information security officer] of the year, you might not." The plaque might just go right up on the wall. "Put a $13 solar charger panel on the plaque, and that makes it a permanent fixture in a CISO's office... a $13 panel that, and actually, by the time it discharges the battery, between times when we check in, that can charge it back up. So technically you could do pretty much infinite, up to the life of the battery, if you set that in the right place." The hardware has also been planted in a stuffed animal and even inside the case of a normal Wi-Fi router.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/08/hack-in-the-box-hack… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Facebook Paid Contractors To Transcribe Users' Audio Chats
by Peter Reutemann 13 Aug '19

13 Aug '19

'Facebook has been paying hundreds of outside contractors to transcribe clips of audio from users of its services, Bloomberg reported Tuesday, citing people with knowledge of the work. From the report: The work has rattled the contract employees, who are not told where the audio was recorded or how it was obtained -- only to transcribe it, said the people, who requested anonymity for fear of losing their jobs. They're hearing Facebook users' conversations, sometimes with vulgar content, but do not know why Facebook needs them transcribed, the people said. Facebook confirmed that it had been transcribing users' audio and said it will no longer do so, following scrutiny into other companies. "Much like Apple and Google, we paused human review of audio more than a week ago," the company said Tuesday. The company said the users who were affected chose the option in Facebook's Messenger app to have their voice chats transcribed. The contractors were checking whether Facebook's artificial intelligence correctly interpreted the messages, which were anonymized. [...] The social networking giant, which just completed a $5 billion settlement with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission after a probe of its privacy practices, has long denied that it collects audio from users to inform ads or help determine what people see in their news feeds.' -- source: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/19/08/13/200217 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Landmark 2.80 Release of Open Source Blender 3D With Improved UI Now Available
by Peter Reutemann 11 Aug '19

11 Aug '19

'"In the 3D content creation space, where are lot of professional 3D software costs anywhere from 2K to 8K Dollars a license, people have always hoped that the free, open source 3D software Blender would some day be up to the job of replacing expensive commercial 3D software packages," writes Slashdot reader dryriver: This never happened, not because Blender didn't have good 3D features technically, but rather because the Blender Foundation simply did not listen to thousands of 3D artists screaming for a "more standard UI design" in Blender. Blender's eccentric GUI with reversed left-click-right-click conventions, keyboard shortcuts that don't match commercial software and other nastiness just didn't work for a lot of people. After years of screaming, Blender finally got a much better and more familiar UI design in release 2.80, which can be downloaded here. Version 2.80 has many powerful features, but the standout feature is that after nearly 10 years of asking, 3D artists finally get a better, more standard, more sensible User Interface. This effectively means that for the first time, Blender can compete directly with expensive commercial 3D software made by industry leaders like Autodesk, Maxon, NewTek and SideFX. Why the Blender Foundation took nearly a decade to revise the software's UI is anybody's guess.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/08/11/1842258 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Can Swap Space Solve System Performance Issues?
by Peter Reutemann 11 Aug '19

11 Aug '19

'Earlier this week on the Linux kernel mailing list, Artem S. Tashkinov described a low-memory scenario where "the system will stall hard. You will barely be able to move the mouse pointer. Your disk LED will be flashing incessantly..." "I'm afraid I have bad news for the people snickering at Linux here," wrote Chris Siebenmann, a sys-admin at the University of Toronto's CS lab. "If you're running without swap space, you can probably get any Unix to behave this way under memory pressure..." In the old days, this usually was not very much of an issue because system RAM was generally large compared to the size of programs and thus the amount of file-backed pages that were likely to be in memory. That's no longer the case today; modern large programs such as Firefox and its shared libraries can have significant amounts of file-backed code and data pages (in addition to their often large use of dynamically allocated memory, ie anonymous pages). A production engineer (now on Facebook's Web Foundation team) wrote about experiencing similar issues years ago when another company had disabled swapping when they replaced or reinstalled machines -- leading to lots of pages from hosts that had to be dealt with. This week they wrote: I stand by my original position: have some swap. Not a lot. Just a little. Linux boxes just plain act weirdly without it. This is not permission to beat your machine silly in terms of memory allocation, either... If you allocate all of the RAM on the machine, you have screwed the kernel out of buffer cache it sorely needs. Back off. Put another way, disk I/O that isn't brutally slow costs memory. Network I/O costs memory. All kinds of stuff costs memory. It's not JUST the RSS of your process. Other stuff you do needs space to operate. If you try to fill a 2 GB box with 2 GB of data, something's going to have a bad day! You have to leave room for the actual system to run or it's going to grind to a stop.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/19/08/10/041223 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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New Spectre-like CPU Vulnerability Bypasses Existing Defenses
by Peter Reutemann 11 Aug '19

11 Aug '19

'Researchers from security firm Bitdefender discovered and reported a year ago a new CPU vulnerability that 'abuses a system instruction called SWAPGS and can bypass mitigations put in place for previous speculative execution vulnerabilities like Spectre,' writes Lucian Constantin for CSO. There are three attack scenarios involving SWAPGS, the most serious of which 'can allow attackers to leak the contents of arbitrary kernel memory addresses. This is similar to the impact of the Spectre vulnerability.' Microsoft released mitigations for the vulnerability in July's Patch Tuesday, although details were withheld until August 6 when Bitdefender released its whitepaper and Microsoft published a security advisory.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/19/08/10/0523206 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Remember Autorun.inf Malware In Windows? Turns Out KDE Offers Something Similar
by Peter Reutemann 11 Aug '19

11 Aug '19

'A security researcher has published proof-of-concept (PoC) code for a vulnerability in the KDE software framework. A fix is not available at the time of writing. The bug was discovered by Dominik "zer0pwn" Penner and impacts the KDE Frameworks package 5.60.0 and below. The KDE Frameworks software library is at the base of the KDE desktop environment v4 and v5 (Plasma), currently included with a large number of Linux distributions. The vulnerability occurs because of the way the KDesktopFile class (part of KDE Frameworks) handles .desktop or .directory files. It was discovered that malicious .desktop and .directory files could be created that could be used to run malicious code on a user's computer. When a user opens the KDE file viewer to access the directory where these files are stored, the malicious code contained within the .desktop or .directory files executes without user interaction — such as running the file. Zero user interaction is required to trigger code execution — all you have to do is to browse a directory with a malicious file using any of KDE file system browsing applications like Dolphin. When ZDNet contacted KDE for a comment Tuesday, their spokesperson provided this response. "We would appreciate if people would contact security(a)kde.org before releasing an exploit into the public, rather than the other way around, so that we can decide on a timeline together."' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/19/08/10/2257259 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Severe local 0-Day escalation exploit found in Steam Client Services
by Peter Reutemann 09 Aug '19

09 Aug '19

'Earlier today, disgruntled security researcher Vasily Kravets released a zero-day vulnerability in the Windows version of the ubiquitous gaming service Steam. The vulnerability allows any user to run arbitrary code with LOCALSYSTEM privileges using just a very few simple commands. The vulnerability lies within Steam Client Service. The service may be started or stopped by unprivileged users. This becomes a problem because, when run,Steam Client Service automatically sets permissions on a range of registry keys. If a mischievous—or outright malicious—user were to symlink one of these keys to that belonging to another service, it becomes possible for arbitrary users to start or stop that service as well. This becomes even more problematic when you realize that it's possible to pass arguments to services that run under extremely privileged accounts—such as msiserver, the Windows Installer service.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/08/severe-local-0-day-escalation-exploi… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Linux Journal Ceases Publication
by Peter Reutemann 09 Aug '19

09 Aug '19

'Not too long after Linus Torvalds wrote his own Unix kernel, which he called Linux, in the summer of 1991, a magazine was founded by enthusiasts to focus on the operating system. For nearly three decades Linux Journal has been an authority magazine on all things Linux, but it is now shuttering doors, it said late Wednesday. The announcement comes about two years after the periodical said it would cease to exist, but it was able to find some backing -- from Privacy Internet Access group -- to resume operations later on. The team said on Wednesday that all staff members had been laid off and the company was left with no operating funds to continue in any capacity. It remains committed to keeping the website afloat for another few weeks.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/08/08/1354211 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Red Hat Joins the RISC-V Foundation
by Peter Reutemann 08 Aug '19

08 Aug '19

'Red Hat has joined the RISC-V Foundation to help foster this open-source processor ISA. Phoronix reports: While we're still likely years away from seeing any serious RISC-V powered servers at least that can deliver meaningful performance, Red Hat has been active in promoting RISC-V as an open-source processor instruction set architecture and one of the most promising libre architectures we have seen over the years. Red Hat developers have already helped in working on Fedora's RISC-V support and now the IBM-owned company is helping out more and showing their commitment by joining the RISC-V Foundation. Red Hat joins the likes of Google, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, SiFive, Western Digital, IBM, and Samsung as among the many RISC-V members. ' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/19/08/08/213253 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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WordPress Team Working on Daring Plan To Forcibly Update Old Websites
by Peter Reutemann 08 Aug '19

08 Aug '19

'The developers behind the WordPress open-source content management system (CMS) are working on a plan to forcibly auto-update older versions of the CMS to more recent releases. From a report: The goal of this plan is to improve the security of the WordPress ecosystem, and the internet as a whole, since WordPress installations account for more than 34% of all internet websites. Officially supported versions include only the last six WordPress major releases, which currently are all the versions between v4.7 and v5.2. The plan is to slowly auto-update old WordPress sites, starting with v3.7, to the current minimum supported version, which is the v4.7 release. The WordPress team said it plans to monitor this tiered forced auto-update process for errors and site breakage. If there's something massively wrong, then auto-update can be stopped altogether. If only a few individual sites break, than those site will be rolled back to their previous versions and the owner will be notified via email.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/19/08/08/1523212 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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