- wlug - list.wlug.org.nz

GoDaddy Security Breach Exposes WordPress Users' Data
by Peter Reutemann 23 Nov '21

23 Nov '21

'Web hosting company GoDaddy said on Monday email addresses of up to 1.2 million active and inactive Managed WordPress customers had been exposed in an unauthorized third-party access. From a report: The company said the incident was discovered on Sept. 6 and the third-party accessed the system using a compromised password.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/21/11/22/1523234 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 (office) +64 (7) 577-5304 (home office) http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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A German State is Switching Its 25,000 Computers From Windows to Linux
by Peter Reutemann 22 Nov '21

22 Nov '21

'The north-German state of Schleswig-Holstein plans to switch to open source software..." reports Mike Saunders from LibreOffice. "By the end of 2026, Microsoft Office is to be replaced by LibreOffice on all 25,000 computers used by civil servants and employees (including teachers), and the Windows operating system is to be replaced by GNU/Linux." The tech site Foss Force writes: This seems to be a done deal, as the steps for the transition from proprietary to open have already been codified by the Schleswig-Holstein state parliament, and explained in plain language in an interview with Jan Philipp Albrecht, the state's digital minister, that was published in c't, a German language computer magazine (Google Translate version here). In the interview, Albrecht said that part of the transition to open source is already in the works, and pointed out that 90% of state administration conferencing is conducted using the open source video conferencing platform Jitsi. "We have been testing LibreOffice in our IT department for two years, and our experience is clear: it works," he said. "This also applies, for example, when editing Microsoft Word documents with comments... No Linux distribution has been chosen yet to use as a standard, although Albrecht said they're currently looking at five distributions that suit their purposes.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/21/11/21/0231218 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 (office) +64 (7) 577-5304 (home office) http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Thousands of Firefox Users Accidentally Commit Login Cookies On GitHub
by Peter Reutemann 19 Nov '21

19 Nov '21

'Thousands of Firefox cookie databases containing sensitive data are available on request from GitHub repositories, data potentially usable for hijacking authenticated sessions. The Register reports: These cookies.sqlite databases normally reside in the Firefox profiles folder. They're used to store cookies between browsing sessions. And they're findable by searching GitHub with specific query parameters, what's known as a search "dork." Aidan Marlin, a security engineer at London-based rail travel service Trainline, alerted The Register to the public availability of these files after reporting his findings through HackerOne and being told by a GitHub representative that "credentials exposed by our users are not in scope for our Bug Bounty program." Marlin then asked whether he could make his findings public and was told he's free to do so. "I'm frustrated that GitHub isn't taking its users' security and privacy seriously," Marlin told The Register in an email. "The least it could do is prevent results coming up for this GitHub dork. If the individuals who uploaded these cookie databases were made aware of what they'd done, they'd s*** their pants." Marlin acknowledges that affected GitHub users deserve some blame for failing to prevent their cookies.sqlite databases from being included when they committed code and pushed it to their public repositories. "But there are nearly 4.5k hits for this dork, so I think GitHub has a duty of care as well," he said, adding that he's alerted the UK Information Commissioner's Office because personal information is at stake. Marlin speculates that the oversight is a consequence of committing code from one's Linux home directory. "I imagine in most of the cases, the individuals aren't aware that they've uploaded their cookie databases," he explained. "A common reason users do this is for a common environment across multiple machines."' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/21/11/18/2227206 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 (office) +64 (7) 577-5304 (home office) http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Linux Has a Serious Security Problem That Once Again Enables DNS Cache Poisoning
by Peter Reutemann 18 Nov '21

18 Nov '21

'As much as 38 percent of the Internet's domain name lookup servers are vulnerable to a new attack that allows hackers to send victims to maliciously spoofed addresses masquerading as legitimate domains, like bankofamerica.com or gmail.com. The exploit, unveiled in research presented today, revives the DNS cache-poisoning attack that researcher Dan Kaminsky disclosed in 2008. He showed that, by masquerading as an authoritative DNS server and using it to flood a DNS resolver with fake lookup results for a trusted domain, an attacker could poison the resolver cache with the spoofed IP address. >From then on, anyone relying on the same resolver would be diverted to the same imposter site. The sleight of hand worked because DNS at the time relied on a transaction ID to prove the IP number returned came from an authoritative server rather than an imposter server attempting to send people to a malicious site. The transaction number had only 16 bits, which meant that there were only 65,536 possible transaction IDs. Kaminsky realized that hackers could exploit the lack of entropy by bombarding a DNS resolver with off-path responses that included each possible ID. Once the resolver received a response with the correct ID, the server would accept the malicious IP and store the result in cache so that everyone else using the same resolver -- which typically belongs to a corporation, organization, or ISP -- would also be sent to the same malicious server.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/21/11/17/1856235 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 (office) +64 (7) 577-5304 (home office) http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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meeting next Monday
by Peter Reutemann 18 Nov '21

18 Nov '21

Hi everyone We have a WLUG meeting next week on Monday: 'For the last meeting of the year, let's have general get-together. Ian Stewart will demo the latest Ubuntu 21.10 and Peter Reutemann will try to show what you can use the frp fast reverse proxy for (https://github.com/fatedier/frp) And of course, general Linux related troubleshooting and questions answered.' -- source: https://www.meetup.com/WaikatoLinuxUsersGroup/events/274861098/ This is once again an online event, so make sure to RSVP on meetup to get the link (you only need a browser). Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 (office) +64 (7) 577-5304 (home office) http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 17 Nov '21

17 Nov '21

Somebody did a nice chart a while back <https://gist.github.com/hellerbarde/2843375> of the time it takes to perform many common data transfer operations on contemporary hardware. And note the multi-part figure, where the basic unit in each block is a bit more than an order of magnitude greater than the one in the previous block. And if the figure isn’t dramatic enough, a commenter has said “let’s multiply all the numbers by a billion” (just to bring them into more human-comprehensible scales), and then liken them to common things that people do, from making a cup of coffee, all the way up to completing a bachelor’s degree.

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Scientists Send Data Using Nuclear Radiation
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 16 Nov '21

16 Nov '21

A research group has used fast neutrons <https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/15/wireless_information_transfer_with_f…> as a communication channel, to send legible data between a transmitter and a receiver. Their proof of concept is very low-bandwidth and requires a lot of complicated equipment, but at least it does show (safety issues aside) that it is theoretically possible. The issue with high-energy subatomic particles is, how do you turn them on and off at will -- i.e. modulate the intensity of the beam to convey information? This group used some kind of shutter system (“neutron chopper”) in conjunction with some quantity of radioactive californium-252 as their neutron source. But they mention that someone else has come up with a device that is basically a particle accelerator on a chip, able to produce a stream of neutrons from non-radioactive starting components on demand.

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Microsoft Fixes An Issue
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 16 Nov '21

16 Nov '21

The latest Windows 11 update <https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/15/windows_11_insiders_bug_fixes/> gets ever closer to perfection. I like this one: We fixed an issue that prevents your device from starting up, and it becomes unresponsive because of licensing API calls. Because what would that good old “enrichment of the user experience” be like without licensing API calls ... The writer’s verdict on the new OS sounds more like damning with faint praise: We have been running Windows 11 for daily work since official release and are happy to report that it is usable and stable in our experience so far, though useful improvements over its predecessor are hard to identify.

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DDR4 memory protections are broken wide open by new Rowhammer technique
by Peter Reutemann 16 Nov '21

16 Nov '21

'Rowhammer exploits that allow unprivileged attackers to change or corrupt data stored in vulnerable memory chips are now possible on virtually all DDR4 modules due to a new approach that neuters defenses chip manufacturers added to make their wares more resistant to such attacks. Rowhammer attacks work by accessing—or hammering—physical rows inside vulnerable chips millions of times per second in ways that cause bits in neighboring rows to flip, meaning 1s turn to 0s and vice versa. Researchers have shown the attacks can be used to give untrusted applications nearly unfettered system privileges, bypass security sandboxes designed to keep malicious code from accessing sensitive operating system resources, and root or infect Android devices, among other things. All previous Rowhammer attacks have hammered rows with uniform patterns, such as single-sided, double-sided, or n-sided. In all three cases, these “aggressor” rows—meaning those that cause bitflips in nearby “victim” rows—are accessed the same number of times. Research published on Monday presented a new Rowhammer technique. It uses non-uniform patterns that access two or more aggressor rows with different frequencies. The result: all 40 of the randomly selected DIMMs in a test pool experienced bitflips, up from 13 out of 42 chips tested in previous work from the same researchers.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/11/ddr4-memory-is-even-more-susceptibl… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 (office) +64 (7) 577-5304 (home office) http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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topics for next month?
by Peter Reutemann 15 Nov '21

15 Nov '21

Hi everyone Next month will be the last meeting for the year and I'm once again looking for presenters. I can give a short introduction/show'n'tell of frp (fast reverse proxy) and what it can be used for: https://github.com/fatedier/frp Who else is willing to talk about something? It doesn't have to be admin-type stuff at all, but instead useful applications that you use/have come across. If you have something, even just for 5-10 min, please reply in this thread or contact me off-list. Have a great and safe weekend! Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 (office) +64 (7) 577-5304 (home office) http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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