Archive for category Comms

Google Accidentally Transmits Self-Destruct Code to Army of Chrome Browsers

From: Wired Enterprise

Google’s Gmail service went down for about 20 minutes on Monday. That was annoying, but not exactly unprecedented. These sorts of outages happen all the time. What was strange is that the Gmail outage coincided with widespread reports that Google’s Chrome browser was also crashing.

Late Monday, Google engineer Tim Steele confirmed what developers had been suspecting. The crashes were affecting Chrome users who were using another Google web service known as Sync, and that Sync and other Google services — presumably Gmail too — were clobbered Monday when Google misconfigured its load-balancing servers.

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Smartphone Malware

FBI: Smartphone Users Should be Aware of Malware Targeting Mobile Devices and the Safety Measures to Help Avoid Compromise

The IC3 has been made aware of various malware attacking Android operating systems for mobile devices. Some of the latest known versions of this type of malware are Loozfon and FinFisher. Loozfon is an information-stealing piece of malware. Criminals use different variants to lure the victims. One version is a work-at-home opportunity that promises a profitable payday just for sending out e-mail. A link within these advertisements leads to a website that is designed to push Loozfon on the user’s device. The malicious application steals contact details from the user’s address book and the infected device’s phone number.

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Communications Go Bag

From KF7ETX:

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Verizon is Very Excited That It Can Track Everything Phone Users Do And Sell That To Whoever Is Interested

Verizon Very Excited That It Can Track Everything Phone Users Do And Sell That To Whoever Is Interested

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/10/17/verizon-very-excited-that-it-can-track-everything-phone-users-do-and-sell-that-to-whoever-is-interested/

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FBI: Malware Attacking Andriod

Malware Targets Android Smartphones

October 12, 2012
Attention smartphone users: be on guard for various types of malware attacking Android operating systems.

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FBI: Smartphone Malware Safety Tips

Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) | Smartphone Malware Safety Tips

The IC3 has been made aware of various malware attacking Android operating systems for mobile devices. Some of the latest known versions of this type of malware are Loozfon and FinFisher. Loozfon is an information-stealing piece of malware. Criminals use different variants to lure the victims.

New E-Scams & Warnings: Smartphone Users Should be Aware of Malware Targeting Mobile Devices and Safety Measures to Help Avoid Compromises

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Mozilla’s New Universal Login

Mozilla has developed a competing login framework that they claim is more secure than Facebook’s or Google’s design.

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Spy Law Extended For 5 Years

From Threat Level:

The FISA Amendments Act, (.pdf) which is expiring at year’s end, allows the government to electronically eavesdrop on Americans’ phone calls and e-mails without a probable-cause warrant so long as one of the parties to the communication is believed outside the United States. The communications may be intercepted “to acquire foreign intelligence information.”

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6th Circuit: No Warrant Needed to Track Cell Phones

From the EFF:

In what can only be described as a results-oriented opinion, the court found Skinner had no reasonable expectation of privacy in the cell phone location data because “if a tool used to transport contraband gives off a signal that can be tracked for location, certainly the police can track the signal.” Otherwise, “technology would help criminals but not the police.” In other words, because cell phones can be used to commit crimes, there can’t be any Fourth Amendment privacy rights in them. If this sounds like an over-simplistic description of the legal reasoning in an opinion we disagree with, the sad reality is that the court’s conclusion really did boil down to this shallow understanding of the law.

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Tactical Hand Signals

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Ironkey S200 Flash Drive Review

From: Healthy Passwords

Ironkey S200 Flash Drive Review from 2011.

Ironkey

The security industry has long considered Ironkey to be “the” premiere flash drive. We wondered how user-friendly Ironkey would be for non-technical users, so we decided to evaluate the drive from a non-technical perspective.

Ironkey Features

  1. Military-grade Hardware Encryption.
  2. Waterproof.
  3. Support for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
  4. Portable Application Support (Apps living and running only on flash drive).
  5. Identity Manager for Password Management. (Windows Only)
  6. Verisign Identity Protection Built into Identity Manager. (Windows Only)
  7. Secure Sessions Service to encrypt browser traffic. (Windows Only)
  8. Self-Destruct after 10 consecutive invalid password attempts (just erases flash).
  9. Online management account to backup Identity Manager records. (Windows Only)
  10. Optional ability to reset hardware password online.

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The iPhone Has Passed a Key Security Threshold

From: Technology Review

At the heart of Apple’s security architecture is the Advanced Encryption Standard algorithm (AES), a data-scrambling system published in 1998 and adopted as a U.S. government standard in 2001. After more than a decade of exhaustive analysis, AES is widely regarded as unbreakable. The algorithm is so strong that no computer imaginable for the foreseeable future—even a quantum computer—would be able to crack a truly random 256-bit AES key. The National Security Agency has approved AES-256 for storing top-secret data.

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New Malware Goes After Financial Information

CNET reports on the new Gauss malware tool:

Gauss has unique characteristics relative to other malware. Kaspersky said it found Gauss following the discovery of Flame. The International Telecommunications Union has started an effort to identify emerging cyberthreats and mitigate them before they spread.

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Google Approves an App that Steals All Your Data

From: MIT

Google’s automated “Bouncer” for apps, which should prevent harmful mobile software from appearing in the company’s app store, appears to have serious blind spots. The system repeatedly scanned but let pass an app that stealthily steals personal data such as photos and contacts, reported two researchers from computer security company Trustwave at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas yesterday.

Nicolas Percoco and Sean Schulte are members of Trustwave’s “ethical hacking” research group, known as SpiderLabs, and they created the app to probe Google’s ability to vet the software uploaded to its app store. The pair said the results shows that Google needs to improve both its app-scanning system and its Android operating system.

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Congressman Leaks – Government Spying on Our Phones

From Threat Level:

The carriers said they responded to police emergencies, subpoenas and other court orders. They did not clearly say how many times they responded to probable-cause warrants. That’s because much of Americans’ mobile-phone data is not protected by the Fourth Amendment.

The reports showed that AT&T, the nation’s second largest carrier, received about 125,000 requests from the authorities in 2007 — mushrooming to more than 260,000 last year.

Verizon, the nation’s largest carrier… said it also received about 260,000 requests last year…

Sprint said it has received…500,000 requests last year.

…T-Mobile, declined to divulge how many requests it gets.

McCone said the company (AT&T) employs more than 100 full-time staffers and “operates on a 24/7 basis for the purpose of meeting law enforcement demands.”

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