Month: January 2016

Categories
privacy security

TrendMicro software allows arbitrary command execution

Also mentioned here, the reported anti-virus software is so full of holes that it should strike fear in any company using TrendMicro Antivirus right now. Not only does it allow privileged command execution, it also exposes passwords that you store using the Password Manager.

The way I see it, it’s a combination of incompetence and lack of proper supervisory oversight. It’s exactly the kind of thing that will result if you ask a developer to just meet the specs, where the specs doesn’t talk about hygiene factors such as security etc.

Source: Issue 693 – google-security-research – TrendMicro node.js HTTP server listening on localhost can execute commands – Google Security Research – Google Project Hosting

Categories
Uncategorized

Remix OS

This is an interesting project – running Android as the primary OS for your PC. And why not? It promises the ability to install and run apps from Google Play store, not unlike some of those cheap knockoff set-top boxes that we see. However the OS (called Remix OS) feels much more “desktop-like” – multiple windows, taskbar etc. Those who likes the Android ecosystem might appreciate something like this.

A PC experience unlike anything on Android. An Android experience unlike anything on a PC.

Categories
security sysadmin Uncategorized

Under-attack Linode resets passwords after logins leak onto web

First sustained DDoS attacks. Now password leaks. The bad news never ends for Linode, which is unfortunate, since they are a very cheap and viable alternative to AWS especially if you factor in ingress/egress traffic.

Linode’s woes continue: the server hosting biz has just run a system-wide password reset on customer accounts after two Linode.com user credentials were discovered “on an external machine.”

Source: Under-attack Linode resets passwords after logins leak onto web

2016-01-06 11.22 SGT: As of now, the site is still having intermittent access.
Capture

Categories
privacy security

FROST: Forensic Recovery Of Scrambled Telephones

Recovering contents directly from physical RAM of devices has been known for quite some time – it involves esoteric measures such as freezing the device using liquid nitrogen or by putting it in the freezer. It is interesting to see this technique being used to attack Android phones to recover disk encryption keys. Potentially this might defeat on-disk encryption for Android devices, though there are quite some caveats in the technique discussed on the website.

To this end we perform cold boot attacks against Android smartphones and retrieve disk encryption keys from RAM. We show that cold boot attacks against Android phones are generally possible for the first time, and we perform our attacks practically against Galaxy Nexus devices from Samsung.

FROST: Forensic Recovery Of Scrambled Telephones