Month: February 2017

Categories
privacy security

Incident report on memory leak caused by Cloudflare parser bug

This is quite serious. A lot of small (and not so small) websites uses Cloudflare for CDN and DDoS protection. The issue reported by Google’s Project Zero team indicates that a bug in Cloudflare’s processing causes potentially sensitive information to be leaked. This is already bad, but it is made worse due to caching servers keeping a copy of those information. Someone is compiling a list of notable websites affected. You are advised to change your passwords on those affected websites.

Last Friday, Tavis Ormandy from Google’s Project Zero contacted Cloudflare to report a security problem with our edge servers. He was seeing corrupted web pages being returned by some HTTP requests run through Cloudflare. It turned out that in some unusual circumstances, which I’ll detail below, our edge

Source: Incident report on memory leak caused by Cloudflare parser bug

Categories
security

Hackers Attack Every 39 Seconds | 2017-02-10 | Security Magazine

Not surprising to anyone who has or had administered any servers that has open ports on the Internet. That is why the minimum you can do is to limit the attack surface by restricting Internet-facing ports, and using software like fail2ban to automatically ban attack attempts.

A Clark School study at the University of Maryland is one of the first to quantify the near-constant rate of hacker attacks of computers with Internet access—every 39 seconds on average—and the non-secure usernames and passwords we use that give attackers more chance of success.

Source: Hackers Attack Every 39 Seconds | 2017-02-10 | Security Magazine

Categories
privacy security

Hackers Have Stolen Millions Of Dollars In Bitcoin — Using Only Phone Numbers

Often your phone is the weakest link to all of your online and sometimes offline identity. Someone wrote a detailed and lengthy advisory on how to protect yourself against such attacks.

The security loophole these hackers are milking can be used against anyone who uses their phone number for security for services as common as Google, iCloud, a plethora of banks, PayPal, Dropbox, Evernote, Facebook, Twitter, and many others. The hackers have infiltrated bank accounts and tried to initiate wire transfers; used credit cards to rack up charges; gotten into Dropbox accounts containing copies of passports, credit cards and tax returns; and extorted victims using incriminating information found in their email accounts.

But the hackings should scare anyone with a mobile phone, an email account or an online bank account.

Source: Hackers Have Stolen Millions Of Dollars In Bitcoin — Using Only Phone Numbers

Categories
privacy

Vizio tracked and sold your TV viewing habits without consent (updated)

The tl;dr version: Smart TV spies on your viewing habits. Well, the incentive for doing this is too great. Such detailed viewing habits can be a minefield for advertisers and marketing companies. Vizio was caught by FTC because it’s too brazen. Others may follow.

According to the original complaint filed by the FTC and New Jersey AG, the company worked with a third party to build smart TVs that could capture “second-by-second” viewing information about what’s on the screen. That includes details on content from cable, internet, set-top boxes, DVD players, over-the-air broadcasts and other streaming devices.

Source: Vizio tracked and sold your TV viewing habits without consent (updated)