Items tagged security in 2017
Filters: Year: 2017 × security × Sorted by date
The Mirai Botnet Was Part of a College Student Minecraft Scheme. Fascinating story about last year’s Mirai botnet, which was originally developed to help corner the Minecraft server market. # 15th December 2017, 3:18 am
Extended Validation is Broken. Ian Carroll spent $100 incorporating a company called “Stripe, Inc” in the state of Kentucky and $77 on an Extended Validation certificate tied to that legal entity. Safari (and Mobile Safari) now hide the URL bar completely, displaying “Stripe, Inc” in its place. “This means the attacker does not even need to register a convincing phishing domain. They can register anything, and Safari will happily cover it with a nice green bar.” # 12th December 2017, 1:36 am
Cybersecurity Campaign Playbook (via) “The information assembled here is for any campaign in any party. It was designed to give you simple, actionable information that will make your campaign’s information more secure from adversaries trying to attack your or-ganization—and our democracy.” # 3rd December 2017, 7:22 pm
From Markdown to RCE in Atom (via) Lukas Reschke found a remote code execution vulnerability in the Atom editor by taking advantage of a combination of Markdown’s ability to embed HTML, Atom’s Content-Security-Policy allowing JavaScript from the local filesystem to be executed, and a test suite HTML file hidden away in the Atom application package that executes code passed to it via query string. # 23rd November 2017, 4:13 pm
Introducing security alerts on GitHub. This is huge: GitHub’s dependency graph feature now shows any dependencies that have a known security vulnerability, based on CVE IDs—and you can sign up for notifications of new vulnerabilities as well. Only supports Ruby and JavaScript today, but Python support is coming in 2018. # 16th November 2017, 7:48 pm
TL;DR on the KRACK WPA2 stuff—you can repeatedly resend the 3rd packet in a WPA2 handshake and it’ll reset the key state, which leads to nonce reuse, which leads to trivial decryption with known plaintext. Can be easily leveraged to dump TCP SYN traffic and hijack connections.
— Graham Sutherland # 16th October 2017, 2:14 pm
Exploding Git Repositories. Kate Murphy describes how git is vulnerable to a similar attack to the XML “billion laughs” recursive entity expansion attack—you can create a tiny git repository that acts as a “git bomb”, expanding 12 root objects to over a billion files using recursive blob references. # 12th October 2017, 7:43 pm
The Absurdly Underestimated Dangers of CSV Injection. This is horrifying. A plain old CSV file intended for import into Excel can embed formulas (a value prefixed with an equals symbol) which can execute system commands—with a big honking security prompt that most people will likely ignore. Even worse: they can embed IMPORTXML() functions that can silently leak data from the rest of the sheet to an external URL—and those will work against Google Sheets as well as Excel. # 10th October 2017, 4:13 am