January 27th, 2010 by Hermann Helmreich
The security researchers Karsten Nohl and Henryk Plötz cloned RFID-cards from the “Prime” product line of the Swiss manufacturer Legic. These RFID-cards are widely used in access control to nuclear power plants or airports in spite of the age of the system. According to Plötz the system is not encrypted and therefore unsecure. The developer of the system had attempted to create the impression of a secure system by various methods of “Code Obfuscation”.
The researchers are able to emulate the card reader, change commands and to emulate cards. They recommend all firms using the RFID-cards based on the “Prime” product line to replace as fast as possible to the newer product line “Advant”.
Tags: hacked, RFID-cards
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January 26th, 2010 by Hermann Helmreich
Internet Explorer is again exploited by hackers. The attack, named “Aurora”, against Google and some other American companies was based on this new exploit of the Internet Explorer, announced McAfee. The exploit has already been reproduced by the Metasploit-Team, which has added the exploit to its framework.
Therefore the danger of this exploit has grown because also Script-Kiddies are able to use this exploit. The BSI recommended using another browser to not get victim of this exploit. Microsoft recommends to set the security options to “high” or to disable JavaScript on which the exploit is based.
A video explaining the attack “Aurora” can be found here.
Tags: attack, Google, Internet Explorer
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January 25th, 2010 by Hermann Helmreich
Today’s smartphones are no more normal mobile phones, they are small personal computers. Therefore threats for smartphones are the same as for personal computers. The only difference form this point of view is that personal computers generally use Microsoft Windows as operating system, whereas there are a wide variety of mobile platforms. Due to this fact mobile platforms are harder to attack.
But the biggest danger for a mobile phone is one that is not one for personal computers: You can lose your mobile phone. This is not only a danger for smartphones but also for all mobile devices containing personal information. Another danger for smartphones is leaving them unattended or loaning it to people because they can install spyware on your smartphone. Additionally to spyware there are mobile viruses, worms and Trojans threatening your smartphone. They can spread using e-mail or via SMS.
Generally speaking, web-based and e-mail attacks are as possible with smarthones as they are with personal computers. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are two technologies which can be dangerous too. Wi-Fi can be attacked by a man-in-the-middle attack and Bluetooth is also a target for attacks. A good discussion of Bluetooth security you can find here: part1, part2. Here you can find a FAQ on how to use your smartphone securely. Another interesting article about smartphone security can be found here.
Tags: mobile phones, security, smartphones
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January 18th, 2010 by Hermann Helmreich
The communication over the gsm network is no longer secure. At the 26th Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin the security researcher Karsten Nohl from Germany presented how to eavesdrop cell phones without high financial and technical costs.
The encryption algorithm(A5/1) of the gsm network is over 20 years old and can be hacked by non-professionals with relatively easy means in a short time. Nohl said that he and his helpers had successfully hacked the gsm-encryption algorithm in a distributed attack within three month and with 40 computers. The needed codebook with the rainbow tables is already distributed via file sharing networks. With this practical tutorial for hacking the gsm network the attacks will be considerably faster in the future.
Therefore the Chaos Computer Club asks for a stronger encryption of the gsm network from the industrial association GSMA. The GSMA denies this because they say that although hacking the gsm network is theoretically possible, it is practically improbable and the application of the presented method of hacking the gsm network is in many countries illegal.
This news is based on a german article which can be found here.
Tags: gsm, hack, mobile phones
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December 17th, 2009 by sebolani
A variant of the Zeus bot (Zbot) was found using Amazon’s Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2) infrastructure for Command&Control commands to infected machines.
Zbot is a password-stealing software, logs financial data and sends them to the botnet. Last year more than 100M US fraud was linked with Zeus malware variants. It was also held responsible for the “destruction” of 100.000 infected computers by deleting registry key data, making them inoperable. Zeus botnet is estimated to consist of millions of infected computers around the world.
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Tags: botnet, malware, zbot
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December 17th, 2009 by Thanasis Petsas
A new effective attack against Google’s CAPTCHA mechanisms was invented by a security researcher lately. The whole attack procedure is presented in a paper that was released on Saturday. The attack is based on OCR (Optical Character Recognition) techinques that used to evade Googles’ reCAPTCHA (CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, for more information click here). reCAPTCHA is a recent security measure that Google uses so as to stop malicious scripts of doing important tasks without has been done first a specific authentication process. This process requires the sense of sight, that a computer script can’t have, so that optical puzzles can be solved first, in order to continue with the task execution.
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Tags: attack, CAPTCHA, Google
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December 17th, 2009 by sebolani
Last month a new search engine appeared, called Shodan. It is a Computer Search Engine, available for free in public, allowing search for routers, servers, computers or any device that opens a port. It is based on a simple idea: Port scan, grab headers and index the results. Quoting Shodan’s quick guide, “SHODAN lets you find servers/ routers/ etc. by using the simple search bar up above. Most of the data in the index covers web servers at the moment, but there is some data on FTP, Telnet and SSH services as well. Let me know which services interest you the most and I’ll prioritize them in my scanning”.
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Tags: port scanning, search engine
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December 10th, 2009 by zarras
The combined efforts of anti-spam products outperform any individual products alone, according to an experiment by Virus Bulletin, the independent security certification organisation.
In a comparative test, almost 200,000 sample emails were sent to 14 different anti-spam products that were required to filter out spam messages from legitimate smails (ham). The test found that no legitimate mail was blocked by more than four products.
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December 10th, 2009 by zarras
Microsoft is fiddling around with the launch dates of the highly anticipated Windows Azure while showing off the cloud service’s latest advances.
The company said on Tuesday that Azure, unveiled in October 2008, would continue as a Community Technology Preview (CTP) through to the end of this year.
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