Archive for the ‘security news’ Category

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Security System “Legic Prime” hacked

Wednesday, January 27th, 2010

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”.

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Attack through new IE exploit

Tuesday, January 26th, 2010

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.

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GSM-encryption hacked

Monday, January 18th, 2010

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.

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Twitter redirected

Monday, January 18th, 2010

On Thursday, 2009-12-17, Twitter’s domain name was hijacked. Visitors were redirected to a page that claimed Twitter had been hacked by the “Iranian Cyber Army”. But there is evidence to suggest that the attack was realised carried out by an individual from the U.S.

It seems the attackers had been able to change the DNS entries at Twitter’s provider. On the provider’s site no evidence was found that unauthenticated users had logged into the system. Therefore it is assumed that the attackers had the proper credentials to log into Twitter’s account at the provider.

In the last year, social networking services have often been attacked in various ways because of their popularity.

The whole article can be found here.

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A new effective attack against Google’s reCAPTCHA

Thursday, December 17th, 2009

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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TLS protocol renegotiation vulnerability

Monday, November 23rd, 2009

A serious flaw in Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol was recently brought to light via the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) mailing list (archive).

TLS is the most common data security protocol on the Internet primarily used to encrypt online HTTP nagotiations, such us online banking and commercial transactions, and to secure online services, such us email and database access. The vulnerability was identified by the researchers at Phonefactor as ‘SSL/TLS Authentication Gap‘. The vulnerability allows an attacker to inject himself, in a number of serious Man-In-The-Middle (MITM) attacks, into the authenticated SSL communication path. This could be done without either parts of the negotiation (client-server) being able to detect the attack.

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Cloud Storage: are my data safe?

Monday, October 26th, 2009

Earlier this month T-Mobile Sidekick users experienced an outage that left most of them without access to their personal data.  Contacts, calendar entries, photographs and other personal information were stored in Danger service provider, a Microsoft subsidiary. (more…)

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When XXS met Reddit

Wednesday, October 7th, 2009

The well-known social news website Reddit got hit from a very effective XSS (cross site scripting) attack on Sunday, September 27th.

The attack was rested on the fact that Reddit was not filtering out JavaScript in specific instances while a user was moving the mouse over the text field of the comments. (more…)

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T-Mobile hacked

Thursday, June 11th, 2009

According to The Register, hackers have hacked into T-Mobile’s computers and the hackers claim they have stolen corporate data, customer accounts and the lot. As proof, they posted some configuration files that appear to be genuine.

“We have everything, their databases, confidental documents, scripts and programs from their servers, financial documents up to 2009.”

Really quite worrying. If true, I am curious what is meant by ‘customer accounts’, Would that include ways to get to call records? Personally, I think the opportunities and increasing incentive to use mobile devices (or information about their use) for malicious activities scary.

T-Mobile is in denial: “There is no evidence customer data is compromised.”

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New Adobe Reader Zero Day Vulnerabilities

Tuesday, May 12th, 2009

According to ZDNet, an anonymous researcher has posted two new vulnerabilities in Adobe Reader, along with proof of concept, which are under investigation by Adobe.

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