Eli Sugarman of the Hewlettt Foundation laments about the sorry state of cybersecurity imagery: The state of cybersecurity imagery is, in a word, abysmal. A simple Google Image search for the term proves the point: It’s all white men in hoodies hovering menacingly over keyboards, green “Matrix”-style 1s and 0s, glowing locks and server racks, … Read More “Wanted: Cybersecurity Imagery” »
Category: securityengineering
Auto Added by WPeMatico
Add to the “not very smart criminals” file: According to court documents, Tinley provided software services for Siemens’ Monroeville, PA offices for nearly ten years. Among the work he was asked to perform was the creation of spreadsheets that the company was using to manage equipment orders. The spreadsheets included custom scripts that would update … Read More “Insider Logic Bombs” »
According to a survey: “68% of the security professionals surveyed believe it’s a programmer’s job to write secure code, but they also think less than half of developers can spot security holes.” And that’s a problem. Nearly half of security pros surveyed, 49%, said they struggle to get developers to make remediation of vulnerabilities a … Read More “Software Developers and Security” »
Wow, is this an embarrassing bug: Yubico is recalling a line of security keys used by the U.S. government due to a firmware flaw. The company issued a security advisory today that warned of an issue in YubiKey FIPS Series devices with firmware versions 4.4.2 and 4.4.4 that reduced the randomness of the cryptographic keys … Read More “Yubico Security Keys with a Crypto Flaw” »
Security researchers Gabriel Campana and Jean-Baptiste BĂ©drune are giving a hardware security module (HSM) talk at BlackHat in August: This highly technical presentation targets an HSM manufactured by a vendor whose solutions are usually found in major banks and large cloud service providers. It will demonstrate several attack paths, some of them allowing unauthenticated attackers … Read More “Hacking Hardware Security Modules” »
Citing security concerns, the Chinese military wants to replace Windows with its own custom operating system: Thanks to the Snowden, Shadow Brokers, and Vault7 leaks, Beijing officials are well aware of the US’ hefty arsenal of hacking tools, available for anything from smart TVs to Linux servers, and from routers to common desktop operating systems, … Read More “Chinese Military Wants to Develop Custom OS” »
A university study confirmed the obvious: if you pay a random bunch of freelance programmers a small amount of money to write security software, they’re not going to do a very good job at it. In an experiment that involved 43 programmers hired via the Freelancer.com platform, University of Bonn academics have discovered that developers … Read More “Programmers Who Don’t Understand Security Are Poor at Security” »
There’s new research on the security of password managers, specifically 1Password, Dashlane, KeePass, and Lastpass. This work specifically looks at password leakage on the host computer. That is, does the password manager accidentally leave plaintext copies of the password lying around memory? All password managers we examined sufficiently secured user secrets while in a “not … Read More “On the Security of Password Managers” »
Good essay on the inherent vulnerabilities in the cell phone standards and the market barriers to fixing them. So far, industry and policymakers have largely dragged their feet when it comes to blocking cell-site simulators and SS7 attacks. Senator Ron Wyden, one of the few lawmakers vocal about this issue, sent a letter in August … Read More “Security Vulnerabilities in Cell Phone Systems” »
The research group AI Now just published its annual report. It’s an excellent summary of today’s AI security challenges, as well as a policy agenda to address them. This is related, and also worth reading. Powered by WPeMatico