PSW #783 – Rob Fuller

"The exploit uses a maliciously crafted HTTP cookie, to which vulnerable TBK DVR devices respond with admin credentials in the form of JSON data." - A very convenient exploit! Also, looking like no one is patching this.

It's how the law was written that's the issue: "Under this bill, pornographic sites are required to verify that a visitor is at least 18 years old using uploaded government IDs or a third-party age verification service." - MindGeek (parent company of PornHub and several other brands) displays a message for Utah visitors: " While safety and compliance are at the forefront of our mission, giving your ID card every time you want to visit an adult platform is not the most effective solution for protecting our users, and in fact, will put children and your privacy at risk." They then recommend that you instead use "demand device-based verification solutions". I'm not sure what that means, but there must be a trade-off here. Also, this could just drive folks to 1) Use a proxy and 2) visit sites that are not-so-good at monitoring the content posted to their site...

"A developer, as opposed to uploading binaries or software releases directly to Packagist.org, simply creates a Packagist.org account, and "submits" a link to their GitHub repo for a particular package. Packagist's crawler then visits the provided repo and aggregates all the data to display on the Packagist page for that package" - Okay, this is pretty terrible, and I would never think its a good thing to use Composer in production if you care about security at all. However, the attacker hijacked packages to get a job, which is probably not the best way to do so. Also, I believe the attacker just hijacked accounts with credential stuffing. I'm not impressed.

I started looking at one of these apps, kind of scary. The apps want all sorts of information to give you better routes, and payment information. This article covers several different attack vectors. Now I don't want to install any of these apps, but I do want better routes than what Telsa provides. The one I tested also just asked me to provide my Tesla login to "provide live data from your car". Uhm, that's a big fat no! (A bank account is tied to your Tesla account!)

"Switching to immutable binary packages addresses these risks. Since they can’t be changed, they can be cached in a local repository manager for fast, repeatable builds that let developers work quickly. Teams are insulated from disruptions in the supply chain of dependencies because whatever versions in use can be readily sourced from private caches or the centralized repository. When every package is uniquely identified, reliable software composition analysis becomes possible. Teams can easily comply with requirements for a software bill of materials, and when advisories or recalls are necessary, identifying which application versions are affected is a simple process. Finally, malicious open source attacks on developers and development infrastructure can be stopped at the repository, before they even enter the software development life cycle." - Interesting points, distribute binaries that are signed rather than source and make them immutable. You just need gatekeepers throughout the development process and at the distribution source.

"The sale of hacking tools also raises several legal issues. While the NSO Group argued that it only sells its products to legitimate governments, the definition of “legitimate” is subjective and may vary depending on the country or organization. " - Laws should dictate who you sell weapons to, in fact, there are some US laws that cover this. However, if your policy is to sell to "legit" folks, who defines that term? Also, who is responsible? Again, I go back to my hammer analogy, it can be used to build houses or beat people to death, should we get the ban hammer out to ban the hammers? Probably not. Its what you do with a tool, not the tool itself, that should be restricted, regulated and monitored. This is a slippery slope as we get into things such as weapons, especially "cyber" weapons.

" the bug was also used by the Tenable team in their unsuccessful Pwn2Own attempt against the device. They, too, disclosed the bug to TP-Link, but their public report did not show that the bug could be exploited on the WAN interface. TP-Link released a firmware update in March that “Fixed some security issues” – including this and other CVEs. It was after this fix was made public that exploit attempts using this CVE were detected in the wild." - I hate it when we get confused, or there is hand waving, about the exploit path. WAN or LAN? Big difference. I also hate it when vendors fix stuff, but don't tell us exactly what they've fixed, like a CVE for a remotely exploitable bug. I also hate it, or love it, when developers use "popen" and don't sanitize the input.

"SLP was not intended to be made available to the public Internet. According to RFC 2165, "Service Location provides a dynamic configuration mechanism for applications in local area networks. It is not a global resolution system for the entire Internet; rather, it is intended to serve enterprise networks with shared services." However, the protocol has been found in a variety of instances connected to the Internet. A recent internet-wide scan revealed more than 54,000 SLP-speaking instances online, belonging to organizations across many sectors and geographies." - Oops. If you design something like this, it will end up on the Internet.

The birds aren't real, but their bodies are.

A research team in New Mexico is converting taxidermic birds into drones in order to study flight patterns, Reuters reported.

From Popular Mechanics article https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/robots/a42940200/scientists-turning-dead-birds-into-drones/: While a realistic bird drone could be great for keeping an eye on reclusive wildlife, it could also turn its gaze on humans as a spy tool. The CIA designed a nuclear-powered bird drone during the Cold War to spy on the Soviet Union and a real-life bird drone could fulfill a similar function.

Section 1.50002 of the Commission’s rules directs the Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau to publish a list of communications equipment and services (Covered List) that are deemed to pose an unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States or the security and safety of United States persons, based exclusively on any of four sources for such a determination and that such equipment or services possess certain capabilities as enumerated in section 2(a) of the Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Act of 2019, Pub. L. No. 116-124, 133 Stat. 158 (2020) (codified as amended at 47 U.S.C. §§ 1601–1609).

Some expected: ZTE devices, Huawei devices, China Telecom

From covered list: Information security products, solutions, and services supplied, directly or indirectly, by AO Kaspersky Lab or any of its predecessors, successors, parents, subsidiaries, or affiliates. Date of inclusion 3.25.22

In practice, is this widely known? Rated as Never Use by FCC? Is this used in assessments in general practice?

Geoffrey Hinton was an artificial intelligence pioneer. Last year, as Google and OpenAI built systems using much larger amounts of data, his view changed. He still believed the systems were inferior to the human brain in some ways but he thought they were eclipsing human intelligence in others. “Maybe what is going on in these systems,” he said, “is actually a lot better than what is going on in the brain.” His immediate concern is that the internet will be flooded with false photos, videos and text, and the average person will “not be able to know what is true anymore.” He is also worried that A.I. technologies will in time upend the job market. And he fears a day when truly autonomous weapons — those killer robots — become reality.

Palantir, the company of billionaire Peter Thiel, is launching Palantir Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP), software meant to run large language models like GPT-4 and alternatives on private networks. In a demonstration video, the operator uses a ChatGPT-style chatbot to order drone reconnaissance, generate several plans of attack, and organize the jamming of enemy communications. The operator uses AIP to generate three possible courses of action to target enemy equipment. The options include attacking the tank with an F-16, long range artillery, or Javelin missiles.

Scientists have found a way to decode a stream of words in the brain using MRI scans and artificial intelligence. The system reconstructs the gist of what a person hears or imagines, rather than trying to replicate each word. This technology can't read minds, though. It only works when a participant is actively cooperating with scientists.

Behind the scenes of the SolarWinds investigation. In 2019, Volexity performed IR on a Solarwinds server. The attackers kept returning through June 2020, despite it having no vulnerability they could identify. It wasn't identified until Nov, 2020, when Mandiant found that they had been hacked, owned for up to eight months. SolarWinds said they were publishing everything it could about the incident, but both it and Mandiant withheld some answers on the advice of legal counsel or per government request--Mandiant more so than SolarWinds.

The Missouri Attorney General’s office launched an online form for “Transgender Center Concerns” in late March, inviting those who’ve witnessed “troubling practices” at clinics that provide gender-affirming care to submit tips. But after days of TikTok and Twitter users spamming the site with gibberish, the tip line has been removed from the Missouri government site entirely.

Designer is a web app that can generate designs for presentations, posters, and more to share on social media and other channels. It leverages user-created content and DALL-E 2, OpenAI’s text-to-image AI.

Is your employer monitoring your mouse clicks, keystrokes, or webcam? What about your location or pace of work? If so, the White House wants to hear from you.

Microsoft showed interest in Rust several years ago as a way to catch and squash memory safety bugs, which were at the heart of about 70 percent of the CVE-listed security vulnerabilities patched by the Windows maker in its own products since 2006. You will actually have Windows booting with Rust in the kernel in probably the next several weeks or months. The basic goal here was to convert some of these internal C++ data types into their Rust equivalents.

Location-tracking devices help users find personal items like their keys, purse, luggage, and more through crowdsourced finding networks. However, they can also be misused for unwanted tracking of individuals. Today Apple and Google jointly submitted a proposed industry specification to help combat the misuse of Bluetooth location-tracking devices for unwanted tracking. There are no technical details in this article--for those, see the next article.

This document lists a set of best practices and protocols for accessory manufacturers whose products have built-in location-tracking capabilities. The devices should only emit location information when not near the owner. They should also provide a way for a user to physically locate unknown accessories traveling with them, such as emitting sounds when moved.

The 21st century calls for 21st century policing. AirTags in your car will help us recover your vehicle if it’s stolen. We’ll use our drones, our StarChase technology & good old fashion police work to safely recover your stolen car. Help us help you, get an AirTag.

Rapid Security Responses are a new type of software release for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. They deliver important security improvements between software updates — for example, improvements to the Safari web browser, the WebKit framework stack, or other critical system libraries. New Rapid Security Responses are delivered only for the latest version of iOS, iPadOS and macOS — beginning with iOS 16.4.1, iPadOS 16.4.1, and macOS 13.3.1.

Fakespot uses a machine learning (ML) system to detect patterns and similarities between reviews in order to flag those that are most likely to be deceptive. Using Fakespot, a buyer is able to quickly see where deceptive reviews may be artificially inflating a product’s ranking in search engines. Fakespot will continue to work across all major web browsers and mobile devices, and the Mozilla team will be investing in continuing to enhance the Fakespot experience for its many, dedicated users. There will also be future Fakespot integrations that are unique to Firefox.

The Australian Cyber Security Centre is recommending that users and companies move away from passwords and start using passphrases. Passphrases use 4 or more random words, with the strongest passphrases being more than 14 characters. This makes them harder for cybercriminals to hack, but easy for you to remember.

Three hardware and four software attacks are described, all rather esoteric and limited. Strangely, the Stanford Cold Boot attack and dissolving the TPM with chemicals did not make the list. I added links to them following this article.

Cold Boot attacks can steal encryption keys from nearly any laptop, by cooling the RAM, removing it, and reading it on a different system. This attack requires physical access, and generally require the target machine to be in a suspended state, not powered off. The risk is low for most users.

Christopher Tarnovsky soaked TPM chips in acid to dissolve their hard outer shells. Then he applied rust remover to help take off layers of mesh wiring, to expose the chips' cores. From there, he had to find the right communication channels to tap into using a very small needle. The Trusted Computing Group, which sets standards on TPM chips, called the attack "exceedingly difficult to replicate in a real-world environment."