Hacking, Security & Privacy News - Page 21

RFID is a cheap and convenient way to communicate information between devices. The problem is that it's also incredible insecure, and easily hacked by a number of ways. But researchers from Texas Instruments and MIT have come together to make a chip that won't be so easy to steal information from.

The implications for such a development are tremendous, with the idea that the public will finally start to trust the technology for more applications. Specifically they're being designed to be nearly impervious to a common attack on RFID devices, the side-channel attack. Those work by analyzing actual power fluctuations or memory access patterns in order to determine what the cryptographic key is, to break in and steal your precious information.

The new chip doesn't prevent the reading of those physical properties, because that would mean it doesn't work at all, but instead uses a a special ferroelectric crystal material that can self-power the chip, and store small amounts of information, to prevent people from cutting the power right before a cryptographic key exchange, which can reveal that key if done properly and the right equipment and software. They'll also incorporate a random number generator on-board to use a new secret key for each transaction, meaning that each one is completely unique, and thus far safer and more secure than ever before.

If you get infected with Malware today, it's a very serious issue that could potentially compromise and complicate your life. Back in the day before the rise of botnets and ransomeware, viruses were quite cheeky and sometimes very bizarre. The Internet Archive is letting you explore what those antiquated infections could do, without the danger of course.

malware_HYMN.COM

The collection is a whimsical exploration of virii from the 1980's and 1990's that was curated by Jason Scott from Internet Archive and Mikko Hypponen, a chief researcher from F-Secure. Click on any of the examples and you'll be greeted with the animations and messages that tended to be the end result. They're safely contained within a DOS box emulator, but are without their destructive powers anymore anyway.

Biometrics are something we've been using to uniquely identify other humans since the 13th Century, but the current methods are flawed and can be spoofed with enough creativity and time. So now researchers have found another novel way to uniquely identify people: With "Brainprints".

A brainprint is the unique way in which your neurons fire when reading, or doing anything. It's a distinct and consistent way to identify people. New research by the Basque Center for Cognition and Binghamton University into the brainprint has been able to show just how unique our thought patterns actually are. They were able to identify people with 97% accuracy just based on them thinking about a particular word that flashed on a monitor in front of them for a half of a second.

That's good news for the coming robot revolution, because until brain thought patterns can be faked, we'll at least be able to know whose who, and not human. But in more practical terms it could be another piece to the puzzle of authentication. As a means to make a password it's horrible, but in a multi-factor authentication scheme, it could be used to identify that you're actually who you say you are and present at the time of entering your pin or password.

The darknet, or dark web, is a conglomeration of hidden services and websites that are accessible only through the Tor network. And as it would turn out, recently published research shows that over 57% of those hidden websites also happen to have some kind of illegal content on them.

The researchers, Daniel Moore and Thomas Rid from King's College London, created a custom script that parsed through some 5,025 live .onion based websites and found that 1,547 hosted some kind of material that's criminal in nature. The leading activity seems to surround drugs, with financial related criminal enterprises taking in a close second.

It's not necessarily a surprising finding, given that the idea of privacy and security tend to attract the unsavory types by their very nature. But the researchers do note that it doesn't have to be that way. And that perhaps removing hidden services from Tor could help, somehow.

It looks like the NSA wants to do some spring cleaning, where it wants to combine its intelligence gathering and cyberdefense groups. But, this creates its own issues, as the intelligence group might be using security flaws to spy on people, and governments, that its cyberdefense team don't even know about - leaving critical systems open to various attacks.

The US spy agency is now reportedly preparing a reorganization that would combine its offensive and defensive capabilities, a move that would help them better coordinate its fight online. The NSA isn't talking specifics just yet, but we should hear more about it this week. The Washington Post reports that it could be more of a cultural shift, versus a technical one. The two divisions already share similar processes, but this move would create a better line of communication between the divisions.

The OpenSSL project has found, and patched, an issue that was fairly serious though it likely didn't effect very many people, or businesses for that matter.

The problem seems to have stemmed around how the open-source implementation of SSL and TLS reuses prime numbers while the Diffie-Hellman key-exchange protocol is used, making it far easier for a would-be attacker to decrypt your information. The good news is that in order for that to happen, a particular setting has to physically be set on, because it's not on by default.

Even better is that in order to have enough information to actually crack the encryption, there the attacker would have to connect (and reconnect via separate handshakes) several times. So it's not something that's of too much concern, certainly not at the same level of the Heartbleed vulnerability of 2014.

This is the second full week using the Thermal Take Black V2 gaming mouse infused with Synaptic's IronVault optical fingerprint reader, and it's been a mostly great experience, when it comes to the fingerprint reader that is.

To be fair, the particular mouse that it's embedded in isn't quite my cup of tea, but that isn't what's being evaluated here, aside from the positioning of the sensor itself. So let's get that little hiccup out of the way from the beginning. The mouse just isn't quite comfortable for my hand and everyone has their own preferences when it comes to their HID's, but let's move on to the important bits.

The sensor itself has proven to be an accurate and surprisingly useful device. Enrolling your fingerprints is as easy as with any other capacitive sensor you might be used to (read: iPhone or any mobile phone for that matter). Just follow the instructions on the application that interfaces, and you're in business, able to use that stored fingerprint to be the basis for logging in to websites. It's almost magical, and much more so than when it was first introduced to the greater consumer by Apple.

In a freshly unsealed court case from October 2015, a judge asked Apple why it ignored requests to unlock the iPhone of a methamphetamine dealer. Turns out it didn't, the device (an iPhone 5s with iOS 7), was simply set to erase all data if someone attempted to unlock it 10 times in a row unsuccessfully (an unlocking device will try every possible code in quick succession). Presumably, this was by Apple design.

"In most cases now and in the future, the government's requested order would be substantially burdensome, as it would be impossible to perform," Apple stated, going on to say iOS 8 and above are designed to be unhackable by even Apple itself.

Apple lawyer Marc Zwillinger took it further at the hearing, noting, "Right now Apple is aware that customer data is under siege from a variety of different directions. Never has the privacy and security of customer data been as important as it is now. A hypothetical consumer could think if Apple is not in the business of accessing my data and if Apple has built a system to prevent itself from accessing my data, why is it continuing to comply with orders that don't have a clear lawful basis in doing so?"

Passwords are sometimes the first and last defense for your precious data. We probably mostly try to make them complex and full of symbols, numbers and non-words. But as it turns out, a lot of people still have easy to remember, and easy to hack passwords.

The top 25 passwords have been compiled by a company called SplashData to help show how insecure and unserious so many happen to be about password security. The list for 2015 is both surprising and also very sad. Despite the increase in security breaches and the ready availability of rainbow tables and brute force password lists, simple passwords still seem to persist.

So if you use one of the passwords listed below, you might want to consider changing it. Or you'll be extra vulnerable.

Securing your PC has always been a priority, and a challenge for Intel, especially in the enterprise sector. But vPro, a small co-processor that helps to secure your system in a variety of different novel ways, is a little long in the tooth even though it's still very relevant. So Intel is innovating on their vPro architecture by adding new functionality and making it a much better and more sophisticated in the wake of more refined attack methods.

Intel Authenticate is their new hardware-enhanced multi-factor authentication solution that'll make use of the existing vPro processor to authenticate users. It's able to verify your identity by using a combination of three things; something you have, which is a security token or even a smartphone or an app on that phone, something you know, such as a pin or password, and something you are, biometrics.

How does it work? In the hardware is a certificate that's completely separated logically and physically from the rest of the system, so this certificate is theoretically very secure and can't be spoofed. You're information is stored with that certificate and compared against it. It's actually a very good solution, and this hardware-assisted MFA is a step in the right direction. And with Synaptics making finger-print sensors easier to integrate into systems, and smartphone authentication apps becoming so ubiquitous, it's a natural evolution.