Caller-ID Spoofing? There’s an App for that! I recently received correspondence from individuals that I did not communicate and quickly determined that an unknown party has been spoofing my phone number. Between 2006 and 2007, I did some work for a small, local CLEC that had a CLASS 5 switch in St. Petersburg. They had […]
General
Common Mistakes Made With Your Tech Partners
Jared Hall General No Comments
ZDNet published an article “Ten mistakes to avoid when working with tech partners“, summarized herein by specifying what a company should do: Don’t treat all tech partners the same. Each of your tech partners have different functions, styles, and backgrounds. They each contribute to your success in a different way. You cannot manage them in […]
Joomla: Security Update
Jared Hall General No Comments
Joomla corrected a bug that was created 8 years ago where an attacker can steal website administrator credentials. The bug exists in Joomla’s LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol). Input is not properly sanitized, so an attacker can use wildcards to progressively determine credentials. Although the bug was present for 8 years, Joomla fixed it promptly […]
Top Attacking Countries: September 2017
Jared Hall General No Comments
The top three countries countries continue to be Russia, United States, and Ukraine. Russia re-assumed its position at #1. China moved down to #5. August 2017’s report can be found here.
GPS Hacked
Jared Hall General, Telecom Security No Comments
Wired ran a story about widespread GPS errors experienced with merchant vessels traveling in the Black Sea. That story can be found here: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/black-sea-ship-hacking-russia. This has been experienced by at least 20 ships over the past year. One ship reports errors in the GPS-powered Automatic Identification System (AIS) every time they approach the Russian port of […]
Microsoft Office: No Shortage of Exploits
Jared Hall General No Comments
There exists another vulnerability (of sorts) within Microsoft Word that is actively being exploited for espionage and surveillance purposes. What is happening is that a Unicode reference to the INCLUDEPICTURE field can include a hyperlink to an external image or file, like a PHP script on a remote server. This is an OLE2 (Object Linking […]
VMware Exploited Again: Update Now
Jared Hall General, Internet Security No Comments
On Friday, 9/15/2017, VMware released patches for the ESXi Server, Workstation, and Fusion (Apple) hypervisors. The most serious issue, an out-of-bounds write vulnerability, exists in ESXi, and desktop hypervisors Workstation, and Fusion. An attacker could exploit the issue, which exists in a SVGA device, to execute code on the host O/S. This affects ESXi version […]
Top Attacking Countries: August 2017
The top three countries countries continue to be Russia, United States, and Ukraine. The US has moved into the top spot. China moved up two notches to #4. July 2017’s report can be found here.
Equifax Hacked
Jared Hall General No Comments
Holy crap, Batman! Yes, the company of last resort to protect your identity has just coughed it up. This breach included the Social Security Numbers of 143 Million Americans, a little less that half of the US population. Equifax reports that over 209,000 credit card numbers were stolen, along with identifying information (PCI) for 182,000 […]
Of NSA Vulnerability Disclosures and Cyber-Command
Jared Hall General, Spy vs. Spy No Comments
Wow. That’s a lengthy title that covers just about anything. Really, this is just a sounding-out of what’s been happening in the Spy business lately. Vulnerability Disclosure To start with, there’s a good read on Lawfare, entitled “No, the U.S. Government Should Not Disclose All Vulnerabilities in Its Possession“. It was written by Rick Ledgett, Deputy […]