About
Dennis Fisher is a journalist with more than 13 years of experience covering information security.
Just a day after security researcher Stefan Viehbock released details of a vulnerability in the WiFi Protected Setup (WPS) standard that enables attackers to recover the router PIN, a security firm has published an open-source tool capable of exploiting the vulnerability. The tool, known as Reaver, has the ability to find the WPS PIN on a given router and then recover the WPA passphrase for the router, as well.
The US-CERT is warning about a vulnerability in the WiFi Protected Setup standard that reduces the number of attempts it would take an attacker to brute-force the PIN for a wireless router’s setup process. The flaw results in too much information about the PIN being returned to an attacker and makes the PIN quite weak, affecting the security of millions of WiFi routers and access points.
The security industry can be a giant repetitive, follow-the-loser echo chamber of unoriginal thoughts, familiar flaws and copycat theories. But if ever there was a year in which folks could stand back and look at what’s gone on and say, what in the hell just happened, 2011 was it. So rather than going in for the typical year-in-review or top stories shtick, let’s just have a look back at some of the more absurd, unexpected and amusing twigs and berries from the last 12 months, shall we?
As the public debate over the merits and drawbacks of the SOPA bill continues, consumers and privacy advocates already are looking for ways to get around the provisions in the proposed anti-piracy law that they see as unreasonable and oppressive. In one example, a developer has published an extension for Firefox that helps users circumvent SOPA’s domain blacklisting.
The security of Android devices has come under quite a lot of scrutiny in recent months, with researchers identifying various root exploits and permission leaks that could be exploited. In this video, researcher Thomas Cannon of ViaForensics demonstrates a method for setting up a remote shell on an Android device without using any exploits or vulnerabilities.
Researchers are warning about a new remotely exploitable vulnerability in 64-bit Windows 7 that can be used by an attacker to run arbitrary code on a vulnerable machine. The bug was first reported a couple of days ago by an independent researcher and confirmed by Secunia.
The creators and maintainers of exploit kits often rely on public reports of new exploits and proof-of-concept exploit code in order to be able to add new exploits to their software. And in many cases, the exploits included in kits such as Black Hole and Eleonore and others will be for vulnerabilities that are older and have long since been patched. But, if recent events are any indication, that could be changing.
The federal government is planning to focus some of its research and development efforts on developing methods for building security into software and hardware systems used in federal agencies. This a major change for the government, which has historically focused its energies on defenses such as IDS, custom desktop images and firewalls.
A new version of the REMnux specialized Linux distribution has been released, and it now includes a group of new tools for reverse-engineering malware. The new additions include a tool for memory forensics as well as one for analyzing potentially malicious PDFs.
Adobe plans to release a patch on Friday for the zero-day vulnerability in its Reader and Acrobat applications on Windows that is currently being used in some targeted attacks. The patches for the applications running on other platforms will be released next month during the next scheduled patch update.
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