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.
Just days after a successful attack on the security think tank Stratfor, Anonymous, the anarchic hacking collective, is getting headlines again for an attack on Specialforces.com, a Web site used by members of the armed forces law enforcement officers and gun enthusiasts. However, an employee working for the online store said the group is playing the media by taking credit for a hack that happened months ago.
By Art CovielloI just came back from a five-week trip of meeting with customers around the world and never in my entire career have CEOs and corporate boards been as interested in security as they are now. The common theme throughout these conversations was that we are facing a new reality – one of persistent, advanced and intelligent threat.
A report on the Web site of the Christian Science Monitor claims that Iran exploited a long-known vulnerability in the GPS navigation system of the U.S.’s RQ-170 Sentinel drone to force it into landing safely within Iran.
GlobalSign, the certificate authority that the attacker who compromised Comodo and DigitNotar claimed he had infiltrated as well, said it has completed its months-long security review and found no evidence that its CA infrastructure was compromised or that any rogue certificates had been issued. The investigation did confirm that the company’s public Web server had been compromised, and GlobalSign decided to revoke its own SSL certificate and key.
DNS provider OpenDNS has developed a new open-source tool that will encrypt all of the traffic between customers and the OpenDNS servers. The tool is designed to address the slew of techniques that enable attackers to eavesdrop on plain-text DNS traffic.
Security researchers often use language and metaphors from the natural world to describe problems in the virtual world. (Thus, our use of the terms “virus,” and “worm.”) Now it turns out that the links may not be so arbitrary, after Microsoft researchers discovered that tools they developed to detect spammers’ efforts to avoid anti-spam filters were also great at spotting mutations in the HIV virus.
Google is stepping up their security game in a big way for the second time this year: introducing a more secure browsing method known as forward secrecy in Gmail and a number of other Web-based services, according to a post on the GoogleOnlineSecurity blog.
Calling it a form of “electronic civil disobedience,” hacktivist group Anonymous took aim at a special agent from the California Department of Justice on Friday. The group spilled 38,000 e-mails containing “computer forensics techniques, investigation protocols as well as highly embarrassing personal information,” according to a press release on Pastebin.
Gamers who use the digital distribution network Steam were warned that their account information may have been exposed to hackers following a compromise of the company’s Web page and back end databases. The incident yielded a slew of sensitive customer information, including user’s passwords and encrypted credit card numbers, Steam said.
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