Malware Writers Use Block Cipher in Latin America
The creators of banking trojan programs in Brazil are using sophisticated block ciphers to encrypt their malware, making detection by anti virus products more difficult.
Cryptography
A New Cybersecurity Research Agenda (In Three Minutes or Less)
by Dan GeerEditor’s Note: As the CISO of In-Q-Tel, the CIA-backed strategic investment firm focused on developing technologies for the intelligence community, Dan Geer gets paid to help find the answers to big questions about computer security, national security, privacy and technology. Headlines proliferate about sophisticated cyber attacks, the looming specter of cyber warfare and ongoing espionage by nations like China and Russia. That means Dan’s job gets more important with each passing day. So what’s on Dan Geer’s mind these days? We asked him what questions he was mulling and, as usual, the answers we got back were both eye-opening and provocative. Here, in Monday morning ‘shot of espresso’ format (and with as little editing as possible) is our three minute speed date with Dan’s brain.
Another Dutch CA, KPN, Stops Issuing Certificates After Finding DDoS Tool On Server
Another Dutch certificate authority, KPN, has stopped issuing digital certificates after finding attack tools on a server in its Web infrastructures. The CA said that while it doesn’t have evidence right now that it’s CA infrastructure was compromised, it is taking the actions as a precaution.
UPDATED–A certificate authority in Malaysia has had to revoke 22 certificates it issued with weak keys and missing extensions. The problem has prompted Mozilla to revoke trust in the intermediate certificate authority from Digicert Sdn. Bhd., and Microsoft said it plans to take the same actions, as well.
The Linux Foundation has released a document outlining ways in which the UEFI secure boot specification can be used to support the installation of Linux and other open operating systems on UEFI-enabled hardware. As long as hardware vendors set up their systems in the proper way, UEFI should be no obstacle to using Linux or other alternate operating systems on forthcoming systems, they say.
Microsoft Research has proposed a mitigation for a known potential attack against verifiable electronic voting machines that could help prevent insiders from being able to alter votes after the fact. The countermeasure to the “trash attack” involves adding a cryptographic hash to the receipts that voters receive.
The EFF, through the use of its SSL Observatory, has taken a look at the data from certificate revocation lists for SSL certificates in recent months, and found that there were four separate CAs compromised in the last four months.
Barnaby Jack, famous for getting ATMs to disgorge an avalanche of cash on stage at the Black Hat Briefings, says he has developed an attack that could be used to deliver a lethal dose of insulin to diabetics using the embedded pumps.
A group of researchers has released a tool that they say implements a denial-of-service attack against SSL servers by triggering a huge number of SSL renegotiations, eventually consuming all of the server’s resources and making it unavailable. The tool exploits a widely known issue with the way that SSL connections work.
Researchers at the Hackers To Hackers Conference in Brazil will detail a method of hijacking the TOR anonymity network, potentially putting its users at risk, while The Tor Project accuses one of the researchers of irresponsible disclosure.
