Security Now - 16k MP3

This week, our time-limited quest to answer today's burning questions causes us to wonder, how worried should Android smartphone users be about Google's revelation of serious flaws in Samsung's baseband chips? What great idea should the NPM maintainers steal? What is it that nation-states increasingly want to have both ways? What crazy but perhaps inevitable change is Google telegraphing that it m...

This week fewer questions required longer answers. What, if anything, can be done about the constant appearance of malicious Chrome extensions? What's the latest country to decide to pull Chinese telecommunications equipment from their country? What's the #1 way that bad guys penetrate networks, and how has that changed in the past year? What delicate and brittle crypto requirement is responsible...

This week's answers are many: How has Fosstodon survived a sustained DDoS attack? Or has it? What luck have Europol and the FBI had with taking down DDoS-for-hire services and have they returned? What's the point of blocking TikTok, and is it even possible? What happens when government-backed surveillance goes rogue? What exactly is "Strategic Objective 3.3" and what, if anything, does it portend...

For how long were bad guys inside GoDaddy's networks? What important oral arguments is the US Supreme Court hearing today and tomorrow? What's Elon done now? What's Bitwarden's welcome news? What's Meta going to begin charging for? Should we abandon all hope for unattended IoT devices? Are all of our repositories infested with malware? How'd last Tuesday's monthly patchfest turn out? Why would any...

What more has happened with the ESXi ransomware story? Is malicious use of ChatGPT going to continue to be a problem? What exactly is Google giving away? Why is the Brave browser changing the way it handles URLs? What bad idea has Russia just had about their own hackers? Why would Amazon change its S3 bucket defaults? Now who's worried about Chinese security camera spying? And who has just breathe...

Leo used to say at the top of our Q&A episodes: "You have questions, we have answers." Now we tease most of the questions and provide their answers. This week we wonder: What is about to happen with the EU's legislation to monitor its citizen's communications? Why would a French psychotherapy clinic be keeping 30,000 old patient records online, and who stole them? What top level domains insist...

This week we embark upon another two hour tour to answer some pressing questions: What happens if the vendor of the largest mobile platform begins blocking old and unsafe APIs, and can anything be done to prevent that? What new add-on is now being blocked by the dreaded Mark of the Web? Would you have the courage to say no after your gaming source code was stolen? Is any crypto asset safe, and wha...

This week we again address a host of pressing questions. What other major player fell victim to a credential reuse attack? What does Apple's update to iOS 16.3 mean for the world? And why may it not actually mean what they say? It was bound to happen. To what evil purpose has ChatGPT recently been employed? And are any of our jobs safe? Why was Meta fined by the EU for the third time this year? An...

This week we're back to answering some questions that you didn't even know were burning. First, is the LastPass iteration count problem much less severe than we thought because they are doing additional PBKDF2 rounds at their end? What sort of breach has Norton LifeLock protected its user's from? And have they really? What did Chrome just do which followed Microsoft and Firefox? And is the Chromiu...

This week, in a necessary follow-up to last week's "Leaving LastPass" episode, we'll share the news of the creation of a terrific PowerShell script, complete with a friendly user interface, which quickly de-obfuscates any LastPass user's XML format vault data. What it reveals is what we expected, but seeing is believing. Then we're going to examine the conclusions drawn and consequences of the mas...

This week, since a single topic dominated the security industry and by far the majority of my Twitter feed and DMs, after a brief update on my SpinRite progress we're going to spend the entire podcast looking at a single topic: LastPass.

This week is our annual holiday best of the year wrap up. Stories include: / Anatomy of a Log4j Exploit. / Will Russia Disconnect? / FCC Says Kaspersky Labs is a National Security Threat. / Lenovo UEFI Firmware Troubles. / That "Passkeys" Thing. / Dis-CONTI-nued: The End of Conti? / Steve's Take on the LastPass Breach.

This week we answer another collection of burning questions: Is there no honor among thieves? What was discovered during this year's Toronto Pwn2Own competition? What did we learn from last Tuesday's patchfest? Whose fault was the most recent Uber data breach? What happened when Elon tried to block all the bots? What's the first web browser to offer native support for Mastodon? What exactly is "Co...

This week we answer the following questions and more: What browser just added native support for passkeys and where are they stored? What service have I recommended that suffered a major multi-day service outage? How can you recognize a totally fake cryptocurrency trading site? Which messaging platform has become cybercrime's favorite, and how would you go about monetizing desirable usernames? Wha...

This week we answer a few questions: What if an Australian company doesn't secure their own network? Has Ireland NOT levied fines against any major Internet property owned by Meta? What's in REvil's complete dump of Australia's Medibank data disclosure? We finally answer the question: Is nothing sacred? (It turns out it's not rhetorical.) Also, whose root cert just got pulled from all of our brows...

What happens when you: Run a Caller ID spoofing service? Or when you mis-list and underprice online goods? Or click on a phishing link for a cryptocurrency exchange? Or consider working for a underworld hacking group? Use a webserver from the dark ages in your IoT device? Or rattle your sabers while attempting to sell closed networking systems to your enemies? Or decide whether or not to continue...

This week we note that Firefox moved to v107 and that Google recently reached a nearly $400 million dollar user-tracking settlement. Red Hat has started cryptographically signing its ZIP distributions, the FBI purchased the nefarious Pegasus spyware and Greece paid 7 million euros for the similar Predator spyware. Passkeys have a directory listing sites where they can be used, the OMB has decreed...

This week we have another event-filled Patch Tuesday retrospective. We look at a newly published horrifying automated host attack framework which script kiddies are sure to jump on. We have a welcome new feature for GitHub, crucial vulnerabilities in the LiteSpeed web server, a spiritual successor to TrueCrypt and VeraCrypt for Linux, Australia's announcement of their intention to proactively atta...

This pure news week we look at Dropbox's handling of a minor breach, and we follow-up on last week's OpenSSL flaws. The FTC has had it with a repeat offender, and we know how much total (reported) ransom was paid last year. Akamai reports on phishing kits, we have some stats about what Initial Access Brokers charge, and we look at the mechanics of cyber bank heists. Several more DeFi platforms def...

This week we revisit the Windows driver block list which has received a long-needed update and at Microsoft's own definition of a CVE. We note that sometime today the OpenSSL project will be releasing an update for an ultra-CRITICAL flaw in OpenSSL v3 and we look at a remote code execution flaw in Windows TCP/IP stack. We have a ubiquitous problem in the past 22 years of the widely used SQLite lib...

This week we note the release of an updated Firefox browser and Google's welcome and interesting announcement of a super-secure-by- design open source operating system project. We look at the latest cryptocurrency craziness and at a new Windows 0-day which bypasses downloaded executable file security checks. And speaking of 0-days, Apple just patched their iPhone and iPad OS's against their 9th 0-...

This week we examine several more serious Microsoft security failures which have just come to light, and a new useful Windows security feature that was just added. The new Passkeys logon technology received its own website to monitor its progress, and Cloudflare logs another record breaking DDoS attack. Signal drops its legacy support for SMS/MMS on Android, Fortinet attempts to keep a new bad aut...

This week we look at a massive customer information leak from a surprising source. Meta notes where their users are being harvested. And in an industry first, Uber's CSO has been convicted. We have more, much more, cryptocurrency industry turmoil. A new appointee in the U.K. wants to drop their use of the GDPR. The NSA is looking for next summer interns, IBM learns that incident responders are fee...

This week we examine a puzzlingly insecure implementation by Microsoft in Teams' design and at their complete re-write of Microsoft Defender Smartscreen. Roskomnadzor strikes again, and Exchange Server is again under serious attack with a new 0-day. CloudFlare introduces Turnstile, their free CAPTCHA improvement and Google published a fabulously engaging 6-video YouTube series under the banner: "H...