I decided to give a descent test to the LIEF project. Executable parsers are not a new thing but that one picked my curiosity (just like most Quarkslab projects) because it also provides dead simple instrumentation functions. To top it up, LIEF is easy to use and well documented, which is becoming a rare perk in the circus of infosec tools.
Source: github.io
At a highway check point on the outskirts of Beijing, local police are this week testing out a new security tool: smart glasses that can pick up facial features and car registration plates, and match them in real-time with a database of suspects.
Source: reuters.com
In December, the Defense Departmentdeclassified twovideos documenting encounters between U.S. Navy F-18 fighters and unidentified aircraft. The first video captures multiple pilots observing and discussing a strange, hovering, egg-shaped craft, apparently one of a “fleet” of such objects, according to cockpit audio. The second shows a similar incident involving an F-18 attached to the USS Nimitz carrier battle group in 2004.
Researchers athuman rights research groupCitizen Lab have discovered that netizens in Turkey, Egypt and Syria who attempted to download legitimate Windows applications from official vendor websites (i.e. Avast Antivirus, CCleaner, Opera, and 7-Zip) have been infected with a nation-state malware.
Source: securityaffairs.co
There is a weakness common to any software letting you protect a piece of data with a password: how does that password translate into an encryption key? If that conversion is a fast one, then you better don’t expect the encryption to hold. Somebody who gets hold of that encrypted data will try to guess the password you used to protect it.
The Equifax data breach affected around 148 million Americans. As the Washington Post reported, the affected people’s compromised information includes even partial driver’s license data. According to Bloomberg, this has made Equifax somewhat of a pariah in Washington.
Ironically, however, the Senate bill designed to punish the consumer credit reporting agency might actually reward it. A last-minute change, an amendment to the bill offered by its author Senate Banking Committee Chairman Mike Crapo, might help Equifax make millions of dollars in revenue.
It was only a matter a of time. There were clearly signs this was going to happen already out there when the SEC went after defunct “exchange” BitFunder. Today, the SEC made its biggest announcement yet: all the crypto exchanges are illegal unless they register with the SEC.
Why is this important? It turns out the entire $400B cryptocurrency ecosystem is based on trading altcoins or utility tokens.
A new variation of the Spectre attack has been revealed this week by six scientists from the Ohio State University. Named SgxSpectre, researchers say this attack can extract information from Intel SGX enclaves. Intel Software Guard eXtensions (SGX) is a feature of modern Intel processors that allow an application to create so-called enclaves.
This enclave is a hardware-isolated section of the CPU’s processing memory where applications can run operations that deal with extremely sensitive details, such as encryption keys, passwords, user data, and more.
Slingshot—which gets its name from text found inside some of the recovered malware samples—is among the most advanced attack platforms ever discovered, which means it was likely developed on behalf of a well-resourced country, researchers with Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab reported Friday. The sophistication of the malware rivals that of Regin—the advanced backdoor that infected Belgian telecom Belgacom and other high-profile targets for years—and Project Sauron, a separate piece of malware suspected of being developed by a nation-state that also remained hidden for years.
Binance, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges on the Internet, said today that hackers and a well-executed phishing campaign are to blame for the Bitcoin sell-offs from yesterday’s afternoon.
Source: bleepingcomputer.com
On 12 January, a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) rocket blasted off from India’s eastern coast. While its primary cargo was a large Indian mapping satellite, dozens of secondary CubeSats from other countries travelled along with it. Seattle-based Planetary Resources supplied a spacecraft that will test prospecting tools for future asteroid miners, Canadian company Telesat launched a broadband communications satellite, and a British Earth-observation mission called Carbonite will capture high-definition video of the planet’s surface.
Researchers Uncovers a Previously Undetected Highly-Skilled APT Hacking Group Operating Covertly Since 2012, Infecting Mikrotik Routers to Implant Advance ‘Slingshot’ Spying Malware
Source: thehackernews.com
Facebook has a GraphQL endpoint which can only be used by some of their own first-party applications. Generally, you need a user (or page) access_token to query the GraphQL endpoint.
I have decided to try using Facebook for Android application’s client token, but the endpoint returned an error message:
Source: josipfranjkovic.com
Governments and Internet Service Providers in Turkey, Syria and Egypt Caught Infecting Citizens with Cryptocurrency Mining and surveillance malware.
Source: thehackernews.com
Today we released Echidna, our next-generation EVM smart fuzzer at EthCC. It’s the first-ever fuzzer to target smart contracts, and has powerful features like abstract state-machine modeling and automatic minimal test case generation. We’ve been working on it for quite some time, and are thrilled to finally share it with the world.
Source: trailofbits.com
The capabilities of its flagship product, the Remote Control System (RCS), include extracting files from a targeted device, intercepting emails and instant messaging, as well as remotely activating a device’s webcam and microphone. The company has been criticized for selling these capabilities to authoritarian governments – an allegation it has consistently denied.
Source: welivesecurity.com
Cybercriminals stole 3.8 million slopes (860,000 euros) from 32 ATMs belonging to the Raiffeisen Romania bank using an infected RTF document. The criminal organization led by Dmitriy Kvasov operated in Romania, the gang stole the money in just one night in 2016.
Source: securityaffairs.co
Hands on the wheel, eyes squinting against the winter sun, Lauren Miehe eases his Land Rover down the main drag and tells me how he used to spot promising sites to build a bitcoin mine, back in 2013, when he was a freshly arrived techie from Seattle and had just discovered this sleepy rural community.
Source: politico.com
GrayShift is a new lawful access company, with an ex-Apple engineer on its staff, that promises to break into the latest iPhones. At least one local police department has already signed up to its GrayKey service.
Source: vice.com
A partnership with police will permit some Amazon Echo owners to report crimes directly through their smart speakers.
Source: theintercept.com