Author: Robby Pedrica
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Security – Hell in a handbasket
The last 2 weeks have really been a bad time for security news and one has to hope things will change for the better; if not, the headline says it all! BlueKeep Microsoft released a security patch 2 weeks ago related to Windows Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) which is used to remote access Windows systems.…
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Symantec’s negative day defense
For when zero-day protection is not enough – Symantec are now prescient! WTF does "negative day defense" even mean?! pic.twitter.com/r1Q2L7GbOg — Jake Williams (@MalwareJake) May 28, 2019
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Vuln mitigation and INtel MDS – the spectre looms
Spectre and Meltdown a have been with us for just over a year now and even with all the predictions of dire consequences, we have yet to see any in-the-wild code snippets or attacks beyond theoretical POCs. So the question to ask is whether we should be losing a lot of hardware performance (most of…
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A lesson in supply chain attacks
What happens when the websites we visit and the companies we depend on to provide us with information, are compromised? Supply chain attacks go to the root of information we depend on rather than attack us directly. A recent attack on the Asus infrastructure paints the exact scenario for supply chain attacks. Attackers compromised an…
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2018 the year of the hacked router
I’ve spoken in depth on consumer (and some enterprise) router security issues. In brief summary, these devices are pieces of scrap that are full of vulnerabilities and very seldom get updated to fix issues. It’s no coincidence that this year has seen an exponential growth in attacks on routers as well as botnets making use…
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(S)RUM
Veronica Schmitt, a senior digital forensic scientist at DFIRLABS, recently featured on Paul’s Security Weekly, showcasing the Microsoft SRUM system tool (System Resource Utilization Monitor). SRUM was first introduced in Windows 8, and was a new feature designed to track system resource utilization such as CPU cycles, network activity, power consumption, etc. Analysts can use…
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VPNFilter and other neat tricks
The Spectre and Meltdown attacks that came to light at the beginning of the year have been the main focus of this year’s security issues however there has been a lot more going on than that. On that note though, additional Spectre variations have been found (we’re up to v4 now); as well, the BSD…
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Loki god of …?
In the field of IT Security, one learns very quickly that there’s always another security risk around the corner. An old favourite, the Loki Botnet, is back for another bite of the pie shortly after the fun with WannaCry a week ago. ( Loki a god in Norse mythology, was sometimes good and sometimes bad.…
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Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and your digital data
The recent Facebook/CA fiasco should be known to most people by now but here is a brief rundown in case you’re unaware. Aleksander Kogan, a Russian-American researcher, worked as a lecturer at Cambridge University, which has a Psychometrics Centre. The Centre advises to be able to use data from Facebook (including “likes”) to ascertain people’s personality traits.…
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Meltdown and Spectre – hardware gone wild!
We’ve had some big doozies over the last 2 years from a security point of view, but the latest CPU hardware-related bugs called Spectre and Meltdown, that started making headlines early last week, surely take the cake. One has to be careful though in classifying these as bugs, because those affected would say these were…
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Multichoice and some news
DSTV has always been a contentious subject amongst South Africans. Multichoice paved the way for pay-tv with the introduction of Mnet in the mid-80’s; following this, they introduced the digital satellite service DSTV in 1995 effectively becoming a monopoly in South Africa. High costs, many repeats and channel binding seem to show Multichoice as the…
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South African Security (Fails)
It’s been a while since my last post but recent events in SA around security have prompted me to write this post. It starts with an open website containing what is now believed to be upwards of 70 million entries for names, ID numbers, income, addresses and other information on South African citizens/residents including possibly…
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Email anti-spam, authentication and signing solutions
There are many solutions providing encryption, anti-spam, authentication and others available on top of the venerable SMTP protocol. Some of these require management overhead, others require end-user input. But the holy grail is to provide all these features with no user input and low management overhead. Basics The most important information needed before starting with…
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A little bit of ransomware with that Sauerkraut?
This past weekend’s shenanigans with WannaCry have been painful for many people. But the simple fact is that solutions for this specific issue ( and many others ) have been available for a long time. The initial patch for the MS17-101 issue was released by Microsoft in March 2017. Didn’t update? Many AV vendors have…
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The NSA and Ransomware. Oh and a bit of HPE on the side.
If ever there was a perfect example of stupidity, the new highly virulent strain of WanaCrypt ransomware that is currently spreading like wildfire, is it. And that stupidity is care of the NSA; who in their infinite wisdom, wrote exploits based on 0-day vulnerabilities that should have been reported to the relevant vendors, but was…
