It was another great BlackHat. If you could not make it, here is a roundup of things that I thought were particularly interesting from the perspective we have here at KnowBe4. It's a short blurb of each topic with a link to more detail. Enjoy!
It was known inside the InfoSec community, but now more details have been made public through CNN after a BlackHat 2015 presentation. "Three years ago, the world witnessed the worst hack ever seen. And for the first time, we're now learning new details about the monstrous cyberattack on Saudi Aramco, one of the world's largest oil companies. In a matter of hours, 35,000 computers were partially wiped or totally destroyed. Read More
Social Engineering & Black Hat: Do As I Do Not As I Say
Let me just put it out there: I was socially engineered into attending the Black Hat conference. There was this email -- legitimate, though not from Black Hat -- that came into my inbox that told me to click on a link for a complimentary badge, and I clicked on it. Then I put my personal and credit card information into a form, clicked submit, and instantly experienced the security professional buyer’s remorse. “Is this really legit?” I wondered. Read More
Black Hat: Hackers urged to protect Internet freedom
Las Vegas -- Security researchers need to fight for the rights to study, modify and reverse engineer Internet hardware and software or the general population risks losing Internet freedom, the Black Hat 2015conference was told. Jennifer Granick “The dream of Internet freedom is dying,” warned Jennifer Granick, the Director of Civil Liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society during the conference keynote. Four things are killing it: centralization, regulation, globalization and loss of “the freedom to tinker,” she says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Read More
Black Hat Is About Cybersecurity People and Processes
Over the past few years, the RSA Security Conference has become a marquis technology industry event. It has really outgrown its humble roots in cryptography and Layer 3 and 4 packet filtering – now RSA is where technology industry bigwigs meet, drink exquisite Napa Valley wine, get a broad perspective of the cybersecurity industry, and do deals.RSA’s emergence as a “must-attend” technology industry event is a good thing on balance. For one week of the year, business, government, and technology leaders descend on San Francisco and shed a spotlight on the global state of cybersecurity. But while this attention is a good thing, RSA has evolved into a high-level affair, focusing on the “why” questions surrounding cybersecurity.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Read More
Black Hat 2015: Cracking just about anything
Researchers at the Black Hat 2015 conference show how to crack Internet routing protocols, malware-detecting honeypots, radio-frequency ID gear that gates building access, and more, but also offer tips on how to avoid becoming victims to their new attacks.A pair of researchers will release a hardware device that exploits weaknesses in RFID access controls and show how to use it to break into buildings. The device exploits the communication protocol used by most access-control systems, according to the team. Read More
Did Android get a case of Stagefright?
At the Black Hat security conference this morning, Adrian Ludwig, Google’s lead engineer for Android security, assuaged fears about the recent Android Stagefright vulnerability reported to affect nearly a billion Android devices.The surge in interest in the Stagefright vulnerability was precipitated by the Black Hat security conference taking place in Las Vegas. It began when Joshua Drake – security analyst with Zimperium who discovered the vulnerability – tweeted about it to promote his Black Hat talk about his discovery, pointing to his place on the conference schedule. A few days after the tweet, Drake gave an interview about the Stagefright vulnerability to National Public Radio (NPR). It was subsequently reported in Forbes, Fortune and Wired, followed by a deluge of related stories across the tech blogosphere. Read More
Car hackers urge you to patch your Chrysler, Ram, Durango, or Jeep
A hacker duo pretty much just made the case for going old school and steering clear of “smart” and “connected” vehicles as they remotely attacked one. Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek revealed 20 of the “most hackable” vehicles last year, but this year at Black Hat they will blow people’s mind when they present “Remote Exploitation of an Unaltered Passenger Vehicle.”It’s not the first remote hack; when DARPA’s Dan Kaufman remotely hacked a car for 60 Minutes, he triggered the windshield wipers, blasted the car’s horn and then disabled the brakes. That and a report claiming that nearly all new cars can be hacked led to a lawsuit against GM, Ford and Toyota for "dangerous defects in their hackable cars. Read More
Attackers use commercial Terracotta VPN to launch attacks
RSA researchers have discovered a China-based VPN network dubbed Terracotta that is used extensively to launch advanced persistent threat (APT) attacks and that hijacks servers of unsuspecting organizations in order to add new nodes to its network.The Terracotta VPN provides the infrastructure that anchors several anonymizing VPN services that are commercially marketed to the public in China, according to a briefing delivered today at the Black Hat conference.The services are pushed as a means for individuals to hide their Internet activity from prying government eyes, but are used as well by criminals seeking to cloak the origins of their attacks, RSA researchers will tell the conference.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Read More
10 disturbing attacks at Black Hat USA 2014
A look back: Attacking car systems, Google Glass for password theft, using free cloud trials to launch botnets, more Read More
Hacker shows how to alter messages on satellite network
Globalstar satellite transmissions used for tracking truck fleets and wilderness hikers can be hacked to alter messages being sent with possibly dire consequences for pilots, shipping lines, war correspondents and businesses that use the system to keep an eye on their remote assets.The technique, described at Black Hat 2015, can’t affect control of the Globalstar satellites themselves, just the messages they relay, but that could mean altering the apparent location of assets the system tracks. So a cargo container with a satellite location device in it could be made to seemingly disappear, or an airplane could be made to seem to veer off course, according to a briefing by Colby Moore, a security staffer at Synack. Read More
FBI warns businesses of spike in email/DDOS extortion schemes
The FBI said there has been a significant uptick in the number of businesses being hit with extortion schemes where a company receive an e-mail threatening a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack to its Website unless it pays a ransom, usually in varying amounts of Bitcoin.The report comes from the FBI’s partner, the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) which stated that victims that do not pay the ransom receive a subsequent threatening e-mail claiming that the ransom will significantly increase if the victim fails to pay within the time frame given. Some businesses reported implementing DDoS mitigation services as a precaution.“Businesses that experienced a DDoS attack reported the attacks consisted primarily of Simple Discovery Protocol (SSDP) and Network Time Protocol (NTP) reflection/amplification attacks, with an occasional SYN-flood and, more recently, Wordpress XML-RPC reflection/amplification attack. The attacks typically lasted one to two hours, with 30 to 35 gigabytes as the physical limit,” the IC3 stated in the warning. Read More
New malware turns your computer into a cellular antenna
Critical data can be collected from a computer using a feature phone Read More
And to end off: DarkReading Blackhat 2015 Roundup - all on one page!
