Buherator

Microsoft is alleged to have taken steps to ensure that the NSA had continuous access to services such as Skype and Outlook.com. Microsoft is adamant that it only cooperated with the authorities where legally required to do so

Okian Warrior writes with this news as reported by TechDirt: "The Washington Post revealed some of the code names for various NSA surveillance programs, including NUCLEON, MARINA and MAINWAY. Chris Soghoian has pointed out that a quick LinkedIn search for profiles with codenames like MARINA and NUCLEON happens to turn up profiles like this one which appear to reveal more codenames: 'Skilled in the use of several Intelligence tools and resources: ANCHORY, AMHS, NUCLEON, TRAFFICTHIEF, ARCMAP, SIGNAV, COASTLINE, DISHFIRE, FASTSCOPE, OCTAVE/CONTRAOCTAVE, PINWALE, UTT, WEBCANDID, MICHIGAN, PLUS, ASSOCIATION, MAINWAY, FASCIA, OCTSKYWARD, INTELINK, METRICS, BANYAN, MARINA.' TRAFFICTHIEF, eh? WEBCANDID? Hmm... Apparently, NSA employees don't realize that information they post online can be revealed."

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Based on a note on the website of SIDN [1], as SQL injection vulnerability was used to comprom ...(more)...

Apache CXF prior to 2.5.10, 2.6.7 and 2.7.4 - Denial of Service

Solaris Recommended Patch Cluster 6/19 Local root on x86

wiredmikey writes "Recently discovered security flaws in the Emergency Alerting System (EAS) which is widely used by TV and radio stations across the United States, has made the systems vulnerable to remote attack. The vulnerability stems from an SSH key that is hard-coded into DASDEC-I and DASDEC-II devices made by Monroe Electronics. Unless the default settings were altered during deployment, impacted systems are using a known key that could enable an attacker with full access if the systems are publicly faced or if they've already compromised the network. By exploiting the vulnerability, an attacker could disrupt a station's ability to transmit and/or could send out false emergency information. 'Earlier this year we were shown an example of an intrusion on the EAS when the Montana Television Network's regular programming was interrupted by news of a zombie apocalypse. Although there was no zombie apocalypse, it did highlight just how vulnerable the system is,' said Mike Davis, a principal research scientist at IOActive. The DHS issued an alert on the vulnerability, and IOActive, the firm that discovered the flaw, has published additional technical details (PDF) on the security issue."

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Hey guys,

Just released the new version of beatmycode (http://www.beatmycode.com/).

Now you can:

• Take the same test multiple times using the same language.
• Send tests to possible candidates or friends and see how they did.

Paul Ducklin digs into one of the cryptographic flaws recently found in Cryptocat, a secure messaging application. Don't worry if you aren't a statistician or a computer scientist...Duck doesn't get very mathematical, and has produced some very groovy images!

Adobe Reader X 10.1.4.38 - BMP/RLE Heap Corruption

andrewa writes "In an interview with Der Spiegel Snowden claims that the NSA, amongst other things, collaborated with Israel to write the Stuxnet virus. Not that this is news, as it has been suspected that it was a collaborative effort for some time. When asked about active major programs and how international partners help, Snowden says: 'The partners in the "Five Eyes" (behind which are hidden the secret services of the Americans, the British, the Australians, New Zealanders and Canadians -- ed.) sometimes go even further than the NSA people themselves. Take the Tempora program of the British intelligence GCHQ for instance. Tempora is the first "I save everything" approach ("Full take") in the intelligence world. It sucks in all data, no matter what it is, and which rights are violated by it. This buffered storage allows for subsequent monitoring; not a single bit escapes. Right now, the system is capable of saving three days’ worth of traffic, but that will be optimized. Three days may perhaps not sound like a lot, but it's not just about connection metadata. "Full take" means that the system saves everything. If you send a data packet and if makes its way through the UK, we will get it. If you download anything, and the server is in the UK, then we get it. And if the data about your sick daughter is processed through a London call center, then ... Oh, I think you have understood.'"

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Subsequent "LOL" and J/K" messages apparently didn't mitigate the alarm caused by then-18-year-old Justin Carter's post about blowing up a kindergarten.

An anonymous reader sends this quote from Ad Age: "[Rachel Law's] creation, called 'Vortex,' is a browser extension that's part game, part ad-targeting disrupter that helps people turn their user profiles and the browsing information into alternate fake identities that have nothing to do with reality. People who use the browser tool, which works with Firefox and Chrome, effectively confuse the technologies that categorize web audiences into likely running shoe buyers, in-market auto buyers, or moms interested in cooking and football. ... It's a bit like the ad blocker extensions of yore, except it scrambles information to trick ad targeters, all in service of an addictive game deemed 'Site Miner,' which allows players to fish for cookies visualized as sea creatures. Players can gobble up cookies Pac-Man style, creating a pool of profile information that has nothing to do with their actual web behavior. ... Vortex features a profile switcher that people can use and share to take on a new identity while browsing the web. 'It's a way of masking your identity across networks,' she said."

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An anonymous reader writes "The Guardian is running a story about a recent recruitment session held by the NSA and attended by students from the University of Wisconsin which had an unexpected outcome for the recruiters. 'Attending the session was Madiha R Tahir, a journalist studying a language course at the university. She asked the squirming recruiters a few uncomfortable questions about the activities of NSA: which countries the agency considers to be 'adversaries', and if being a good liar is a qualification for getting a job at the NSA.' Following her, others students started to put NSA employees under fire too. A recording of the session is available on Tahir's blog."

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An anonymous reader writes "Swedish startup Flattr, which offers an 'online tipjar' service, has announced it has added partial support for Bitcoin: you can now fund your account with the virtual currency. Furthermore, the company is considering adding the option to withdraw in Bitcoins too, but it first wants to gauge its community's desire for the feature on Twitter."

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hypnosec writes "Harlan – a declarative programming language that simplifies development of applications running on GPU has been released by a researcher at Indiana University. Erik Holk released his work publicly after working on it for two years. Harlan's syntax is based on Scheme – a dialect of LISP programming language. The language aims to help developers make productive and efficient use of GPUs by enabling them to carry out their actual work while it takes care of the routine GPU programming tasks. The language has been designed to support GPU programming and it works much closer to the hardware." Also worth a mention is Haskell's GPipe interface to programmable GPUs.

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At the sixth Sharkfest, Wireshark founder Gerald Combs looks back on 15 years of network analysis. His tool is now capable of handling 1,500 protocols and 120,000 field filters

Nyder sends this quote from TorrentFreak: "Swedish payment service provider Payson received an email stating that VPN services are no longer allowed to accept Visa and MasterCard payments due to a recent policy change. ... The new policy went into effect on Monday, leaving customers with a two-day window to find a solution. While the email remains vague about why this drastic decision was taken, in a telephone call Payson confirmed that it was complying with an urgent requirement from Visa and MasterCard to stop accepting payments for VPN services. 'It means that U.S. companies are forcing non-American companies not to allow people to protest their privacy and be anonymous, and thus the NSA can spy even more.'" Oddly, this comes alongside news that MasterCard has backed down on its financial blockade against WikiLeaks.

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Windows EPATHOBJ::pprFlattenRec Local Privilege Escalation

New submitter pbritt writes "Ben Lincoln was hooking up to Microsoft ActiveSync at work when he 'made an interesting discovery about the Android phone (a Motorola Droid X2) which [he] was using at the time: it was silently sending a considerable amount of sensitive information to Motorola, and to compound the problem, a great deal of it was over an unencrypted HTTP channel.' He found that photos, passwords, and even data about his home screen config were being sent regularly to Motorola's servers. He has screenshots showing much of the data transmission."

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A dream team of computer+law geeks have put together an appelant brief in Weev's defense. A major feature is that simply "unwanted" access doesn't mean "unauthorized" under the law: just because you don't like what I do doesn't necessarily make me a criminal.

For example, I use "AdBlock" to block advertisements from websites. Since websites earn money from advertisements, my free-riding with AdBlock is unwanted access. But is this conduct prohibited under the CFAA? I don't think so, but then, I wouldn't have thought Weev's (adding one to a URL) or Lori Drew's (violating ToS) conduct illegal either.

In the following two screenshots I demonstrate what AdBlock does. The first shows my access without ads on the site "Volokh.com". Notice the 'stop sign" icon near the URL which indicates how many items on the page have been blocked. Also notice my smiling face in the "comments" section -- I included that in the screen capture so that you know it's me, so that if "Volokh.com" chooses to prosecute me for this, the evidence of my guilt is clear. The second screenshot shows what the site looks like with AdBlock disabled.
This is the central question behind the Weev case. Is this conduct prohibited by the CFAA? Certainly, I'm a jerk, but the question is whether I should be a felon.

Fortigate Firewalls - CSRF Vulnerability

Java Applet ProviderSkeleton Insecure Invoke Method

Like all good tinkerers, [Andrew] decided to figure out how his wireless security system worked. Yes, it’s an exercise in reverse engineering, and one of the best we’ve seen to date.

After breaking out the handheld spectrum analyzer and TV tuner SDR, [Andrew] cracked open a few devices and had a gander at the circuit boards. The keypad, PIR sensor, and base station all used a TI radio chip – the CC11xx series – that uses SPI to communicate with a microcontroller.

Attaching a logic analyzer directly to the radio chip and reading the bits directly, [Andrew] started getting some very good, if hard to understand data. From the security system specs, he knew it used a ’20-bit code’, but the packets he was reading off the SPI bus were 48 bits long. The part of this code was probably the system’s address, but how exactly does the system read its sensors?

The easiest way to figure this out was to toggle a few of the sensors and look at the data being transmitted. With a good bit of reasoning, [Andrew] figured out how the alarm system’s code worked. This theory was tested by connecting one of the radios up to an Arduino and having his suspicions confirmed.

While [Andrew]‘s adventure in reverse engineering is only a benefit for people with this model of security system, it’s a wonderful insight into how to tear things apart and understand them.

Filed under: wireless hacks

After ten years for the 1.8.x branch and five years of 1.8.7, the Ruby 1.8 family is coming to its planned end as all support for it, including security fixes, ends

KernelMuncher writes "Australia's Royal Air Force has been left red-faced after a job ad asked applicants to solve a complex math problem that was revealed to be unsolvable. The service posted the puzzle in a bid to attract the country's best minds to its ranks. 'If you have what it takes to be an engineer in the Air Force call the number below,' it read, above a complicated formula which candidates had to crack. But there was a slight difficulty: The problem had typos and ended up not giving potential operatives the correct contact information."

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An anonymous reader writes "Recently published on the Command Five website is a technically detailed threat advisory (PDF) in relation to a recurring vulnerability in Atlassian Crowd. Tucked away inconspicuously at the end of this document in a section entitled 'Unpatched Vulnerabilities' is the real security bombshell: Atlassian's turnkey solution for enterprise single sign-on and secure user authentication contains an unpatched backdoor. The backdoor allows anyone to remotely take full control of a Crowd server and, according to Command Five, successful exploitation 'invariably' results in compromise of all application and user credentials as well as accessible data storage, configured directories (for example Active Directory), and dependent systems."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.