Security Briefing – 1-30-2018
Attacks targeting ATMs, called “jackpotting,” which have been seen in Europe and Asia for some time, have now reached the US, according to a recent alert from the US Secret Service obtained by Brian Krebs. It’s a two-step process, step 1, access vulnerable (think XP) ATM via PC, step infect malware and deploy all the cash! Yay!
A map showing paths taken by users of an exercise tracking app reveals potentially sensitive information about American and allied military personnel in places including Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. Military will probably ban fitbit-type things on bases soon.
Computer maker Lenovo has updated Fingerprint Manager Pro for Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 to address several insecure credential storage issues in the software, including the presence of a hardcoded password. The vulnerability has been addressed in Lenovo Fingerprint Manager Pro version 8.01.87.
Fallout from flawed fixes for the Meltdown and Spectre microprocessor firmware vulnerabilities continues as Microsoft released a second emergency patch this month for Windows: this time, to deactivate Intel’s buggy update for one of the Spectre issues. Microsoft late Friday issued an out-of-band update that disables the mitigation patch for the branch target injection flaw (CVE-2017-5715), aka Spectre variant 2.
Last week, on Tuesday morning, three armed men entered the office of an Ottawa Bitcoin exchange, Canadian Bitcoins, where they tied up four employees and demanded Bitcoins. Sorry, there’s no punchline. This is not a joke. The bank robbers did not expect clinking bagfuls of shiny gold Bitcoins like you see in the cryptocurrency icons. One was arrested.
Cisco informed customers on Monday that updates released for its Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) software patch a critical vulnerability that can be exploited to gain full control of devices or cause them to reload. The security hole, tracked as CVE-2018-0101 and assigned a CVSS score of 10, allows a remote and unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code or cause a denial-of-service (DoS) condition. The flaw exists in the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) VPN functionality of the ASA software. Disabling ‘web-vpn’ stops this. Or update the devices.