M1 Chip Flaw, Boeing 747 Hacking, Don’t Blame the Intern, & John Deere – PSW #696

This is interesting? - "48% of cybersecurity leaders use their work computer to log on to social network platforms. Further, 77% are willing to accept connection/friend requests from unknown individuals—especially on LinkedIn (63%)."

But what is the incentive? - "That’s why we’ve launched Security by Design on Google Play Academy to help developers identify, mitigate, and proactively protect against security threats. The Android ecosystem, including Google Play, has many built-in security features that help protect developers and users. The course Introduction to app security best practices takes these protections one step further by helping you take advantage of additional security features to build into your app."

This is awesome, and a simple little trick to lock down the container: "For example, try building RUN apt-get remove apt into the image after all of it’s essential packages have been installed. The packages will remain on the image, but the runtime scanner will be unable to query with apt list, therefore resulting in 0 vulnerabilities found." Of course, you should not be running as root anyhow. Ooooh and this: "If you know exactly where and how the runtime scanner binary gets injected, find a way to prevent it. For example in the microscanner case above, we know it will add the scanner binary at /microscanner . In this case, we can add a layer before the microscanner gets written that creates a symlink to /dev/null. Meaning at image build time the microscanner binary gets discarded instead of written to the filesystem."

"According to Hector Martin, this register can be read from by userland programs running at EL0, though he doesn’t know what the register is actually used for, if anything. However, userland programs aren’t supposed to be able to write into it, given that it’s a system register and supposedly off-limits to EL0 programs. But Martin discovered that userland code can write to just two individual bits inside this register – bits that are apparently otherwise unused and therefore might be considered unimportant or even irrelevant… …and those bits can then be read out from any other userland program."

"According to Jamf researchers Jamf researchers Jaron Bradley, Ferdous Saljooki, and Stuart Ashenbrenner, the malware controls legit applications that can capture screen records or screenshots without requiring user consent as soon as it infects the device."

". By publicizing its tool, Bitdefender alerted DarkSide to the lapse, which involved reusing the same digital keys to lock and unlock multiple victims. The next day, DarkSide declared that it had repaired the problem, and that “new companies have nothing to hope for.”"

Backpedaling: "“What happened at the congressional hearings where we attributed it to an intern was not appropriate, and was not what we are about or is not what we are about,” he said. “We have learned from that and I want to reset it here by saying that we are a very safe environment, and we want to attract and retain the best talent.”" and this: "“As we look back, they were doing very early [reconnaissance] activities in January of 2019,” he said."

Awesome write-up, down the rabbit hole we go: "Suddenly they had a private vulnerability disclosure program. It did not exist when we started. 24 hours later, I received the invitation to the program… I was the only researcher in the program The program was created that day Every single asset had no bounty The company does not allow public disclosure"

If you trust someone else's computers...

This was neat. Windows NT!