Renting Your Phone, Public-Key Explained, Toilet Identification, & AutoDiscover Bug – PSW #711

Privacy please: "Take the Stanford School of Medicine, where The Wall Street Journal reports that researchers are developing a scanner that can recognize the user’s unique “anal print,” or “distinctive features of their anoderm,” meaning the skin of the anal canal. To pull it off, they installed a camera inside a toilet bowl and used machine learning algorithms to match stool samples to specific, uh, users. The system could even calculate “the flow rate and volume of urine using computer vision as a uroflowmeter,” according to the researchers’ 2020 paper."

"Another option is to give the drive a hard tap, but that doesn't always work. Usually this means opening the box, pulling the hard drive, and tapping the drive gently. Personally, I wasn't feeling that patient. Instead, I intentionally dropped the 30 lbs desktop computer a few inches onto some cardboard. The cardboard protected the floor, while the drop gave it a sharp tap. Then I turned it on." - Too funny!

Here we are in 2021 still talking about secure update protocols for IoT devices: "The daemon connects to Circle and Netgear to obtain version information and updates to the circled daemon and its filtering database. Experts noticed that database updates from Netgear are unsigned and downloaded via Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), allowing the attacker to carry out a MitM attack on the device."

"15yrsago Rented AT&T home phone cost elderly woman $2,000 over 40 years" - https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/offbeat/2006-09-14-phone_x.htm

Turns out they use it just like other cyber criminals, maybe they are just more organized about it?

"Researchers at Guardara used their technology to find a zero-day vulnerability in NanoMQ, an open-source platform from EMQ that monitors IoT devices in real time, then acts as a “message broker” to deliver alerts that atypical activity has been detected. EMQ’s products are used to monitor the health of patients leaving a hospital, to detect fires, monitor car systems, in smartwatches, in smart-city applications and more."

Yikes: ""Because this feature provides the ability to persistently execute system software in the context of Windows, it becomes critical that WPBT-based solutions are as secure as possible and do not expose Windows users to exploitable conditions," the Windows maker notes in its documentation. "In particular, WPBT solutions must not include malware (i.e., malicious software or unwanted software installed without adequate user consent)." The vulnerability uncovered by the enterprise firmware security company is rooted in the fact that the WPBT mechanism can accept a signed binary with a revoked or an expired certificate to completely bypass the integrity check, thus permitting an attacker to sign a malicious binary with an already available expired certificate and run arbitrary code with kernel privileges when the device boots up."

This is a mistake, never negotiate with criminals and expect them to follow rules, even ones they created: "What's notable about the attack is the company's insistence that they are critical infrastructure and should therefore be spared as per BlackMatter's own policy. However, the operators behind BlackMatter disagree with this assessment and are continuing to pursue payment from the victim"

Okay, also, we don't need Linux to look like Windows (or macOS for that matter). We're not seeing Linux on the desktop for many reasons, the look and feel are way down on the list if it even makes the list at all. We'll see Linux on more desktops when: Apple pissed off more of its customer base, Microsoft moves all your apps to the cloud and confused their user base, the Linux kernel driver developers work more closely with most hardware manufacturers, and we settle on a standard, or a few, for making apps for Linux that cross distribution boundaries (like snap, but actually better than snap).

Somehow, I am more confused than ever, which way does the key turn again?

“While this approach was not particularly sophisticated, the novelty of using an ELF loader designed for the WSL environment gave the technique a detection rate of one or zero in Virus Total, depending on the sample, as of the time of this writing” and "Since most endpoint agents designed for Windows systems don’t ship with signatures to analyze ELF files, this attack vector could’ve allowed the threat actors to infect a target without any resistance." If you want to get busy with it: https://linuxhint.com/understanding_elf_file_format/

Okay, just because ChromeOS is based on Linux, and many schools use it, does not mean this is the year of the Linux desktop.

Bugs in the implementation of Microsoft Exchange's Autodiscover feature have leaked approximately 100,000 login names and passwords for Windows domains. Researchers say organizations are unknowingly leaking their employees' email passwords due to a design flaw in the widely used "Autodiscover" feature found in Microsoft Exchange that is designed to allow companies to host their own email servers and set up apps on phones or computers using only an employee's email address and password. According to researchers, while the majority of apps search for the configuration file on a company's domain, in instances where apps cannot find the configuration file, they will "fail up" somewhere else on the same domain, leaving users to deal with the problem.

Overall, average prices for credit cards fell this year by 27% compared with a similar study conducted eight months ago. For 2021, the price of a PayPal account rose by 194% compared with the study from eight months ago. Based on Comparitech's research, the average price of a PayPal account on the dark web is $196.50, with an average account balance of $2,133.61.

TTEC answers customer support calls on behalf of a large number of name-brand companies, like Bank of America, Best Buy, Credit Karma, Dish Network, Kaiser Permanente, USAA and Verizon.

Earlier this year Biden asked Russia to steer clear of 16 critical sectors of the U.S. Economy. Among those is “food and agriculture.” The BlackMatter group, which is behind the Iowa attack, is claiming that the volume of production from their victims doesn’t meet the definition of critical.

A researcher using the moniker "Watchful IP" says that he or she has uncovered an unauthenticated, zero-click remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability (CVE-2021-36260) impacting Hikvision's popular Internet of things (IoT) security camera that could be exploited by unauthenticated attackers to obtain full control over targeted devices and possibly internal networks.

Security researchers disclosed a new zero-day flaw in Apple’s macOS Finder that can allow attackers to run arbitrary commands on Macs.

Two-thirds of cloud security incidents could have been avoided if the configuration of apps, databases, and security policies were correct.

Today, the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) announced that Russia-based cryptocurrency Over The Counter (OTC) broker Suex was designated pursuant to Executive Order 13694 and added to the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons (SDN) List, thereby prohibiting Americans from doing business with the company.

A band of high-tech car thieves used the Bronx as a staging area to steal hundreds of vehicles from New Yorkers trapped indoors during the pandemic, using bootleg computer code to spoof car owners’ electronic keys, authorities said. State Attorney General Letitia James and the NYPD announced Tuesday they’d dismantled the ring and busted 10 suspects on a 303-count indictment.

Increase in Travel-Themed Phishing email and URLs. Unit 42 tracked increase which attempts to lure lockdown weary travelers as restrictions are easing.

More than 250 people seeking relocation to the UK - many of whom are in hiding - were mistakenly copied into an email from the Ministry of Defence, potentially compromising their email addresses. OPSEC is important.

A group of researchers with the Singapore University of Technology and Design have disclosed a family of 16 new vulnerabilities that affect commercial Bluetooth.