For 20 years a small two person firm in Ohio has licensed their TCP/IP software stack for use in embedded systems and IoT devices – from printers to medical devices. In June a collection of 19 vulnerabilities in this software was disclosed – affecting millions of devices from 50 different vendors. The collection of vulnerabilitiesRead more
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Amazon Web Services has revealed that in May 2020 it deflected the largest ever recorded DDoS attack. The previous largest Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack had been against GitHub in 2018 which was measured at 1.3 Terabits (Thousand Billion bits per second) – the attack against AWS in May was almost double at 2.3Read more
Security software provider LastPass has published their third Annual Global Password Security Report which reveals the extent of password reuse. LastPass has analysed the anonymised data and usage patterns of their enterprise password vault used by 47,000 organisations around the world. Some key data points from the report: For Businesses under 25 employees the averageRead more
VideoLAN has released a patch for their popular VLC Media player software to resolve a remote code execution vulnerability The VLC open source media player is widely used in domestic and enterprise environments for playback of all kinds of video files and digital signage applications. In a security bulletin, the developer state that: If successful, a maliciousRead more
The developers of the OpenSSH implementation of Secure Shell have announced their intention to drop support for SHA-1 in a ‘near future release.’ OpenSSH is used by millions of system administrators to securely access networked systems. OpenSSH supports various encryption algorithms and the decision to drop support for SHA-1 comes as recent research demonstrates itRead more
After analysing dozens of ransomware incidents over the last 4 years, researchers have identified their defining common characteristics – which can help security managers design targeted defences. Mandiant Intelligence have published a report that reveals the common attributes of ransomware incidents from around the world and across the industrial spectrum. The key findings are:Read more
Microsoft has released a patch to fix a remote code execution flaw in the SMB protocol affecting Windows 10 PC and their servers. SMB is used by Active Directory, for network file sharing and some printers. Microsoft have published a security advisory which details the scope of the flaw. The problem is the way the SMBv3Read more
Most Android devices receive security updates for only 2 years from release – yet can remain on sale for much longer than that. Which means it is possible to by a brand new Android phone today that is already too old to receive security updates. When considering which smartphones and tablets to deploy to staff,Read more
Kr00k is a serious Wi-Fi vulnerability which can trick a device to retransmit the last 32k of encrypted traffic with an encryption key of all zeros. The flaw affects devices using Wi-Fi chips from Broadcom and Cypress including Apple devices, Amazon Echo and Google Nexus devices. The bug can be triggered when a device disconnectsRead more
From September 2020 the security certificates used to enable HTTPS communications can only be valid for a maximum of 13 months, says Apple. Since the Apple Safari browser enjoys a 17% market share, this restriction will likely force the whole industry to adopt the same limit in certificate lifespan. The Certificate Authority Browser Forum (CABRead more
