Security Now - 16k MP3

This week we follow-up on last week's "News from the Darkside" with a surprising amount of happenings including the dark web's rejection of further ransomware. We look at blockchain analytics which are used to follow the dark money, the mixed signals now coming from the Darkside group and a live list of more than 2000 ransomware attacks during the past two years from the dark web. We cover last week's Patch Tuesday that you won't want to miss. We have a bit of miscellany, including the "Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force" which is actually a thing, and some closing-the-loop feedback from our listeners regarding last week's Andy Weir's "Hail Mary" book mention. Then we take a close look at the biggest non-Colonial Pipeline news from last week: a new round of research which revealed a range of attacks on WiFi's security.

This week we look at a new (and old) thread to our global DNS infrastructure. We ask what the heck Google is planning with two-step verification, and we examine a huge new problem with the Internet's majority of email servers. We look at the reality of Tor exit node insecurity, touch on a new sci-fi novel by a well-known author, share a bit of closing-the-loop feedback, then take a look at this latest very high-profile ransomware attack from a previously low-key attacker.

This week we touch on several topics surrounding ransomware. We look at the REvil attack that affected Apple, and at this past weekend's attack that brought down Southern California's world renown Scripps Health system. We catch up on the multinational takedown of the Emotet botnet and the FBI's contribution of more than 4 million compromised eMail addresses to Troy Hunt's Have I Been Pwned. We also look at the two notification services that Troy now offers. I take the opportunity to pound another well-deserved nail into QNAP, and take note of an update I just made to my favorite NNTP newsreader, Gravity. I also ran across a Dan Kaminsky anecdote that I had to share, then we have two pieces of closing the loop listener feedback before we conclude by taking a look at the just-announced task force to combat ransomware. Is there any hope that this scourge can be thwarted?

This week we begin by remembering Dan Kaminsky, who the world lost last Friday at the age of 42. We finally catch up with this month's Patch Tuesday, and look at a welcome maturation in Google's Project Zero vulnerability disclosure policy. We shine a light upon a new startup venture which, if successful, promises to dramatically improve the future of IoT security. We then look at some controversial security research, for which the researchers have apologized, and wonder whether any apology was due. We shine another light onto a new battle Cloudflare has chosen to wage against an abusive patent troll, to help Cloudflare with additional attention, and to let our listeners know that they can participate in a money-making hunt for prior art. And after a brief SpinRite progress report, we engage with the Internet mystery of the Autonomous System 8003.

This week we touch on the Vivaldi browser project's take on Google's FLoC. We look at Chrome's vulnerability-driven update to v89, and then its feature-embellished move to Chrome 90. We consider the surprising move by the FBI to remove web shells from U.S. Exchange Servers without their owners' knowledge or permission, and WordPress's consideration of FLoC Blocking. We also have an interesting-looking programmer's Humble Bundle, some interesting closing-the-loop feedback from our listeners, and a brief progress report on SpinRite. We finish by examining an important privacy guarantee provided by Google's FLoC implementation which prevents homogeneity attacks, where users presenting a common cohort ID also share a sensitive attribute.

This week we start with some needed revisiting of previous major topics. We look at an additional remote port that Chrome will soon be blocking, and the need to change server ports if you're using it. We look again at Google's forthcoming FLoC non-tracking technology and a new test page put up by the EFF. We revisit the PHP GIT server hack now that it's been fully understood. We look at Cisco's eyebrow-raising decision not to update some end-of-life routers having newly revealed critical vulnerabilities, and we also examine another instance of the industry's failure to patch for years. Then, we conclude with a blow-by-blow, or hack-by-hack, walkthrough of last week's quite revealing and somewhat chilling Pwn2Own competition.

This week, by popular demand, we examine the big cover-up at Ubiquiti. We look at the consequences of the personal data of 533-plus million Facebook users appearing on the 'Net and how to tell if you're represented there. We look at another water treatment plant break-in with a very different outcome. We look at a new move by Google to further lock down Android against abuses of its permissive-by-design API services. We look at the new threat to Call Of Duty cheaters, and yet another set of serious vulnerabilities in QNAP NAS devices. Then, after sharing a catchy tweet, we look into some new research from researchers in Ireland into the unwarranted chattiness of iOS and Android mobile phones.

This week we begin by checking in on the patching progress, or lack therefore, of the ProxyLogon Exchange Server mess. We examine a new Spectre vulnerability in Linux, a handful of high-severity flaws affecting OpenSSL, still more problems surfacing with SolarWinds code, an intriguing new offering from our friends at Cloudflare, and the encouraging recognition of the need for increasing vigilance of the security of increasingly prevalent networked APIs. I'll check in about my work on SpinRite. Then we're going to take a look at the often breathlessly reported hack of the PHP project's private Git server, and why I think that all the tech press got it all wrong.

This week we briefly, I promise, catch up with ProxyLogon news regarding Windows Defender and the Black Kingdom. We look at Firefox's next release which will be changing its Referer header policy for the better. We look at this week's most recent RCE disaster, a critical vulnerability in the open source MyBB forum software, and China's new CAID (China Anonymization ID). We then conclude by taking a good look at Google's plan to replace tracking with explicit recent browsing history profiling, which is probably the best way to understand FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts). And as a special bonus we almost certainly figure out why they named it something so awful.

This week we start off with a bunch of interesting browser-related news, zero-days, updates, a browser-based PoC for Spectre, a zero-script tracking kludge, and a look at last Tuesday's Patch Tuesday, what it fixed and what it broke. Some wonderful news for the Open Source community, a bit of miscellany, some listener feedback, and a screenshot of the final replacement for SpinRite's "Discovering System's Mass Storage Devices..." screen. Then we revisit the Microsoft Exchange disaster, another week downstream and still drowning.