Security Now - 16k MP3

This week we check in on Texas, and on the Kazakhstan government's attempt to be their own CA. How did that work out for them? We note a troubling increase in attacks on the open source software supply chain. Google's announced plans to add data breach notification to Chrome. We look at a surprising Apple iOS v12.4 regression (whoops!) and at another Microsoft RDP component in need of updating. I update our listeners on the state of SQRL (another of its documents is completed) and on SQRL presentations past and future. I share some news from my ongoing file sync journey. We conclude by looking at some very interesting and promising moves as browser-based advertising matures from the ad hoc mess it has always been into a privacy-respecting Internet citizen.

This week we look at last week's monthly Patch Tuesday and its collision with third-party AV add-ons. We examine four years of Kaspersky unique web user tracking. We look again at Tavis Ormandy's discovery of the secret undocumented CTF protocol, wondering WTF is CTF? We note a new and devastating strategy in the ransomware battle which hit Texas last Friday. We also have the sad demise of Extended Validation certificates, the further removal of FTP support from web browsers, Google's campaign to still further reduce web certificate lifetimes, and Netflix's discovery of eight implementation flaws in the new HTTP/2 protocol. We'll cover a bit of miscellany, update on my file syncing journey, touch on SQRL news and SpinRite, then conclude with a look at the most recent attack on Bluetooth pairing negotiation which renders all Bluetooth associations vulnerable to a trivial attack.

This week, as expected, we look at some of the events and announcements from last week's Black Hat and DEF CON conference events. Microsoft and Apple have upped the ante for bug hunters, the Chaos Computer Club shreds a hotel's door lock security, a serious philosophical design flaw is revealed to be present in 40 signed device drivers, and Google vows to continue its Incognito-mode battle. We also have some SQRL news, some fun miscellany, and some interesting closing-the-loop feedback from our terrific listeners.

This week we look at a widespread false alarm about Facebook's planned subversion of end-to-end encryption, still more municipality ransomware attacks, more anti-encryption saber-rattling among the Five Eyes nations, Microsoft's discovery of Russian-backed IoT compromise for enterprise intrusion, Chrome 76's changes, this week's Black Hat and DEF CON conferences, a bit of miscellany, and closing the loop with our listeners. Then I want to share my recent experiences and findings about the challenge of synchronizing a working set of files between two locations, and the tools I settled on.

This week we close the chapter on the Marcus Hutchins saga. The U.S. Attorney General weighs in on "warrant-proof" data encryption. We look at what's popular with the underground, give an update on the latest four new ransomware attacks, examine three different attacks on exposed network attached storage (NAS) servers, cover a bit of miscellany, then take a close look at the news of the just-released-yesterday vulnerabilities in the two billion-strong VxWorks embedded OS.

This week we start off with something bad that we unfortunately saw coming. We then look at the changing security indication feedback in browsers; the challenge of keeping browsers compatible with important but non-standards-compliant websites; the failure and repair of incognito browsing mode; the possibility of a forthcoming "super incognito mode" for Firefox; a new super-fast TLS stack written in the Rust programming language; Microsoft's promised open source release of their voting machine election software; and yet another widely deployed, exposed, and exploitable Internet server. We have a quick bit of miscellany and some terrific SQRL news. Then we look at a recent and quite sobering report from Sophos about attacks on exposed RDP servers.

This week we cover a few bullet points from last Tuesday's monthly Windows patches, as well as some annoyance that the patches caused for Windows 7 users. We track some interesting ongoing ransomware news and look at the mixed blessing of fining companies for self-reporting breaches. We check out a survey of enterprise malware headaches, update some Mozilla/Firefox news, and examine yet another (and kind of obvious) way of exfiltrating information from a PC. We address a bit of errata, some miscellany, and closing-the-loop feedback with our listeners. We then conclude with a closer look at all the progress that's been occurring quietly with DNS encryption.

This week we stumble over a number of instances where technology appears to be colliding with the status quo. In any complex social system, individual and group interests are often complex and may be in opposition. So when new technology comes along to offer new capabilities, not everyone is going to be pleased. So this week we discuss some of the mounting tensions being created by connectivity, storage, and computation which are being combined to create many new capabilities. We look at the surprising backlash to Mozilla's privacy-enhancing DNS-over-HTTPS support, concerns over the use of facial recognition and automobile license plate scanners, and the future of satellite-based Internet services. We present some SQRL news and share a bunch of closing-the-loop feedback from our listeners. We then examine how a Ruby code repository was hacked and look at the U.K. GCHQ's proposal for adding "ghost" participants into private conversations.

This week we track further occurrences of ransomware in Florida and elsewhere. We check in on the state of the "going dark" anti-encryption debate. We look at a stunning new BlueKeep proof-of-concept demo produced by the guys at SophosLabs. We update some miscellany and present some closing-the-loop feedback from our terrific listeners. Then we examine the nature of the continuing problem of massive publicly exposed databases. In the third example of this just this week, we discover a prolific Chinese IoT manufacturer who is logging more than a million of their customers' devices into an exposed database of two-billion-plus records - which returns us to the dilemma we have with the utter lack of oversight and control over our own IoT devices, and the need to soberly reconsider what "IoT" stands for.

This week we check in on the state of last week's Linux TCP SACK kernel panic, examine two Mozilla zero-days which were being used against Coinbase and others, and note that performing a full factory reset of an IoT device may not be sufficient. We look at a very clever and elegant solution to OpenSSH key theft via Rowhammer attacks, share an update on the BlueKeep RDP vulnerability, and examine the cause of a three-hour widespread Internet outage yesterday morning. We discuss NASA's APT, which crawled in via a Raspberry Pi, the cost of paying versus not paying a ransomware ransom, and an update on Microsoft's Chromium-based Edge browser. Lastly, we handle a bit of listener feedback, then take a closer look at the state of the commercial bug bounty business.