Unsupervised Learning

I created a new tutorial on OWASP Amass, and just joined the team as a contributor as well. Tutorial Chinese hacking groups have been embedded deep inside multiple major US tech firms for many years, including Fujitsu, Tata, NTT, Dimension Data, and HPE. The first thing you should be thinking is where else they are today. More Amazon is getting heavier into the SIEM space (and perhaps others) with their new Amazon Security Hub offering. It takes in lots of event types from various AWS services, and surfaces what it thinks is most important. Of course, it doesn't do this for other product types, i.e., non-AWS stuff, but that could come eventually. More Amazon also launched a new service that lets you monitor your AWS VPC traffic. And lots of vendors are announcing their support for it. More

There's a Linux vulnerability called SACK Panic (among other names) that takes advantage of a kernel feature called Selective ACK. The feature lets systems tell the other side of the conversation how much data it's received, and it turns out it can be overflowed or fuzzed. The former creates a crash, and the latter creates a slowdown. You should patch. And if you have any services facing the internet running Linux, you should definitely patch. More A Florida city paid $600,000 in bitcoin to get access to their data back from a ransomware gang. More Magic Leap is suing former engineer Chi Xu for allegedly using his knowledge of the headset to make a version for China. More The average security group is running over 50 security tools. As my friend Jeremiah once said when looking at a Momentum Partners slide, "Are we secure yet?" More Amazon just got a patent for using delivery drones for surveillance. I don't necessarily think that means they'll use delivery drones for surveillance though. That's what a lot of the conspiracy theorists will say, though—just based on them getting a patent for using delivery drones for surveillance. Actually, the patent is a bit more benign than my joke implies. It's designed to monitor opted-in people's property, a lot like a house camera or a Ring device. Makes sense. But still. More

The US is supposedly ramping up attacks against Russian power grid through the use of new cyberattack powers granted by Trump. I am happy to hear of this, but it's an example of where we as outsiders can only know a tiny fragment of the story. But any signs that this administration sees Russia as a foe, and are treating it as such, are positive in my view. More Adobe is entering the deepfakes arena by showing off research tools designed to detect manipulated photos. More Target stores have been hit by major outages. More Many places are using very granular bluetooth beacon tracking to watch you move throughout their businesses, including airports, malls, subways, buses, gyms, hotels, festivals, museums, etc. More The US is going after ethnic Chinese researchers in the medical field, and specifically at cancer centers. I'm all for becoming more aggressive towards the Chinese government pilfering the world's intellectual property, but, um, cancer research is one thing that I think it's ok to spread widely. It's not like they're stealing the only copy of the research; they're just sharing it. Maybe I'm missing something, but if that something is just about who makes the profit, then I'm calling Meh. More Firewalling outbound DNS could save companies billions. Yes! I've been on about this for years. More

Some absolutely fascinating research has just come out on what percentages and types of vulnerabilities are actually exploited in the wild. It found that only 5.5% of vulnerabilities discovered between 2009 and 2018 were actually exploited, with most of those being issues with a CVSS score of 9 or 10. The best part of the paper, however, was a discussion of optimal patching strategies, where they looked at different methodologies for what to patch and measured them against each other based on coverage (no misses) and efficiency (not patching what you don't have to). Options included patching by CVSS, whether or not there are public exploits, by vulnerability tags, etc. The ML model performed best, but it seemed that patching the CVSS 7 and above was decent as well, and for more efficiency but less coverage—CVSS 9 and above. Super interesting paper. More The US is going to start requiring 5 years of social media account history from Visa applicants, as part of the filtering process. I'm genuinely curious as to how effective this is going to be. On the one hand, there will now be a market for creating and maintaining fake social media accounts that people can use for this purpose. But on the other hand, there will be many who don't want to go to that effort and either won't try to come, or will get caught in the filter. As with most things, the efficacy will come down to execution. More A team at Stanford has made it possible to edit video using a text editor. So, editing the things that were said by the actual subject, to say something else entirely, but having it seamlessly injected into the video so it looks completely natural. More

An argument that we should acknowledge grit as one of the most powerful causal factors in success, and figure out ways to bring its benefits to everyone.

A concise explanation of why software continues to have security and quality problems after decades of supposedly trying to address the problem.

The Deepfakes thing is already starting to have an impact, and it didn't even involve actual Deepfake (GAN ML) technology. A video was spread of Nancy Pelosi speaking very slowly and seeming to stumble over her words, which made her look quite bad. The video was virally shared throughout social media on the right. Problem is, it was intentionally slowed down to make her look old/stupid/crazy. What this shows us is that it's not the machine learning that makes Deepfakes dangerous; it's the willingness of a massive percentage of the US population to believe total garbage without an ounce of scrutiny. It doesn't matter if Deepfakes can be shown to be fake because people are matching evidence to their emotions, not the other way around. The vulnerability is our ignorance and cynicism, not a spoofing technology. And as I wrote about a couple of years ago, this will be used as a weapon against us. More Essay A real estate insurance website for First American Financial Corp was vulnerable to a simple IDOR (where you change the account number in the URL to get another account), and it evidently resulted in the exposure of hundreds of millions of insurance records that included extremely sensitive information. IDOR is still one of the most common and dangerous vulns a web app can have, and for companies like this they can be devastating. More The US Military is trying to learn how popular movements form and evolve, and to do so they're studying 350 billion social media messages. But it's a Bloomberg article, so maybe they're actually studying bullfrogs for clues about hypertension. More Moody's has downgraded Equifax's rating in some significant part due to its 2017 cyber breach. This is noteworthy because until now, breaches have largely been spackled over in terms of the major financial perspective and at the 6-24 month timescale. This is a positive indication that companies could actually start taking cybersecurity more seriously, and not just at the CISO and IT level, but from the boardroom down. More Advisories: TP-Link Routers

Trump has semi-banned the use of foreign telecom gear, which is really a direct shot at Huawei and China. more Baltimore’s IT systems are still being held hostage after 2 weeks. Of all the cities in the world that I could imagine this happening to, Baltimore is towards the top of the list. If you don’t have good schools or a good police force, I don’t expect you’d have good IT security hygiene either. more Crime is so bad in Mexico that people buy fake mobile phones so they can give them to muggers instead of their real one. I have to assume this is also happening in Brazil. more This is a stunning audio Deepfake of Joe Rogan doing a few different routines. It sounds exactly like him. Not a little bit. Exactly. Now imagine that for politicians and celebrities, where there is plenty of source material to train from. We’re about to move to a world where you can only trust authenticated voices and personalities, using sources and clients that are trusted to serve you their actual content. Expect a massive industry around serving authentic content and detecting fakes. more Salesforce had to disable access to millions while the fixed an access control issue that allowed open reading of tons of customer data. more

My Takeaways from the 2019 DBIR Report My Summary The Report The DOJ has unsealed the indictment against those who they believe hacked Anthem in 2015, and they are Chinese Nationals. They didn't reveal the suspected motive, however. But as I wrote about last year, I don't think we need an explanation. I think it's obvious. More An Airbnb host in China has been arrested for watching guests using a hidden camera. More The Mossad has released an interesting challenge in something of a spy CTF style. More Chinese scientists have created a small, portable camera system that uses LIDAR to resolve human features from up to 28 miles away. Good news—it also penetrates smog. More