Last Friday Github saw a supply chain attack hidden in a popular Github Action. To understand this, we have to quickly cover Continuous Integration (CI) and Github Actions. CI essentially means automatic builds of a project. Time to make a release? CI run. A commit was pushed? CI run. For some projects, even pull requests […]
We would be remiss if we didn’t address the X Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack that’s been happening this week. It seems like everyone is is trying to make political hay out of the DDoS, but we’re going to set that aside as much as possible and talk about the technical details. Elon made […]
The fine researchers at Google have released the juicy details on EntrySign, the AMD Zen microcode issue we first covered about a month ago. And to give away the punchline: cryptography is hard. It’s hard in lots of ways, but the AMD problem here is all about keeping track of the guarantees provided by cryptographic […]
It’s usually not a good sign when your downloaded theme contains obfuscated code. Yes, we’re talking about the very popular Material Theme for VSCode. This one has a bit of a convoluted history. One of the authors wanted to make some money from all those downloads. The original Material Theme was yanked from the VSCode […]
OpenSSH has a newly fixed pair of vulnerabilities, and while neither of them are lighting the Internet on fire, these are each fairly important. The central observation made by the Qualsys Threat Research Unit (TRU) was that OpenSSH contains a code paradigm that could easily contain a logic bug. It’s similar to Apple’s infamous goto […]
There’s a constant tension between governments looking for easier ways to catch criminals, companies looking to actually protect their users’ privacy, and individuals who just want their data to be truly private. The UK government has issued an order that threatens to drastically change this landscape, at least when it comes to Apple’s iCloud backups. […]
There are some interesting questions afoot, with the news that the Contec CMS8000 medical monitoring system has a backdoor. And this isn’t the normal debug port accidentally left in the firmware. The CISA PDF has all the details, and it’s weird. The device firmware attempts to mount an NFS share from an IP address owned […]
DeepSeek has captured the world’s attention this week, with an unexpected release of the more-open AI model from China, for a reported mere $5 million training cost. While there’s lots of buzz about DeepSeek, here we’re interested in security. And DeepSeek has made waves there, in the form of a ClickHouse database unintentionally opened to […]
Cisco’s ClamAV has a heap-based buffer overflow in its OLE2 file scanning. That’s a big deal, because ClamAV is used to scan file attachments on incoming emails. All it takes to trigger the vulnerability is to send a malicious file through an email system that uses ClamAV. The exact vulnerability is a string termination check […]
Up first, go check your machines for the rsync version, and your servers for an exposed rsync instance. While there are some security fixes for clients in release 3.4.0, the buffer overflow in the server-side rsync daemon is the definite standout. The disclosure text includes this bit of nightmare fuel: “an attacker only requires anonymous […]