Category: This Week in Security

We finally have some answers about the Windows IPv6 vulnerability — and a Proof of Concept! The patch was a single change in the Windows TCP/IP driver’s Ipv6pProcessOptions(), now calling IppSendError() instead of IppSendErrorList(). That’s not very helpful on its own, which is why [Marcus Hutchins]’s analysis is so helpful here. And it’s not an […]
There have been some hilarious issues on mobile devices over the years. The HTC Dream had a hidden shell that was discovered when a phone rebooted after sending a text containing just the word “reboot”. iOS has gotten in on the fun from time to time, and this time it’s ""::. Type the double quotes, […]
You may have heard about a very large data breach, exposing the Social Security numbers of three billion individuals. Now hang on. Social Security numbers are a particularly American data point, and last time we checked there were quite a few Americans shy of even a half of a billion’s worth. As [Troy Hunt] points […]
You may have heard some scary news about RISC-V CPUs. There’s good news, and bad news, and the whole thing is a bit of a cautionary tale. GhostWrite is a devastating vulnerability in a pair of T-Head XuanTie RISC-V CPUs. There are also unexploitable crashes in another T-Head CPU and the QEMU soft core implementation. […]
It’s a bit of bitter irony, when a security product gets used maliciously, to pull off the exact attack it was designed to prevent. Enter Proofpoint, and the EchoSpoofing attack. Proofpoint offers an email security product, filtering spam and malicious incoming emails, and also handling SPF, DKIM, and DMARC headers on outgoing email. How does […]
An issue was discovered in libarchive through Google’s ClusterFuzz project. Libarchive is a compression and decompression library, widely used in utilities. The issue here is how the library recovers from a malformed archive. Hitting an invalid header causes the memory in use to be freed. The problem is that it’s possible for file processing to […]
Our own [Pat Whetman] wrote about a clever technique published by the University of Michigan, where lasers can be used to trigger a home assistant device. It’s an interesting hack, and you should go read it. Borrowing IP Addresses We’ve lived through several IPv4 exhaustion milestones, and the lack of available addresses is really beginning […]
A Japanese hotel chain uses robots for nearly everything. Check in, room access, and most importantly, bedside service. What could possibly go wrong with putting embedded Android devices, complete with mics and cameras, right in every hotel room? While I could imagine bedside robots ending badly in many ways, today we’re looking at the possibility […]
A government is going after a human rights activists in Morocco. It sounds familiar, but I don’t think Humphrey Bogart is running the gin joint this time around. Questionable Casablanca references aside, Amnesty International has reported another attack against human rights workers. In this case, a pair of Moroccan activists were targeted with what appears […]
A bug was recently fix in Signal that allowed a caller to force a call connection without any user interaction on the receiving side. We’ve seen this sort of problem in other chat applications, most recently the Zoom debacle. The Signal client uses the same function to connect an outgoing call as an incoming call. […]