Category: This Week in Security

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. […]
So first off this week is something of a mystery. Microsoft released an out-of-cycle patch for Internet Explorer. The exploitability assessment from Microsoft indicates that this bug is under active exploitation, but not many details are available. Let’s take a look at what information has been released, and see what we can learn. A remote […]
VoIP cameras, DVRs, and other devices running the Web Services Dynamic Discovery (WSDD) protocol are being used in a new type of DDoS attack. This isn’t the first time a zeroconf service has been hijacked as part of a DDoS, as UPnP has also been abused in similar ways. Feel like alphabet soup yet? A […]
We often think of SIM cards as simple data storage devices, but in reality a SIM card is a miniature Universal integrated circuit card, or smart card. Subscriber data isn’t a simple text string, but a program running on the smart cards tiny processor, acting as a hardware cryptographic token. The presence of this tiny […]
In a very mobile-centric installment, we’re starting with the story of a long-running iPhone exploitation campaign. It’s being reported that this campaign was being run by the Chinese government. Attack attribution is decidedly non-trivial, so let’s be cautious and say that these attacks were probably Chinese operations. In any case, Google’s Project Zero was the […]
We’ll start with more Black Hat/DEFCON news. [Meh Chang] and [Orange Tsai] from Devcore took a look at Fortinet and Pulse Secure devices, and found multiple vulnerabilities. (PDF Slides) They are publishing summaries for that research, and the summary of the Fortinet research is now available. It’s… not great. There are multiple pre-authentication vulnerabilities, as […]
Blackhat and DEF CON both just wrapped, and Patch Tuesday was this week. We have a bunch of stories to cover today. First some light-hearted shenanigans. Obviously inspired by Little Bobby Tables, Droogie applied for the vanity plate “NULL”. A year went by without any problems, but soon enough it was time to renew his […]
This has been an interesting week. First off, security researchers at Armis discovered a set of serious vulnerabilities in the vxWorks Real Time Operating System (RTOS). Released under a name that sounds like the title of a western or caper movie, Urgent/11. Not familiar with vxWorks? It’s a toss-up as to whether vxWorks or Linux […]