Friday, August 30, 2013

TechEye

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iPhone still targeted by hackers

Posted: 30 Aug 2013 05:04 AM PDT

While the focus is on Android as the number one source of mobile malware, it appears that the iOS platform is getting hacked too.

According to a post on the Russian website Habrahabr.ru, there is a serious vulnerability in iOS6 which allows nefarious users to remotely crash apps on iOS 6, or destroy them.

The vulnerability is due to a bug in Apple's CoreText font rendering framework. It also effects OS X Mountain Lion.

What makes this dangerous is that it is not a difficult hack - simply exposing various iOS or OS X apps to one of several possible strings of text is enough to cause a crash.

Sending an SMS or an iMessage to an iPhone, iPad, iPod touch or Mac computer can crash Apple's Messages app repeatedly, breaking it.

Apple's browser is also vulnerable to the bug. Naming a wi-fi network with one of the strings of text can cause an error while an Apple device is scanning for networks.

What might worry some users is Apple has known about this bug for six months and has not done anything about it. It has changed the beta versions of iOS 7 and of OS X Mavericks but it seems that it is not going to bother helping out its older users.

After all if you want an incentive to force users to upgrade, what's better than refusing to update a previously buggy product? 

Snowden seriously hacked into NSA

Posted: 30 Aug 2013 04:36 AM PDT

The NSA has had to question ever hiring brilliant people ever again after the Edward Snowden incident, according to one senior spook.

Whistleblower Edward Snowden accessed some seriously secret national security documents by spoofing some of the agency's top spooks.

An NSA spokesperson said that every day the agency is learning how brilliant Snowden was and found more good reasons to only let dimmer people into its systems.

"You don't hire brilliant people for jobs like this. You hire smart people. Brilliant people get you in trouble," the agency told NBC

While Snowden was a Honolulu-based employee of Booz Allen Hamilton, his job gave him system administrator privileges on the NSA's intranet, NSAnet.

Apparently the NSA still doesn't know exactly what Snowden took, but a forensic investigation is starting to show how deep he got into their networks.

Part of the difficulty is that Snowden impersonated high-level officials on the network so well that it is difficult to tell if it was them, or him who was reading the agency's most sensitive stuff.

Currently all they can do is look for discrepancies between the real world actions of an NSA employee and the online activities linked to that person's computer user profile.

The NSA has found several cases where Snowden borrowed someone else's user profile to access documents.

Snowden had "top secret" security clearance, but it is clear he needed higher levels of clearance.

He did this by using his admin rights to create and modify user profiles for employees and contractors. He also had the ability to access NSAnet using those user profiles, meaning he could impersonate other users in order to access files. He borrowed the identities of users with higher level security clearances to grab sensitive documents.

His admin rights also let him download files from his computer to an external storage device. This is how he got 20,000 documents put onto thumb drives before leaving Hawaii for Hong Kong on 20 May. 

Dell denies pulling out of the PC business

Posted: 30 Aug 2013 03:56 AM PDT

Tinman Michael Dell has denied a rumour that he wants to take the company private so he can get out of making PCs and get into mobile phones and tablets instead.

It is truly bizarre because it is based on a fallacy that PCs are being replaced by tablets rather than the industry is in the doledrums because of the economy.  When Dell has tried to do anything mobile it has usually ended in tears.

Just to make sure that everyone got the message Dell stated in no uncertain terms at the Dell Solutions Summit in Beijing, China, that Dell will continue to build and sell PCs and the reason is that he sees large growth potential in emerging markets.

While the first quarter was a rough one for the PC industry, which as a whole saw sales decline, Dell saw market share gains. Dell pointed out that meant that things were taking off, and there are some areas where sales never slumped at all. China and India still want PCs.

Michael Dell concluded that there is no reason why the company shouldn't continue to invest in PCs and tablets. 

Nasdaq crash was caused by dodgy software

Posted: 30 Aug 2013 03:41 AM PDT

The shutting down of the Nasdaq exchange due to computer problems was not because of hackers, as many had suspected.

Apparently the three-hour halt in trading arose from shonky software.

The Nasdaq OMX Group released preliminary findings that provided the clearest official insight into what caused the trading halt, being called in trading circles as the "flash freeze".

Stock prices were little affected when the exchange reopened late in the afternoon of 22 August, but there were fears about the fragility of modern markets and their dependence technology.

There were some suggestions that they were potentially vulnerable to hackers.

In this situation, however, the software appears to have gone wrong after the Arca system of NYSE Euronext tried several times to connect with the Nasdaq system.

That generated a surge of data which led to a failure of Nasdaq's backup systems, forcing the market to go offline to fix the problem.

Robert Greifeld, Nasdaq's chief executive was quoted by the New York Times as saying that the code has a nefarious way of working and then not working.

Arca tried to connect more than 20 times to the system and as part of the procedure, it sent over a number of zero-dollar quotes. These are meant to make sure that no stale trades would be sent out to the market.

However, the data sent greatly exceeded the amount that Nasdaq's Securities Information Processor could handle. For some reason the Nasdaq's system was not designed to "throttle" the flood of information so much as break.

When Arca overwhelmed Nasdaq's SIP the system started using back-up servers. Then the administrators found a a flaw in the backup software and it was goodnight Vienna.

Nasdaq fixed the problem within half an hour of turning off the machines but it took additional time to contact other markets and regulators. 

Microsoft plans a stake in Foursquare

Posted: 30 Aug 2013 03:24 AM PDT

Software king of the world, Microsoft, is looking to buy itself a chunk of a social networking site.

According to RT News, Foursquare labs said that Vole is competing with American Express to take an equity stake in Foursquare.

Foursquare is slightly different from your usual social not-working site in that it is location-based primarily for mobiles.

Users "check in" at venues using a mobile website, text messaging or a device-specific application by selecting from a list of nearby venues that the application will locate, and can share relevant tips.

It has been around for a while and was launched in 2009 by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai.  It works on iOS, Symbian, Series 40, MeeGo, Android, WebOS, Windows Phone, Bada and BlackBerry, and PlayStation Vita.

What has been a breakthrough for the outfit is that it has worked out a way for advertisers to target users when they arrive in a particular area.

The big idea is to give Microsoft a bigger boot in the door of social media and mobile which are areas where it has little impact.

Foursquare has been getting closer to Microsoft by making an application for its Windows 8 operating system.

Mother and daughter jailed for internet dating scam

Posted: 30 Aug 2013 03:16 AM PDT

A mother and daughter used an internet dating scam to diddle $1.1 million from people who thought they were helping lonely soldiers.

According to the Huffington Post, Denver-based Karen Vasseur, 63, and daughter Tracy, 42, have been jailed for 27 years.

The court heard how they would pretend to be soldiers looking for love and duped 374 victims in the US and 40 other countries.

Colorado Attorney General John Suthers said that they not only broke people's bank accounts they "also broke hearts".

Both women pleaded guilty when arrested last year. Tracy faces 15 years while her mum was given a 12-year sentence.

However, Tracy Vasseur received an additional four years for trying to gain control of her children's inheritance, and for "attempting to influence a public servant".

They were not the only ones in the scam, but others who were involved have not been caught yet.

The tactic was to target potentially vulnerable people on popular social media sites or dating services. They would pretend that they were in the US military and short of cash.

When a victim offered to help they were instructed to transfer funds to the two women who posed as "military agents". One payment was for $59,000.

Most of the cash was spirited away to accomplices in Nigeria, but also to individuals in the UK, India, UAE and Ecuador. 
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