Google today released Chrome 79 for Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome OS, Android, and iOS users. This release comes with security and bug fixes, but also with new features such as built-in support for the Password Checkup tool, real-time blacklisting of malicious sites via the Safe Browsing API, general availability of Predictive Phishing protections, a ban on loading HTTPS "mixed content," support for tab freezing, a new UI for the Chrome Sync profile section, and support for a back-forward caching mechanism. ZDNet has outlined each new feature in-depth.

Avast, the multibillion-dollar Czech security company, doesn't just make money from protecting its 400 million users' information. It also profits in part because of sales of users' Web browsing habits and has been doing so since at least 2013. From a report: That's led to some labelling its tools "spyware," the very thing Avast is supposed to be protecting users from. Both Mozilla and Opera were concerned enough to remove some Avast tools from their add-on stores earlier this month, though the anti-virus provider says it's working with Mozilla to get its products back online. But recently appointed chief executive Ondrej Vlcek tells Forbes there's no privacy scandal here. All that user information that it sells cannot be traced back to individual users, he asserts. Here's how it works, according to Vlcek: Avast users have their Web activity harvested by the company's browser extensions. But before it lands on Avast servers, the data is stripped of anything that might expose an individual's identity, such as a name in the URL, as when a Facebook user is logged in. All that data is analysed by Jumpshot, a company that's 65%-owned by Avast, before being sold on as "insights" to customers. Those customers might be investors or brand managers.

What do those customers get? Vlcek says Jumpshot, which was initially acquired in 2013, provides "insights on how cohorts of users on the internet use the web." For instance, it could show a percentage of visitors who went from one website to another. That could be useful to anyone monitoring an advertising campaign. "Typical customers would be, for example, investors, who would be interested in how online companies are doing in terms of their new campaigns," the new Avast chief explains. Say Amazon launches a new product -- Jumpshot could determine how much interest it's getting online.

Facebook said it would not weaken end-to-end encryption across its messaging apps, despite pressure from world governments, in a letter to US Attorney General Bill Barr and UK and Australian leaders. From a report: The letter, sent Monday, came in response to an October open letter from Barr, UK Home Secretary Priti Patel, Australian Minister for Home Affairs Peter Dutton, and then-acting US homeland security secretary Kevin McAleenan, which raised concerns that Facebook's continued implementation of end-to-end encryption on its WhatsApp and Messenger apps would prevent law enforcement agencies from finding illegal activity such as child sexual exploitation, terrorism, and election meddling. The US, UK, and Australian governments asked the social networking company to design a backdoor in its encryption protocols, or a separate way for law enforcement to gain access to user content. "It is simply impossible to create such a backdoor for one purpose and not expect others to try and open it," wrote WhatsApp head Will Cathcart and Messenger head Stan Chudnovsky in Facebook's response. "People's private messages would be less secure and the real winners would be anyone seeking to take advantage of that weakened security. That is not something we are prepared to do."

The city of Pensacola, Florida, has been dealing with a cyberattack since late Friday when a Saudi Air Force trainee killed three sailors at Pensacola Naval Air Station. Officials for the city are unsure whether the incidents are related. CNN reports: The city of Pensacola, Florida, said it has experienced a cyber "incident" and has disconnected several city services until the issue can be resolved. Mayor Grover Robinson told CNN affiliate WEAR the city has been dealing with a cyberattack since late Friday. The city said the issue has impacted city emails and phones, 311 customer service and online payments, including Pensacola Energy and Pensacola Sanitation Services. However, 911 and emergency services are not impacted. As for whether the cyberattack is related to the Friday shooting, Kaycee Lagarde, a spokeswoman for the mayor, said: "It's really too early to say one way or another. We are still assessing this. We understand that it's on people's mind but we just don't know at this point."

Lagarde said the incident was reported to the FBI and Homeland Security as a precaution.

WireGuard has now been committed to the mainline Linux kernel. "While there are still tests to be made and hoops to be jumped through, it should be released in the next major Linux kernel release, 5.6, in the first or second quarter of 2020," reports ZDNet. From the report: WireGuard has been in development for some time. It is a layer 3 secure VPN. Unlike its older rivals, which it's meant to replace, its code is much cleaner and simple. The result is a fast, easy-to-deploy VPN. While it started as a Linux project, WireGuard code is now cross-platform, and its code is now available on Windows, macOS, BSD, iOS, and Android. It took longer to arrive than many wished because WireGuard's principal designer, Jason Donenfeld, disliked Linux's built-in cryptographic subsystem on the grounds its application programming interface (API) was too complex and difficult. He suggested it be supplemented with a new cryptographic subsystem: His own Zinc library. Many developers didn't like this. They saw this as wasting time reinventing the cryptographic well.

But Donenfeld had an important ally. Torvalds wrote, "I'm 1000% with Jason on this. The crypto/ model is hard to use, inefficient, and completely pointless when you know what your cipher or hash algorithm is, and your CPU just does it well directly." In the end, Donenfeld compromised. "WireGuard will get ported to the existing crypto API. So it's probably better that we just fully embrace it, and afterward work evolutionarily to get Zinc into Linux piecemeal." That's exactly what happened. Some Zine elements have been imported into the legacy crypto code in the forthcoming Linux 5.5 kernel. This laid the foundation for WireGuard to finally ship in Linux early next year.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Verizon, which bought Yahoo in 2017, has suspended email addresses of archivists who are trying to preserve 20 years of content that will be deleted permanently in a few weeks. As Verizon announced in October, the company intends to wipe all content from Yahoo Groups. As of December 14, all previously posted content on the site will be permanently removed. The mass deletion includes files, polls, links, photos, folders, database, calendar, attachments, conversations, email updates, message digests, and message histories that was uploaded to Yahoo servers since pre-Google 1990s. Verizon planned to allow users to download their own data from the site's privacy dashboard, but apparently it has a problem with the work of The Archive Team who wants to save content to upload it to the non-profit Internet Archive, which runs the popular Wayback Machine site.

"Yahoo banned all the email addresses that the Archive Team volunteers had been using to join Yahoo Groups in order to download data," reported the Yahoo Groups Archive Team. "Verizon has also made it impossible for the Archive Team to continue using semi-automated scripts to join Yahoo Groups -- which means each group must be rejoined one by one, an impossible task (redo the work of the past four weeks over the next 10 days)."

China has ordered that all foreign computer equipment and software be removed from government offices and public institutions within three years, the Financial Times reports. hackingbear writes: The government directive is likely to be a blow to US multinational companies like HP, Dell and Microsoft and mirrors attempts by Washington to limit the use of Chinese technology, as the trade war between the countries turns into a tech cold war. The Trump administration banned US companies from doing business with Chinese Chinese telecommunications company Huawei earlier this year and in May, Google, Intel and Qualcomm announced they would freeze cooperation with Huawei. By excluding China from western know-how, the Trump administration has made it clear that the real battle is about which of the two economic superpowers has the technological edge for the next two decades. This is the first known public directive from Beijing setting specific targets limiting China's use of foreign technology, though it is part a wider move within China to increase its reliance on domestic technology.

The nonprofit Open Source Technology Improvement Fund connects open-source security projects with funding and logistical support. (Launched in 2015, the Illinois-based group includes on its advisory council representatives from DuckDuckGo and the OpenVPN Project.)

To raise more money, they're now planning to offer "hacker-themed swag" and apparel created with a state-of-the art direct-to-garment printer -- and they're using Kickstarter to help pay for that printer: With the equipment fully paid for, we will add a crucial revenue stream to our project so that we can get more of our crucial work funded. OSTIF is kicking-in half of the funding for the new equipment from our own donated funds from previous projects, and we are raising the other half through this KickStarter. We have carefully selected commercial-grade equipment, high quality materials, and gathered volunteers to work on the production of the shirts and wallets.
Pledges of $15 or more will be rewarded with an RFID-blocking wallet that blocks "drive-by" readers from scanning cards in your pocket, engraved with the message of your choice. And donors pledging $18 or more get to choose from their "excellent gallery" of t-shirts. Dozens of artists have contributed more than 40 specially-commissioned "hacker-themed" designs, including "Resist Surveillance" and "Linux is Communism" (riffing on a 2000 remark by Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer).

There's also shirts commemorating Edward Snowden (including one with an actual NSA document leaked by Edward Snowden) as well as a mock concert t-shirt for the "world tour" of the EternalBlue exploit listing locations struck after it was weaponized by the NSA. One t-shirt even riffs on the new millennial catchphrase "OK boomer" -- replacing it with the phrase "OK Facebook" using fake Cyrillic text.

And one t-shirt design shows an actual critical flaw found by the OSTIF while reviewing OpenVPN 2.4.0.

So far they have 11 backers, earning $790 of their $45,000 goal.

schwit1 shares a report from U.S. News & World Report: The Department of Homeland Security is dropping plans to propose a regulation requiring all travelers -- including U.S. citizens -- to have their photos taken and faces scanned by facial recognition technology when entering and exiting the country, according to multiple reports. The proposed rule was slated to be issued in July of next year and would be part of a larger effort by U.S. Customs and Border Protection to better track those who enter and exit the country. Privacy advocates pointed to a June data breach as one of the reasons that the agency should not collect the information. DHS last summer acknowledged a cyberattack against a contractor that exposed the photos and license plates of nearly 100,000 people traveling in and out of the country at a border crossing.

The FBI says owners of IoT (Internet of Things) devices should isolate this equipment on a separate WiFi network, different from the one they're using for their primary devices, such as laptops, desktops, or smartphones. From a report: "Your fridge and your laptop should not be on the same network," the FBI's Portland office said in a weekly tech advice column. "Keep your most private, sensitive data on a separate system from your other IoT devices," it added. The same advice -- to keep devices on a separate WiFi network or LAN -- has been shared in the past by multiple IT and security experts. The reasoning behind it is simple. By keeping all the IoT equipment on a separate network, any compromise of a "smart" device will not grant an attacker a direct route to a user's primary devices -- where most of their data is stored. Jumping across the two networks would require considerable effort from the attacker. However, placing primary devices and IoT devices on separate networks might not sound that easy for non-technical users. The simplest way is to use two routers. Further reading: Now Even the FBI is Warning About Your Smart TV's Security.

From a report: Keybase started off as co-founder and developer Max Krohn's "hobby project" -- a way for people to share PGP keys with a simple username-based lookup. Then Chris Coyne (who also was cofounder of OkCupid and SparkNotes) got involved and along came $10.8 million in funding from a group of investors led by Andreesen Horowitz. And then things got increasingly more complicated. Keybase aims to make public-key encryption accessible to everyone, for everything from messaging to file sharing to throwing a few crypto-coins someone's way. But because of that level of accessibility, Keybase faces a very OkCupid kind of problem: after drawing in people interested in easy public-key crypto-based communications and then drawing in blockchain lovers with its partnership with (and funding from) Stellar.org, Keybase has also drawn in spammers and scammers. And that has brought a host of alerts and messages that have made what was once a fairly clear communications channel into one clogged with unwanted alerts, messages, and other unpleasantry -- raising a chorus of complaints in Keybase's open chat channel. It turns out there's a reason spell check keeps wanting to tell me that Keybase should be spelled "debase."

Keybase's leadership is promising to do something to fix the spam problem -- or at least make it easier to report and block abusers. In a blog post, Krohn and Coynes wrote, "To be clear, the current spam volume isn't dire, YET. Keybase still works great. But we should act quickly." But the measures promised by Keybase won't completely eliminate the issue. And Keybase execs have no interest in getting involved with additional steps that they see as censorship. "Keybase is a private company and we do retain our rights to kick people out," the co-founders said in the blog post. "That hammer will not be used because someone is mostly disliked, as long as they're playing nicely on Keybase."

Researchers at Valimail found that only 5% of the largest voting counties in the U.S. are protected against email impersonation and phishing attacks. TechCrunch reports: Researchers at Valimail, which has a commercial stake in the email security space, looked at the largest three electoral districts in each U.S. state, and found only 10 out of 187 domains were protected with DMARC, an email security protocol that verifies the authenticity of a sender's email and rejects fraudulent or spoofed emails. DMARC, when enabled and properly enforced, rejects fake emails that hackers design to spoof a genuine email address by sending to spam or bouncing it from the target's inbox altogether. Hackers often use spoofed emails to try to trick victims into opening malicious links from people they know.

But the research found that although DMARC is enabled on many domains, it's not properly enforced, rendering its filtering efforts largely ineffective. The researchers said 66% of the district election-related domains had no DMARC entry at all, while 28% had either a valid DMARC entry but no enforcement, or an invalid DMARC entry altogether. [...] The worry is that attackers could use the lack of DMARC to impersonate legitimate email addresses to send targeted phishing or malware in order to gain a foothold on election networks or launch attacks, steal data or delete it altogether, a move that would potentially disrupt the democratic process.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: After more than two years since it's been used the last time, the Chinese government deployed an infamous DDoS tool named the "Great Cannon" to launch attacks against LIHKG, an online forum where Hong Kong residents are organizing anti-Beijing protests. [...] DDoS attacks with the Great Cannon have been rare, mainly because they tend to generate a lot of bad press for the Chinese government. But in a report published today, AT&T Cybersecurity says the tool has been deployed once again. This time, the Great Cannon's victim was LIHKG.com, an online platform where the organizers of the Hong Kong 2019 protests have been sharing information about the locations of daily demonstrations. The site is also a place where Hong Kong residents congregate to recant stories of Chinese police abuse and upload video evidence.

AT&T Cybersecurity says the first Great Cannon DDoS attacks targeted LIHKG on August 31, while the last one being recorded on November 27. AT&T Cybersecurity researcher Chris Doman said the August attacks used JavaScript code that was very similar to the one spotted in the 2017 attacks on Mingjingnews.com. According to LIHKG, the site received more than 1.5 billion requests per hour during the August attack, compared to the site's previous traffic record that was only a meager 6.5 million requests per hour.

The Microsoft threat research team scanned all Microsoft user accounts and found that 44 million users were employing usernames and passwords that leaked online following security breaches at other online services. From a report: The scan took place between January and March 2019. Microsoft said it scanned user accounts using a database of over three billion leaked credentials, which it obtained from multiple sources, such as law enforcement and public databases. The scan effectively helped Microsoft identify users who reused the same usernames and passwords across different online accounts. The 44 million total included Microsoft Services Accounts (regular user accounts), but also Azure AD accounts.

The admission comes from the author of the snippet itself, Andreas Lundblad, a Java developer at Palantir, and one of the highest-ranked contributors to StackOverflow, a Q&A website for programming-related topics. From a report: An academic paper [PDF] published in 2018 identified a code snippet Lundblad posted on the site as the most copied Java code taken from StackOverflow and then re-used in open source projects. The code snippet was provided as an answer to a StackOverflow question posted in September 2010. The code snippet printed byte counts (123,456,789 bytes) in a human-readable format, like 123.5 MB. Academics found that this code had been copied and embedded in more than 6,000 GitHub Java projects, more than any other StackOverflow Java snippet. In a blog post published last week, Lundblad said that the code had a flaw as it incorrectly converted byte counts into human-readable formats. Lundblad said he revisited the code after learning of the academic paper and its results. He looked at the code again and published a corrected version on his blog.

An anonymous reader writes: Security researchers found a new vulnerability allowing potential attackers to hijack VPN connections on affected *NIX devices and inject arbitrary data payloads into IPv4 and IPv6 TCP streams. They disclosed the security flaw tracked as CVE-2019-14899 to distros and the Linux kernel security team, as well as to others impacted such as Systemd, Google, Apple, OpenVPN, and WireGuard. The vulnerability is known to impact most Linux distributions and Unix-like operating systems including FreeBSD, OpenBSD, macOS, iOS, and Android. A currently incomplete list of vulnerable operating systems and the init systems they came with is available below, with more to be added once they are tested and found to be affected: Ubuntu 19.10 (systemd), Fedora (systemd), Debian 10.2 (systemd), Arch 2019.05 (systemd), Manjaro 18.1.1 (systemd), Devuan (sysV init), MX Linux 19 (Mepis+antiX), Void Linux (runit), Slackware 14.2 (rc.d), Deepin (rc.d), FreeBSD (rc.d), and OpenBSD (rc.d).

This security flaw "allows a network adjacent attacker to determine if another user is connected to a VPN, the virtual IP address they have been assigned by the VPN server, and whether or not there is an active connection to a given website," according to William J. Tolley, Beau Kujath, and Jedidiah R. Crandall, Breakpointing Bad researchers at University of New Mexico. "Additionally, we are able to determine the exact seq and ack numbers by counting encrypted packets and/or examining their size. This allows us to inject data into the TCP stream and hijack connections," the researchers said.

Security researchers at Check Point say the company has uncovered evidence that Chinese hackers managed to hijack $1 million in seed money during a wire transfer between a Chinese venture capital firm and an Israeli startup -- without either side realizing anything was wrong. From a report: The VC firm and the startup, whose names Check Point hasn't released, reached out to the security firm after the funds failed to arrive. Once Check Point dug into the details, it discovered a man in the middle attack that took a lot of planning and plenty of patience. After analyzing the server logs, emails, and the computers involved in correspondence between the companies, Check Point noticed some abnormalities. Some of the emails, analysts discovered, had been modified. Others hadn't even been written by either organization. After seeing the original email thread announcing the upcoming multi-million dollar seeding fund, the hacker took action. Instead of monitoring subsequent emails by creating an auto forwarding rule (standard practice in traditional attacks), the hacker started by creating two lookalike domains.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: IBM X-Force, the company's security unit, has published a report of a new form of "wiper" malware connected to threat groups in Iran and used in a destructive attack against companies in the Middle East. The sample was discovered in a response to an attack on what an IBM spokesperson described as "a new environment in the [Middle East] -- not in Saudi Arabia, but another regional rival of Iran." Dubbed ZeroCleare, the malware is "a likely collaboration between Iranian state-sponsored groups," according to a report by IBM X-Force researchers. The attacks were targeted against specific organizations and used brute-force password attacks to gain access to network resources. The initial phase of the attacks was launched from Amsterdam IP addresses owned by a group tied to what IBM refers to as the "ITG13 Group" -- also known as "Oilrig" and APT34. Another Iranian threat group may have used the same addresses to access accounts prior to the wiper campaign.

In addition to brute force attacks on network accounts, the attackers exploited a SharePoint vulnerability to drop web shells on a SharePoint server. These included China Chopper, Tunna, and another Active Server Pages-based webshell named "extensions.aspx," which "shared similarities with the ITG13 tool known as TWOFACE/SEASHARPEE," the IBM researchers reported. They also attempted to install TeamViewer remote access software and used a modified version of the Mimikatz credential-stealing tool -- obfuscated to hide its intent -- to steal more network credentials off the compromised servers. From there, they moved out across the network to spread the ZeroCleare malware. "While X-Force IRIS cannot attribute the activity observed during the destructive phase of the ZeroCleare campaign," the researchers noted, "we assess that high-level similarities with other Iranian threat actors, including the reliance on ASPX web shells and compromised VPN accounts, the link to ITG13 activity, and the attack aligning with Iranian objectives in the region, make it likely this attack was executed by one or more Iranian threat groups."

Apple's Activation Lock is an anti-theft feature built into iOS, watchOS, and macOS Catalina that prevents people from restoring your Apple devices without your permission. "With the release of macOS Catalina earlier this fall, any Mac that's equipped with Apple's new T2 security chip now comes with Activation Lock," writes iFixit's Craig Lloyd. What this means is that there will likely be thousands of perfectly good Macs being parted out or scrapped instead of being put into the hands of people who could really use them. From the report: Activation Lock was designed to prevent anyone else from using your device if it's ever lost or stolen, and it's built into the "Find My" service on iPhones, iPads, and other Apple devices. When you're getting rid of an old phone, you want to use Apple's Reset feature to wipe the phone clean, which also removes it from Find My iPhone and gets rid of the Activation Lock. But if you forget, and sell your old iPhone to a friend before you properly wipe it, the phone will just keep asking them for your Apple ID before they can set it up as a new phone. In other words, they won't be able to do much with it besides scrap it for parts.

That seems like a nice way to thwart tech thieves, but it also causes unnecessary chaos for recyclers and refurbishers who are wading through piles of locked devices they can't reuse. This reduces the supply of refurbished devices, making them more expensive -- oh, and it's an environmental nightmare. [...] The T2 security chip, however, erases any hope and makes it impossible to do anything on a Mac without the proper Apple ID credentials. Attempting any kind of hardware tinkering on a T2-enabled Mac activates a hardware lock, which can only be undone by connecting the device to Apple-authorized repair software. It's great for device security, but terrible for repair and refurbishment. While recyclers may not be dealing with as many locked Macs as locked iPhones (especially since Activation Lock on Macs is still very new, and there are specific software criteria that need to be met), it's only a matter of time before thousands upon thousands of perfectly working Macs are scrapped or shredded, for lack of an unknown password.

The Python security team removed two trojanized Python libraries from PyPI (Python Package Index) that were caught stealing SSH and GPG keys from the projects of infected developers. From a report: The two libraries were created by the same developer and mimicked other more popular libraries -- using a technique called typosquatting to register similarly-looking names. The first is "python3-dateutil," which imitated the popular "dateutil" library. The second is "jeIlyfish" (the first L is an I), which mimicked the "jellyfish" library. The two malicious clones were discovered on Sunday, December 1, by German software developer Lukas Martini. Both libraries were removed on the same day after Martini notified dateutil developers and the PyPI security team. While the python3-dateutil was created and uploaded on PyPI two days before, on November 29, the jeIlyfish library had been available for nearly a year, since December 11, 2018.