During his Open Source Summit Europe keynote speech, Greg Kroah-Hartman, the stable Linux kernel maintainer, said Intel CPU's security problems "are going to be with us for a very long time" and are "not going away." He added: "They're all CPU bugs, in some ways they're all the same problem," but each has to be solved in its own way. "MDS, RDDL, Fallout, Zombieland: They're all variants of the same basic problem." ZDNet reports: And they're all potentially deadly for your security: "RIDL and Zombieload, for example, can steal data across applications, virtual machines, even secure enclaves. The last is really funny, because [Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX)] is what supposed to be secure inside Intel ships" [but, it turns out it's] really porous. You can see right through this thing." To fix each problem as it pops up, you must patch both your Linux kernel and your CPU's BIOS and microcode. This is not a Linux problem; any operating system faces the same problem.

OpenBSD, a BSD Unix devoted to security first and foremost, Kroah-Hartman freely admits was the first to come up with what's currently the best answer for this class of security holes: Turn Intel's simultaneous multithreading (SMT) off and deal with the performance hit. Linux has adopted this method. But it's not enough. You must secure the operating system as each new way to exploit hyper-threading appears. For Linux, that means flushing the CPU buffers every time there's a context switch (e.g. when the CPU stops running one VM and starts another). You can probably guess what the trouble is. Each buffer flush takes a lot of time, and the more VMs, containers, whatever, you're running, the more time you lose. "The bad part of this is that you now must choose: Performance or security. And that is not a good option," Kroah-Hartman said. He added: "If you are not using a supported Linux distribution kernel or a stable/long term kernel, you have an insecure system."

Microsoft said in a blog post today that it has tracked "significant" cyberattacks coming from a group it calls "Strontium" or "Fancy Bear," targeting anti-doping authorities and global sporting organizations. Reuters reports: The group, also called APT28, has been linked to the Russian government, Microsoft said in a blog post. At least 16 national and international sporting and anti-doping organizations across three continents were targeted in the attacks which began on Sept. 16, according to the company. The company said some of these attacks had been successful, but the majority had not. Microsoft has notified all customers targeted in these attacks.

Strontium, one of the world's oldest cyber espionage groups, has also been called Sofancy and Pawn Storm by a range of security firms and government officials. Security firm CrowdStrike has said the group may be associated with the Russian military intelligence agency GRU. Microsoft said Strontium reportedly released medical records and emails taken from sporting organizations and anti-doping officials in 2016 and 2018, resulting in an indictment in a federal court in the United States in 2018. Strontium's methods include spear-phishing, password spray, exploiting internet-connected devices and the use of both open-source and custom malware, it added.

When it comes to firewalls, most system administrators prefer to use a graphical user interface (GUI) rather than a command-line interface (CLI), a new academic study published over the summer has revealed. From a report: Despite the many preconceptions that system administrators are almost all ardent CLI users, firewall GUIs won by a pretty large margin in a survey compiling results from more than 300 respondents. Almost 60% of sysadmins said they "preferred" GUIs over CLIs, and 70% said they "used" GUIs on a daily basis. The survey showed that while CLIs might be popular in some circles, they are not the most ideal interface for managing a complex security software suite like a firewall. The survey, which included more than 15 questions that also sought to discover the reasoning behind each answer, revealed that "usability" was the main reason why system administrators tended to prefer and use firewalls more than CLIs.

Microsoft officials said the company's Azure Sphere microcontroller (MCU) and associated cloud security service will be generally available in February 2020. From a report: Microsoft also introduced new branding today for the ThreadX RTOS technology it acquired when it bought Express Logic in April 2019. Going forward, this product will be known as Azure RTOS. ThreadX is one of the most-deployed real-time operating systems in the world. Today, Microsoft said that Renesesas, a major microcontroller manufacturer, announced that Azure RTOS will be be broadly available across its products, including the Synergy and RA MCU families. Microsoft has been working for at least a couple of years to secure low-cost Internet-connected devices. Microsoft Research's "Project Sopris" was all about creating a highly secure microcontroller. That project morphed into Azure Sphere, which Microsoft announced in April 2018. The first Azure Sphere chip was the MediaTek MT3620, which included an onboard security subsystem MIcrosoft christened "Pluton." The Azure Sphere OS included a Microsoft-developed custom Linux kernel, plus secured application containers.

An anonymous reader quotes the CEO of Doist: Study after study after study into remote work has made one thing clear: Remote workers are more productive than their office-bound counterparts. What's not entirely clear is why. Yes, people gain back time (and sanity) by avoiding rush hour commutes. They avoid the distractions of the office. They regain a sense of control over their workdays. They have more time to dedicate to family, friends, and hobbies. But apart from the commute, all of those benefits aren't necessarily the result of location independence, but rather the byproduct of asynchronous communication -- giving employees control over when they communicate with their teammates.

Many company leaders are asking themselves if they should embrace remote work. Very few are asking themselves if they should embrace a more asynchronous workstyle. While I think remote work is the future, I believe that asynchronous communication (or async, for short) is an even more important factor in team productivity, whether your team is remote or not. Not only does async produce the best work results, but it also lets people do more meaningful work and live freer, more fulfilled lives.
Asynchronous communication helps workers avoid "collaborative overload" and the distractions of near-constant communication, the article argues. "We know that we are challenging the status quo and that calm, asynchronous communication isn't the current norm.

"It's going to take a paradigm shift to change things."

nickwinlund77 shares this story from ZDNet: A recently patched security flaw in modern versions of the PHP programming language is being exploited in the wild to take over servers, ZDNet has learned from threat intelligence firm Bad Packets. The vulnerability is a remote code execution (RCE) in PHP 7, the newer branch of PHP, the most common programming language used to build websites.

The issue, tracked as CVE-2019-11043, lets attackers run commands on servers just by accessing a specially-crafted URL. Exploiting the bug is trivial, and public proof-of-concept exploit code has been published on GitHub earlier this week. Only NGINX servers with PHP-FPM enabled are vulnerable. PHP-FPM, or FastCGI Process Manager, is an alternative PHP FastCGI implementation with some additional features, and according to reports, a common server configuration option.

Sparrowvsrevolution writes: In a lengthy article, Wired tells a newly detailed narrative of the cyberattack on the 2018 Winter Olympic games, which hit the Olympics network during the opening ceremony. The piece details how the malware used in that attack was designed to incorporate multiple sophisticated false flags, and how forensic analysts overcame those red herrings to eventually trace the attack to a specific unit of Russia's GRU military intelligence agency.
It's a good read. Wired calls it "perhaps the most deceptive hacking operation in history," but they finally get an answer from a 28-year-old former anarchist punk turned security researcher at the Reston, Virginia, office of the security and private intelligence firm FireEye. The tell-tale clue: the malware used "a certain common set of hacking tools called PowerShell Empire." He soon deduced that the source of that signal in the noise was a common tool used to create each one of the booby-trapped documents. It was an open source program, easily found online, called Malicious Macro Generator. Michael Matonis speculated that the hackers had chosen the program in order to blend in with a crowd of other malware authors, but it had ultimately had the opposite effect, setting them apart as a distinct set... When he looked at the command and control servers that the malware connected back to -- the strings that would control the puppetry of any successful infections -- all but a few of the IP addresses of those machines overlapped too...

Matonis began painstakingly checking every IP address his hackers had used as a command and control server in their campaign of malicious Word document phishing; he wanted to see what domains those IP addresses had hosted... At the end of his long chain of internet-address connections, Matonis had found a fingerprint that linked the Olympics attackers back to a hacking operation that directly targeted the 2016 US election. Not only had he solved the whodunit of Olympic Destroyer's origin, he'd gone further, showing that the culprit had been implicated in the most notorious hacking campaign ever to hit the American political system.

An anonymous reader quotes Bloomberg News: A Russia-linked group is believed to have utilized Iranian tools to conduct cyber attacks against dozens of countries, in an apparent effort to mask their identities, according to joint advisories by the U.S. and the U.K.

The group, known as Turla, used tools from suspected Iran-based hacking groups and deployed them against old and new targets. In order to acquire the tools, Turla "comprised the suspected Iran-based hacking groups themselves," according to the U.S. National Security Agency and the U.K.'s National Cyber Security Centre, which released the advisories on Monday. The original owners of the tools "were almost certainly not aware of, or complicit with, Turla's use of their implants," the agencies said. The attacks, against more than 35 countries, would appear to the victims as coming from Iran.

SmartAboutThings tipped us off to an interesting bug reported by ZDNet Thursday: For the fourth time in three months, a Symantec security product is crashing user apps, and this time it's the latest Chrome release, v78, which rolled out earlier this week, on Tuesday, October 22. According to reports on Reddit [1, 2] the Google support forums [1, 2], and in comments on the official Google Chrome blog, Symantec Endpoint Protection 14 is crashing Chrome 78 instances with an "Aw, Snap! Something went wrong while displaying this webpage" error... The errors have been plaguing users for the past two days, with the vast majority of reports coming from enterprise environments, where SEP installs are more prevalent....

According to the antivirus maker, the issues are only affecting SEP 14 users on Windows 10 RS1, Windows Server 2012, and Windows Server 2016 operating systems. Symantec users on other OS versions can fix this by updating to the latest SEP 14.2 release. Users of Microsoft Edge Chromium are also impacted, but the Chromium-based Edge version has not been officially released; hence there are almost no users impacted by this issue in the real world...

Symantec blamed the issue on Microsoft's Code Integrity security feature, which Google uses to protect the Chrome browser process. As a temporary solution, Symantec recommends that users exclude Chrome from receiving protection from their antivirus product, or modify their Chrome clients, so the browser starts without Code Integrity protections. However, this opens the browser to various attacks and is not recommended as long as users can simply use another browser until this is fixed.
ZDNet adds that the issue "should have not surprised Symantec staff, who received early warnings about this more than three months ago, according to a bug report filed in early August while Chrome 78 was still in testing in the Canary channel."

A hacker group going by the name of Shadow Kill Hackers has infected the city of Johannesburg's internal network with ransomware and is holding South Africa's largest city for ransom. From a report: The hackers are demanding 4 bitcoins to be paid by next Monday, October 28, 5 pm, local time, or they claim they'll upload the city's data on the internet. "Your servers and data have been hacked," the ransom note reads, according to reports from local media [1, 2, 3, 4] and a screenshot posted on Twitter. "We have dozens of back doors inside your city. We have control of everything in your city. We also compromised all passwords and sensitive data such as finance and personal population information," the note said. Authorities responded by shutting down all the IT infrastructure, such as websites, payment portals, and other e-services. A breach was later confirmed via the city's official Twitter account. This is the second time in the past four months that the city's network was hit by ransomware. In July, hackers installed ransomware on the city power provider's network, leaving some residents without electricity for days.

New submitter arkamax writes: A security researcher based in Russia discovered that her research (article in Russian, Google Translate) into API for a new automatic pet feeder manufactured by Xiaomi resulted in obtaining full control of approximately 10,950 of similar devices across the world. She found ways to access logs of those pet feeders, change their settings, invoke manual feeding or completely delete all feeding schedules. She mentioned that the feeder is based on a widely known ESP8266 embedded board, adding that "apparently one could send a remote request to the feeder to download a firmware update. An evil person could use that to reboot those devices and brick them afterwards. The only way to fix it would involve mechanical disassembly and a manual firmware update that requires connecting directly to the board. Explain THAT to poor kitties and puppies who eagerly wait for their owners to come back from a two-week vacation." She then added that the "whole architecture is one epic fail and it's hard to imagine a speedy fix." The researcher chose to stick to the responsible disclosure guidelines and declined to disclose any details until the issues are fixed. Since then, the manufacturer was reported to have fixed a few critical issues but the bulk of the vulnerability still remains. Looks like S in "IoT" remains to stand for Security.

sandbagger writes: The BBC has made its international news website available via the Tor network, in a bid to thwart censorship attempts. The browser can obscure who is using it and what data is being accessed, which can help people avoid government surveillance and censorship. Countries including China, Iran and Vietnam are among those who have tried to block access to the BBC News website or programs. Instead of visiting bbc.co.uk/news or bbc.com/news, users of the Tor browser can visit the new bbcnewsv2vjtpsuy.onion web address. Clicking this web address will not work in a regular web browser.

For the past week, a group of criminals has been launching DDoS attacks against companies in the financial sector and demanding ransom payments while posing as "Fancy Bear," the infamous hacking group associated with the Russian government, known for hacking the White House in 2014 and the DNC in 2016. From a report: The attacks, brought to ZDNet's attention by one of our readers, were confirmed today by Link11 and Radware, two companies that provide DDoS mitigation services and have documented similar "ransom denial-of-service" (RDOS) attacks in the past years. In an interview with ZDNet, Daniel Smith, Radware ERT researcher, said the attacks started last week and targeted the financial vertical. Smith said "the group is launching large scale, multi-vector demo DDoS attacks when sending victims the ransom letter."

A Link11 spokesperson said the same thing, adding that the purpose of these demo attacks is to serve as an initial warning and intimidation factor, to convince victims into paying the ransom demand. According to a copy of the ransom letter, the group is sending victims, the fake Fancy Bear group is asking for payments of 2 bitcoin, which is about $15,000 at today's exchange rate.

An open database exposing records containing the sensitive data of hotel customers as well as US military personnel and officials has been disclosed by researchers. ZDNet reports: On Monday, vpnMentor's cybersecurity team, led by Noam Rotem and Ran Locar, said the database belonged to Autoclerk, a service owned by Best Western Hotels and Resorts group. Autoclerk is a reservations management system used by resorts to manage web bookings, revenue, loyalty programs, guest profiles, and payment processing.

In a report shared with ZDNet, the researchers said the open Elasticsearch database was discovered through vpnMentor's web mapping project. It was possible to access the database, given it had no encryption or security barriers whatsoever, and perform searches to examine the records contained within. The team says that "thousands" of individuals were impacted, although due to ethical reasons it was not possible to examine every record in the leaking database to come up with a specific number. Hundreds of thousands of booking reservations for guests were available to view and data including full names, dates of birth, home addresses, phone numbers, dates and travel costs, some check-in times and room numbers, and masked credit card details were also exposed. Some of the records were logs for U.S. Army generals visiting Russia and Israel, the report says. In total, the AWS-hosted database contained over 179GB of data.

Internet giant Comcast is lobbying U.S. lawmakers against plans to encrypt web traffic that would make it harder for internet service providers (ISPs) to determine your browsing history, Motherboard reported Wednesday, citing a lobbying presentation. From the report: The plan, which Google intends to implement soon, would enforce the encryption of DNS data made using Chrome, meaning the sites you visit. Privacy activists have praised Google's move. But ISPs are pushing back as part of a wider lobbying effort against encrypted DNS, according to the presentation. Technologists and activists say this encryption would make it harder for ISPs to leverage data for things such as targeted advertising, as well as block some forms of censorship by authoritarian regimes.

Mozilla, which makes Firefox, is also planning a version of this encryption. "The slides overall are extremely misleading and inaccurate, and frankly I would be somewhat embarrassed if my team had provided that slide deck to policy makers," Marshall Erwin, senior director of trust and safety at Mozilla, told Motherboard in a phone call after reviewing sections of the slide deck. "We are trying to essentially shift the power to collect and monetize peoples' data away from ISPs and providing users with control and a set of default protections," he added, regarding Mozilla's changes.

Japanese hotel chain HIS Group has apologized for ignoring warnings that its in-room robots were hackable to allow pervs to remotely view video footage from the devices. The Register reports: The Henn na Hotel is staffed by robots: guests can be checked in by humanoid or dinosaur reception bots before proceeding to their room. Facial recognition tech will let customers into their room and then a bedside robot will assist with other requirements. However several weeks ago a security researcher revealed on Twitter that he had warned HIS Group in July about the bed-bots being easily accessible, noting they sported "unsigned code" allowing a user to tap an NFC tag to the back of robot's head and allow access via the streaming app of their choice.

Having heard nothing, the researcher made the hack public on October 13. The vulnerability allows guests to gain access to cameras and microphones in the robot remotely so they could watch and listen to anyone in the room in the future. The hotel is one of a chain of 10 in Japan which use a variety of robots instead of meat-based staff. So far the reference is only to Tapia robots at one hotel, although it is not clear if the rest of the chain uses different devices. The HIS Group tweeted: "We apologize for any uneasiness caused," according to the Tokyo Reporter. The paper was told that the company had decided the risks of unauthorized access were low, however, the robots have now been updated.

The Pixel 4 is shipping with a face-unlock security issue that's not expected to get fixed for quite some time. "Unlike the iPhone's FaceID (and Google's earlier face-unlock system on Android 4.1), the Pixel 4's face unlock doesn't look for the user's eyes, so the phone could be pointed at a sleeping or unconscious owner and unlocked without their consent," reports Ars Technica. Google said in a statement that a fix requiring a user's eyes to be looking at the device "will be delivered in a software update in the coming months." Ars Technica reports: The Pixel 4 was announced last week, and instead of including a fingerprint reader like most Android phones do, the Pixel 4 features Google's newly developed face-unlock system as the only biometric option. Google is clearly chasing the iPhone here, and the Pixel 4's face unlock works just like Apple's Face ID system: an IR dot projector blasts a grid of invisible dots onto the user's face, and a camera (a pair of cameras, in the case of the Pixel 4) reads the user's face in 3D. As part of the many pre-release Pixel 4 leaks, screenshots of pre-release builds of the Pixel 4's software showed an option to "require eyes to be open." So we know Google hasn't been completely blindsided by this problem; the fix just wasn't ready in time for launch.

An anonymous reader writes: Czech cyber-security software maker Avast disclosed today a security breach that impacted its internal network. In a statement published today, the company said it believed the attack's purpose was to insert malware into the CCleaner software, similar to the infamous CCleaner 2017 incident. Avast said the breach occurred because the attacker compromised an employee's VPN credentials, gaining access to an account that was not protected using a multi-factor authentication solution. The intrusion was detected on September 23, but Avast said it found evidence of the attacker targeting its infrastructure going as far back as May 14, this year. The identity of the attacker is currently unknown, but the company said hackers didn't manage to modify CCleaner downloads this time around.

Microsoft today announced a new initiative to combat threats specifically targeted at the firmware level and data stored in memory: Secured-core PCs. From a report: Microsoft partnered with chip and computer makers to apply "security best practices of isolation and minimal trust to the firmware layer, or the device core, that underpins the Windows operating system." Secured-core PCs will be available from Dell, Dynabook, HP, Lenovo, Panasonic, and Surface. Microsoft hasn't released a full list of Secured-core PCs, but two examples include HP's Elite Dragonfly and Microsoft's Surface Pro X.

Firmware is used to initialize the hardware and other software on the device. The firmware layer runs underneath the OS, where it has more access and privilege than the hypervisor and kernel. Firmware is thus emerging as a top target for attackers since the malicious code can be hard to detect and difficult to remove, persisting even with an OS reinstall or a hard drive replacement. Microsoft points to the National Vulnerability Database, which shows the number of discovered firmware vulnerabilities growing each year. As such, Secured-core PCs are designed for industries like financial services, government, and healthcare. They are also meant for workers who handle highly sensitive IP, customer, or personal data that poses higher-value targets for nationstate attackers.

A user writes: When it comes to using strong username and passwords for administrative purposes let alone customer facing portals, Equifax appears to have dropped the ball. Equifax used the word "admin" as both password and username for a portal that contained sensitive information, according to a class action lawsuit filed in federal court in the Northern District of Georgia. The ongoing lawsuit, filed after the breach, went viral on Twitter Friday after Buzzfeed reporter Jane Lytvynenko came across the detail. "Equifax employed the username 'admin' and the password 'admin' to protect a portal used to manage credit disputes, a password that 'is a surefire way to get hacked,'" the lawsuit reads. The lawsuit also notes that Equifax admitted using unencrypted servers to store the sensitive personal information and had it as a public-facing website. When Equifax, one of the three largest consumer credit reporting agencies, did encrypt data, the lawsuit alleges, "it left the keys to unlocking the encryption on the same public-facing servers, making it easy to remove the encryption from the data." The class-action suit consolidated 373 previous lawsuits into one. Unlike other lawsuits against Equifax, these don't come from wronged consumers, but rather shareholders that allege the company didn't adequately disclose risks or its security practices.