PolygamousRanchKid shares a report from Reuters: The United States has told India it is considering caps on H-1B work visas for nations that force foreign companies to store data locally, three sources with knowledge of the matter told Reuters, widening the two countries' row over tariffs and trade. India, which has upset companies such as Mastercard and irked the U.S. government with stringent new rules on data storage, is the largest recipient of these temporary visas, most of them to workers at big Indian technology firms.

A Washington-based industry source aware of India-U.S. negotiations also said the United States was deliberating capping the number of H-1B visas in response to global data storage rules. The move, however, was not solely targeted at India, the source said. Most affected by any such caps would be India's more than $150 billion IT sector, including Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Infosys Ltd, which uses H-1B visas to fly engineers and developers to service clients in the United States, its biggest market. Major Silicon Valley tech companies also hire workers using the visas. Since last year, the Trump administration has been upset that U.S. companies such as Mastercard and Visa suffer due to regulations in several countries that it says are protectionist and increasingly require companies to store more data locally. India last year mandated foreign firms to store their payments data 'only in India' for supervision, and New Delhi is working on a broad data protection law that would impose strict rules for local processing of data it considers sensitive. Senior Indian government officials were briefed last week on a U.S. plan to cap H-1B visas issued each year to Indians at between 10% and 15% of the annual quota. Currently, there is no country-specific limit on the 85,000 H-1B work visas granted each year, and an estimated 70% go to Indians.

Google on Thursday confirmed that a bug in its Nest security cameras could have allowed users to be spied on. The Daily Dot reports: The issue was first raised by a user on Facebook who recently sold his Nest Cam Indoor yet was still able to access its feed. The problem involves Wink, an app that lets people manage multiple smart devices regardless of their developer. The Facebook user noted that despite carrying out a factory reset on his Nest camera before selling it, his Wink account remained connected to the device, allowing him to view snapshots of the buyer's live feed.

Wirecutter tested the vulnerability on its own Nest Cam by linking it to a Wink account and then performing a factory reset. The publication also found it was receiving "a series of still images snapped every several seconds" via its Wink account. "In simpler terms: If you buy and set up a used Nest indoor camera that has been paired with a Wink hub, the previous owner may have unfettered access to images from that camera," Wirecutter says. "And we currently don't know of any cure for this problem." Google responded to the report and said it has fixed the problem. "We were recently made aware of an issue affecting some Nest cameras connected to third-party partner services via Works with Nest," a spokesperson told Wirecutter. "We've since rolled out a fix for this issue that will update automatically, so if you own a Nest camera, there's no need to take any action."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: A MongoDB database was left open on the internet without a password, and by doing so, exposed the personal details and prescription information for more than 78,000 U.S. patients. The database contained information on 391,649 prescriptions for a drug named Vascepa; used for lowering triglycerides (fats) in adults that are on a low-fat and low-cholesterol diet. Additionally, the database also contained the collective information of over 78,000 patients who were prescribed Vascepa in the past. Leaked information included patient data such as full names, addresses, cell phone numbers, and email addresses, but also prescription info such as prescribing doctor, pharmacy information, NPI number (National Provider Identifier), NABP E-Profile Number (National Association of Boards of Pharmacy), and more. According to vpnMentor, the company that left the database open may have violated HIPAA, and may be in line for a hefty fine for failing to encrypt the patient data it had stored on the database server, a HIPAA golden rule," the report adds. "However, Dissent, the administrator of DataBreaches.net, a website dedicated to tracking data breaches and HIPAA violations, told ZDNet that just because a system stores medical information, it doesn't mean it's necessarily covered by HIPAA. Until the database owner is found, no other conclusions can be drawn."

Apple on Thursday launched a voluntary recall and replacement program on Thursday for the 15-inch 2015 MacBook Pro with Retina Display, saying that batteries on some of these devices could overheat and "may pose a fire safety risk." From a report: The current generation is not impacted thankfully; if you have a 2016-2018 MacBook Pro you can breathe a sigh of relief. Actually, the only model covered by the recall is the "Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2015." If you own that model, don't panic -- it is not all of them. To see if your computer has the faulty battery, you need to enter your serial number on Apple's website.

An anonymous reader writes: A recent Firefox zero-day that has made headlines across the tech news world this week was actually used in attacks against Coinbase employees, and not the company's users. Furthermore, the attacks used not one, but two Firefox zero-days, according to Philip Martin, a member of the Coinbase security team, which reported the attacks to Mozilla. One was an RCE reported by a Google Project Zero security researcher to Mozilla in April, and the second was a sandbox escape that was spotted in the wild by the Coinbase team together with the RCE, on Monday.

The question here is how an attacker managed to get hold of the details for the RCE vulnerability and use it for his attacks after the vulnerability was privately reported to Mozilla by Google. The attacker could have found the Firefox RCE on his own, he could have bribed a Mozilla/Google insider, hacked a Mozilla/Google employee and viewed details about the RCE, or hacked Mozilla's bug tracker, like another attacker did in 2015.

The city council for Riviera Beach, Florida, voted this week to pay more than $600,000 to a ransomware gang so city officials could recover data that has been locked and encrypted more than three weeks ago. From a report: The city's decision, as reported by CBS News, came after officials came to the conclusion that there was no other way to recover the city's files. Access to Riviera City data has been locked since May 29, this year, when a Riviera Beach police department employee opened an email and unleashed ransomware on the city's network. The ransomware locked files and shut down all the city's services. Operations have been down ever since, with the exception of 911 services, which were able to continue to operate, although limited. The city's website, email server, billing system, and everything else has been down ever since, with all city communications being done in person, over the telephone, or via posters. The city has been having a hard time recovering from the incident ever since.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Just one day of work per week is the most "effective dose" to give the mental health benefits of paid employment, research suggests. A study indicated that the risk of mental health problems reduces by 30% when people move from unemployment or stay-at-home parenting into paid work of eight hours or less per week. But researchers at the Universities of Cambridge and Salford found no evidence that working any more than eight hours provided further boosts to well-being. The researchers used data from a panel survey to examine how changes in working hours were linked to mental health and life satisfaction in more than 70,000 UK residents between 2009 and 2018. They controlled for characteristics including age, children, longstanding illness and household income. The study suggests that to get the mental well-being benefits of paid work, the most "effective dose" is only around one day a week -- as anything more makes little difference. The research has been published in the journal Social Science & Medicine.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Oracle on Tuesday published an out-of-band update patching a critical code-execution vulnerability in its WebLogic server after researchers warned that the flaw was being actively exploited in the wild. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2019-2729, allows an attacker to run malicious code on the WebLogic server without any need for authentication. That capability earned the vulnerability a Common Vulnerability Scoring System score of 9.8 out of 10. The vulnerability is a deserialization attack targeting two Web applications that WebLogic appears to expose to the Internet by default -- wls9_async_response and wls-wsat.war. The flaw in Oracle's WebLogic Java application servers came to light as a zero-day four days ago when it was reported by security firm KnownSec404.

Federal workers and the public in general might be mistaken about the security of .zip files, Sen. Ron Wyden said on Wednesday [PDF], and he's asking the National Institute of Standards and Technology to issue guidance on the best way to send sensitive files over the internet. Wyden wrote: Government agencies routinely share and receive sensitive data through insecure methods -- such as emailing .zip files -- because employees are not provided the tools and training to do so safely. As you know, it is a routine practice in the government, and indeed the private sector, to send by email-protected .zip files containing sensitive documents. Many people incorrectly believe that password-protected .zip files can protect sensitive data.

Indeed, many password-protected .zip files can be easily broken with off-the-shelf hacking tools. This is because many of the software programs that create .zip files use a weak encryption algorithm by default. While secure methods to protect and share data exist and are freely available, many people do not know which software they should use. Given the ongoing threat of cyber attacks by foreign state actors and high-profile data breaches, this is a potentially catastrophic national security problem that needs to be fixed. The government must ensure that federal workers have the tools and training they need to safetly share sensitive data. To address this problem, I ask that NIST create and publish an easy-to-understand guide describing the best way for individuals and organizations to securely share sensitive data over the internet.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Over 70 million records were stolen or leaked from poorly configured databases last year, making privacy a top concern. That's no doubt one motivation behind Google's open-sourcing this morning of Private Join and Compute, a new secure multi-party computation (MPC) tool designed to help organizations work together with confidential data sets. "We continually invest in new research to advance innovations that preserve individual privacy while enabling valuable insights from data," wrote engineering director Sarvar Patel and research scientist Moti Yung in a blog post. "Many important research, business, and social questions can be answered by combining data sets from independent parties, where each party holds their own information about a set of shared identifiers, some of which are common."

At its core, Private Join and Compute lets organizations gain aggregated insights about the other party's data. They're able to encrypt identifiers and associated data, join them, and then perform calculations on the overlapping corpora to draw useful information. All identifiers and their associated data remain fully encrypted and unreadable throughout the process. While neither party is forced to reveal their raw data, they can answer questions at hand using outputs of the computation -- for instance, counts, sums, and averages. Private Join and Compute achieves this with two cryptographic privacy methods devised to protect sensitive data: Private set intersection and homomorphic encryption.

Google today launched a new Chrome extension that will simplify the process of reporting a malicious site to the Google Safe Browsing team so that it can be analyzed, reviewed, and blacklisted in Chrome and other browsers that support the Safe Browsing API. From a report: Named the Suspicious Site Reporter, this extension adds an icon to the Google Chrome toolbar that when pressed, opens a popup window from where users can file an automatic report for the current site they're on, and which they suspect might be up to no good. "If the site is added to Safe Browsing's lists, you'll not only protect Chrome users but users of other browsers and across the entire web," said Emily Schechter, Chrome Product Manager. The Safe Browsing API is implemented not only in the mobile and desktop versions of Chrome but also in the mobile and desktop versions of Mozilla Firefox and Apple's Safari.

Artem S. Tashkinov writes: The Register reports that it is possible to crash network-facing Linux servers, PCs, smartphones and tablets, and gadgets, or slow down their network connections, by sending them a series of maliciously crafted packets. It is also possible to hamper FreeBSD machines with the same attack. Patches and mitigations are available, and can be applied by hand if needed, or you can wait for a security fix to be pushed or offered to your at-risk device. A key workaround is to set /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_sack to 0. At the heart of the drama is a programming flaw dubbed SACK Panic aka CVE-2019-11477: this bug can be exploited to remotely crash systems powered by Linux kernel version 2.6.29 or higher, which was released 10 years ago.

Cloudflare, along with a group of individual and academic partners, is forming a new coalition that will provide truly random, unpredictable numbers for a variety of applications, including election systems and lotteries. From a report: The problem of producing truly random numbers on a consistent basis has been a thorny one for cryptographers for many years. There have been plenty of efforts to establish sources of randomness, with some success, but one of the drawbacks is that any single randomness generator can be a target for abuse by privileged insiders or outside attackers. This is especially true in high-value applications that require random numbers, such as lottery or election systems. Also, if a given source of random numbers fails for any reason, the applications that rely on it can be crippled, as well.

To help address this problem, Cloudflare has teamed up with the University of Chile, the Ecole polytechnique federale de Lausanne, and several individual researchers to form a consortium of randomness beacons distributed around the world. The system is based on the drand randomness beacon developed by Nicholas Gailly, a researcher at Protocol Labs, a research lab for network protocols, and the aim is to have a distributed network of beacons that will always be available. "Our founding members are contributing their individual high-entropy sources to provide a more random and unpredictable beacon to generate publicly verifiable random values every sixty seconds. The fact that the drand beacon is decentralized and built using appropriate, provably-secure cryptographic primitives, increases our confidence that it possesses all the aforementioned properties," Dina Kozlov, a product manager at Cloudflare, said.

"This global network of servers generating randomness ensures that even if a few servers are offline, the beacon continues to produce new numbers by using the remaining online servers. Even if one or two of the servers or their entropy sources were to be compromised, the rest will still ensure that the jointly-produced entropy is fully unpredictable and unbiasable." Random numbers are vital to many kinds of systems and there are plenty of hardware and software-based random number generators. But more than one RNG has been found to have a bias, whether intentional or accidental, so randomness beacons emerged.

Microsoft has released To-Do for Mac, finally giving Apple users access to the task management tool on their desktops. The Mac app will allow users to work offline, view their upcoming tasks under "My Day," share to-do lists with friends and colleagues and see flagged emails. From a report: "Today, we'd like to announce the arrival of a new family member -- that's right, the moment many of you have been waiting for is here -- say hello to the Mac app. If you've already been using our app on Android, iOS, Windows, or web, then the Mac app will feel very familiar. Sign in and all your tasks will be waiting for you, ready to be checked off. You can work offline, add tasks to My Day, see your flagged email in your Flagged email list, and share your lists with colleagues or friends and family. The Planner integration isn't available yet, but we're already working on bringing the Assigned to Me list to you," says Polly Davidson, Social Media Strategist, Microsoft.

Over a quarter of all the major content management systems (CMSs) use the old and outdated MD5 hashing scheme as the default for securing and storing user passwords. From a report: Some of the projects that use MD5 as the default method for storing user passwords include WordPress, osCommerce, SuiteCRM, Simple Machines Forum, miniBB, MyBB, SugarCRM, CMS Made Simple, MantisBT, Phorum, Observium, X3cms, and Composr. The MD5 algorithm has been cracked for years now, meaning all passwords stored in this format can be reversed back to their plaintext version. This means that unless website owners changed these default settings by modifying the CMS source code, most websites built on top of these CMSs puts user passwords at risk in the case a hacker steals the site's database. This revelation is just one of the many observations that came out of an extensive academic research project at the University of Piraeus, in Greece. Academics examined 49 commonly used CMSs and 47 popular web application frameworks and looked at their default password storage mechanism, namely their password hashing schemes.

Apple CEO Tim Cook said Sunday in a commencement address at Stanford University that technology companies need to take responsibility for the "chaos" they create. From a report: He did not name specific companies in his speech, but referenced several reasons that tech firms, particularly social media platforms, have come under scrutiny in recent months. He also made an apparent reference to embattled health startup Theranos. "Lately it seems this industry is becoming better known for a less noble innovation -- the belief you can claim credit without accepting responsibility," Cook said, according to videos posted online of his speech. "We see it every day now with every data breach, every privacy violation, every blind eye turned to hate speech, fake news poisoning out national conversation, the false miracles in exchange for a single drop of your blood," he added. "Too many seem to think that good intentions excuse away harmful outcomes, but whether you like it or not, what you build and what you create define who you are. It feels a bit crazy that anyone should have to say this, but if you built a chaos factory, you can't dodge responsibility for the chaos."

Researchers from Austria's Graz University of Technology "have devised an automated system for browser profiling using two new side channel attacks that can help expose information about software and hardware," reports The Register.

The researchers recently presented a paper titled "JavaScript Template Attacks: Automatically Inferring Host Information for Targeted Exploits," which The Register says "calls into question the effectiveness of anonymized browsing and browser privacy extensions... "

Long-time Slashdot reader Artem S. Tashkinov shared their report: One of the side-channel attacks developed for JavaScript Template Attacks involve measuring runtime differences between two code snippets to infer the underlying instruction set architecture through variations in JIT compiler behavior. The other involves measuring timing differences in the memory allocator to infer the allocated size of a memory region.

The boffins' exploration of the JavaScript environment reveals not only the ability to fingerprint via browser version, installed privacy extension, privacy mode, operating system, device microarchitecture, and virtual machine, but also the properties of JavaScript objects. And their research shows there are far more of these than are covered in official documentation. This means browser fingerprints have the potential to be far more detailed -- have more data points -- than they are now.

The Mozilla Developer Network documentation for Firefox, for example, covers 2,247 browser properties. The researchers were able to capture 15,709. Though not all of these are usable for fingerprinting and some represent duplicates, they say they found about 10,000 usable properties for all browsers.

"The U.S. military's Cyber Command has gotten more aggressive than ever against Russia in the past year, placing 'potentially crippling malware' in systems that control the country's electrical grid," according to CNET, citing a report in the New York Times: Made possible by little-noticed legal authority granted last summer by Congress, Cyber Command's strategy shift from a defensive to offensive posture is meant in part as a warning shot, but it's also designed to enable paralysing cyberattacks in the event of a conflict, The New York Times said Saturday, quoting unnamed officials... [T]he recent moves appear to have taken place under a military authorization bill Congress passed in 2018 that gives the go-ahead for "clandestine military activity" in cyberspace to "deter, safeguard or defend against attacks or malicious cyberactivities against the United States...."

The Times said Cyber Command is concerned Russia could trigger selective power outages in key states during the 2020 election and that it needs a way to discourage such attacks. But the agency and the U.S. have to consider their moves carefully in this international game of cyberchess. "The question now is whether placing the equivalent of land mines in a foreign power network is the right way to deter Russia," the Times report says. "While it parallels Cold War nuclear strategy, it also enshrines power grids as a legitimate target...."

In related news, Bloomberg reported Friday that a Russia-linked hacking group that shut down an oil and gas facility in Saudi Arabia in 2017 has been probing utilities in the U.S. since late last year.

ZDNet reports: Internet-connected security cameras account for almost half of the Internet of Things devices that are compromised by hackers even as homes and businesses continue to add these and other connected devices to their networks. Research from cybersecurity company SAM Seamless Network found that security cameras represent 47 percent of vulnerable devices installed on home networks.

According to the data, the average U.S. household contains 17 smart devices while European homes have an average of 14 devices connected to the network... Figures from the security firm suggest that the average device is the target of an average of five attacks per day, with midnight the most common time for attacks to be executed -- it's likely that at this time of the night, the users will be asleep and not paying attention to devices, so won't be witness to a burst of strange behavior.
The anonymous reader who submitted this story suggests a possible solution: government inspectors should examine every imported IoT device at the border.

"The device gets rejected if it has non-essential ports open, hard-coded or generic passwords, no automated patching for at least four years, etc."

JustAnotherOldGuy quotes Threatpost: A high-severity bug impacting two popular command-line text editing applications, Vim and Neovim, allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary OS commands. Security researcher Armin Razmjou warned that exploiting the bug is as easy as tricking a target into clicking on a specially crafted text file in either editor. Razmjou outlined his research and created a proof-of-concept (PoC) attack demonstrating how an adversary can compromise a Linux system via Vim or Neowim. He said Vim versions before 8.1.1365 and Neovim before 0.3.6 are vulnerable to arbitrary code execution...

Vim and Neovim have both released patches for the bug (CVE-2019-12735) that the National Institute of Standards and Technology warns, "allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary OS commands via the :source! command in a modeline."

"Beyond patching, it's recommended to disable modelines in the vimrc (set nomodeline), to use the securemodelinesplugin, or to disable modelineexpr (since patch 8.1.1366, Vim-only) to disallow expressions in modelines," the researcher said.