The Inquirer recently ran a story about a group targeting Facebook and their use of your personal information. This group called “Europe Vs Facebook” claims that Facebook not only stores information about you even after you have deleted it, in other words it never really get deleted, but that they also create ghost profile of users who opted not to be on Facebook in the first place.

I find this very interesting because technically it is quite possible… Even if someone is not on Facebook their photo can be uploaded and their name tagged to it. It would require much more intelligence though to be able to correlate some information about that person discussed in Facebook mails/messages but it is in theory possible.

Although many people have wa...
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More issues have been found with Dropbox, they were major issues and the researchers worked with the vendor to fix them before going public.
Although they are now fixed they highlight the time bomb Dropbox is for enterprise users as usage convenience and security risk ignorance means sensitive information is likely to be transferred centrally on Dropbox from many different companies and user profiles.

The 3 security issues discussed in the this article were:
– Hash value spoofing to access other customer’s data
– Stealing Dropbox hostID to access other customer’s data
– Potential replay attack when providing other customer’s data hash combined with any valid host ID (i.e.: the attacker’s host ID) to get access to the corresponding data.

One key point made in the article is ...
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In the never ending story that is more issues/concerns with Dropbox, there is an interesting article discussing the recent changes of Terms and Conditions with using Dropbox:

TechRepublic Post

In a nutshell, Dropbox is trying to protect themselves with what they do and can do with your data hosted in their data centre. So it means granting Dropbox and those they work with“worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sub-licensable rights to use, copy, distribute, prepare derivative works “ from your data.

The TechRepublic article stresses that it is already the case with sites such as Facebook. There is however a big difference. Facebook is mainly used for social content, personal “stuff” (to use Dropbox’s term). Dropbox is not only used for personal “stuff” but also for professional “stuff”....
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Dropbox is a very convenient way to synchronise data across locations and devices, it is one of the leader for in the cloud storage solutions. However, it has lately gathered some attention for the wrong reasons.

There has been a recent upset about the false claims (or incorrect depending where you stand on this) that no-one could decrypt your data on their data centre, including their staff. Well, it turned out it was no-one *excluding* their staff.

As explained in this article on TECHREPUBLIC

That’s fair enough, so as long as they have the right processes and due diligence in place your data should be safe into their hands, you can trust their staff.

Or can you?

Today, it appeared that while updating their backend code, anyone could connect to ...
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There has recently been an increase in blackhat attention to Apple products.
It would seem that what has been predicted for some time is about to be tested:
that one of the main reason for Mac/OSX to be more secure than windows is because it did not get the same attention from hackers.

This had to happen, and I believe that the time is right.
Indeed, Apple products are gaining more and more market shares and their hippy/cool image is being eroded by both their very strict view of the world and exponantial user base growth.
(On a non security related note, one could wonder how long can Apple be seen as different/cool if everyone has their product!)

This gives every reasons for hackers to take their attention to Mac OSX and iOS.
Recently a fake anti virus software for MAC was discussed on the excellent Intego blog and many other ...
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Below are two interesting Forensic resources I got from Jess Garcia

– Some great free Forensic windows tools, i.e.: to convert time format
http://www.mikesforensictools.co.uk/index.html

– Zero Wine Malware; A promessing virtual environment to analyse malware behaviour and impact
Zero Wine 2.0

Here is an amuzing story where prisoners in a maximum security prison managed to hack their lockdown computers.
Their computer seems to be more like a dumb terminal than a full featured one, and what they can do and where they can go is very limited (i.e.: watch television and receive call).
However, the prisoners found out that by opening 200+ windows explorer they could cause a buffer overflow which then allowed them more access!

http://gcn.com/articles/2011/05/30/colorado-prison-sidebar.aspx

and to go with this story here is a photo I came accross on the internet and that summerize the security state of many companies!

The security of mobile devices is receiving an increasing level of attention and many security vendors are now offering a Mobile Device Management solution. What seems to be leading the market is a secured container approach, which although providing a high level of security could potentially be flawed because it does not take into account what is driving users to buy smartphones and tablets.

A container approach is a very secured one with a strong legal aspect, however, the same way the consumerisation of devices is driving unapproved devices in companies today, there is a risk that users want a full consumer experience where different users will have different preferred apps to do a similar task. A container approach does not provide this full consumer experience and locks the user to the functionalities the secured container apps provides.
Therefore a secured container approach may be flawed through another layer of consumerisation, the apps consumerisation where user...
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I just came accross an interesting attack on the Secure Real Time Protocol (SRTP) using Variable Bit Rate codecs (VBR). That protocol is used to secure voice or IP communication by encrypting the transmitted data.

The attack is described in this draft paper but for the the full details you should take a look at the very comprehensive white paper here which dates back to 2008.

It usesthe phoneticpronunciation of words to identify patterns in the VBR encoding which can be used to bypass encryption and identify phrases as well as the language spoken. So this attack does not target individual words, but phrases or sentences.

Although the paper claims in some cases a success rate of 90% it has an average of 50% success, which is already good enough! What is ...
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