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Google Calls Out Microsoft For Security Issue

March 10, 2018 by Joseph Martin

Depending on who you ask, Google’s Project Zero is either the thing that’s going to singlehandedly save the internet, or the bane of many companies’ existence. It’s easy to see both sides of the argument.

On one hand, by uncovering previously undiscovered bugs in all manner of software and handing that information over to the authors, Google is undeniably performing a valued public service. The problem has never been with the “carrot” side of the equation, always with the stick.

The stick is this: Google gives each company 90 days in which to address the bug. If they take no action during that time, then Google will announce the existence of the bug to the world, which of course, means that hackers everywhere immediately have access to a new exploit.

This approach often accomplishes what contacting the vendor privately does not. Once the bug becomes common knowledge, the company in question is essentially forced to fix the problem, thus making the internet safer.

It should be noted that Google does allow exemptions to the 90-day rule. If a company is hard at work on a fix and needs more time, Google has been known to delay their announcement. In a similar vein, if a bug is simply catastrophic in scope and scale, the company has been known to make the announcement to help deploy resources of multiple companies toward addressing the issue.

More than 90 days ago, the Project Zero team discovered a pair of security flaws in Microsoft products. One in their Edge browser, and the other in the Windows 10 OS. One of the two got fixed. The other did not, and Google called them out for it.

Needless to say, Microsoft is not pleased, and they have hit Google back for such behavior in the past. They scored a PR victory last year when Microsoft engineers discovered a flaw in Google’s Chrome browser, and contacted the company privately so they could fix the issue and then bragged about their more responsible approach after the fact.

It will be interesting to see what Microsoft does in this instance.

Joseph Martin

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5G Cellular Service Is Beginning To Roll Out

March 9, 2018 by Joseph Martin

AT&T has big plans for their future and yours. If they’re your carrier of choice, and if you live in the cities of Dallas, Atlanta, or Waco, then you stand to be on the cutting edge of the changes the company has in store. Those locations have been selected to be the first to receive AT&T’s 5G network upgrade.

Often, whenever a new technology is touted, you hear the phrase “this changes everything” associated with it. However, after listening to an AT&T spokesman talk at length about the capabilities of the new 5G network, the phrase is much more than just hot air and wishful thinking. From the sounds of it, it really does change everything.

Here’s what a company official had to say on the matter:

“We are working with our vendors on an aggressive schedule to help ensure customers can enjoy 5G when we launch the network this year. We will add more 5G-capable mobile devices and smartphones in early 2019 and beyond.

After significantly contributing to the first phase of 5G standards, conducting multi-city trials, and literally transforming our network for the future, we’re planning to be the first carrier to deliver standards-based mobile 5G–and do it much sooner than most people thought possible.

What this means for our customers in these cities is that they will be the very first to access this next generation of wireless services. The experience we’ve gained by leading the industry transformation to network virtualization and software control will help our customers to get the most out of 5G. Ultimately, this means new experiences with augmented reality and virtual reality (AR/VR), future autonomous cars and delivery drones.

In order for these new experiences to become reality, you need mobile 5G powered by SDN and edge computing. We’re making the cloud smarter, faster, and local.”

By all accounts, there are exciting times ahead. If you’ve been thinking about switching to AT&T, this might be a good reason to do so.

Joseph Martin

Android Ransomware Infections Declined in 2017

March 8, 2018 by Joseph Martin

Android users have a reason to cheer. According to the latest report by ESET, the number of ransomware attacks targeting Android devices declined in 2017. The decline represents a bit of an anomaly, given that in 2017, the most common type of malware attack (by a wide margin) was ransomware. Given that security researchers can’t name a particular reason for the decline, it’s important not to read too much into the data. Whether there are declining figures or not, ransomware attacks still played a prominent role in last year’s threat landscape across a whole spectrum of devices. This year is shaping up to be no different.

Where Android-based ransomware attacks were concerned, several old standbys were still seeing frequent use, including both Charger and SimpleLocker. The most prominent new player in 2017 was DoubleLocker, which was first seen in the wild last October. It is unique in that it was the first Android malware to take advantage of a vulnerability in the Accessibility service to gain admin rights and infect users.

Interestingly, Android-based banking Trojans have been abusing the Accessibility service for literally years. It’s not immediately clear why hackers didn’t begin using it as an attack vector where ransomware was concerned until the appearance of DoubleLocker. Now that it’s on the scene, we can expect to see an increasing number of similar attacks.

In any case, given the fact that ransomware is poised to dominate the threat landscape in 2018, all users would do well to stay on their guard. The slight decline in ransomware attacks against Android users, (while a welcome sight), is probably going to be short-lived. If there’s one thing you can be sure of, it is that 2018 will be another record-breaking year where hacking attacks are concerned.

Joseph Martin

Known Bug On Macs May Be Causing Lost Data

March 6, 2018 by Joseph Martin

Do you own a Mac? Do you use APFS “sparse disk images?” If so, be aware that under certain conditions, your trusty computer may allow you to copy important data into the void where it will be lost forever, without giving you a heads up first.

This unusual error was recently discovered by Mike Bombich, the creator of Carbon Copy Cloner, which is a popular Mac backup application. According to Mr. Bombich, the bug is only likely to impact a small percentage of users, but if you’re one of the unlucky few who lose important data, that’s going to be small consolation.

Here’s how the bug works, and where it can get you into trouble:

Let’s say you’ve created a 100 GB APFS-formatted sparse image whose data is stored on a remote network share.

Time passes, and you copy 90 GB worth of data to the remote network share, which leaves just 10 GB for use by your sparse image, but therein lies the problem. The sparse image still thinks it’s got the full amount of space to play with.

At this point, if you copy a 20 GB file, the copy function will appear to succeed. In the short run, you’ll still be able to access and open the file until you reboot your machine. After restarting, 10 GB of the 20 GB file copy vanishes, and the file becomes corrupt and unusable.

Details of the bug have been forwarded to Apple, and the company is in the process of reviewing them. At this point, no ETA has been given on when a fix might be made available. Until it is, be very careful when using sparse images, because the system will let you copy your files right into oblivion.

Joseph Martin

2018 Olympics Hit By Malware

February 27, 2018 by Joseph Martin

Hackers are picky about their victims. They’ll target just about any group or organization, including the 2018 Olympics.

Cisco’s Talos Group recently identified a new strain of malware they’ve dubbed “Olympic Destroyer” which is wreaking havoc in Pyeong Chang’s computer networks and causing downtime to internal WiFi and television systems. This has impacted the games’ opening ceremonies, and stands an excellent chance of further disrupting the rest of the festivities.

Because the threat was only recently discovered, the Talos team’s initial assessment and report was spotty and short on details, but the group recently amended their initial findings. The results aren’t pretty, and the malware is seen as being both more dangerous and more advanced than originally thought.

The big three findings in the team’s amended report are as follows:

It’s Polymorphic – As the malware spreads, it collects new credentials from each machine it infects, adding these to its binary on the fly. Members of the Talos team had this to say about the behavior: “I have not seen a malware sample modify itself to include harvested creds before and I’ve been doing this stuff longer than I should admit. Polymorphic malware isn’t a new idea by itself, but I’ve never seen any examples of malware modifying itself to include harvested credentials.”

It Spreads Via The EternalRomance Exploit – This bit of information comes to us from the Windows Defender team. The mechanism by which Olympic Destroyer spreads is industrial grade, utilizing an exploit from the NSA leaked by the Shadow Brokers last year.

Finally, It Wipes Data – This is perhaps the most significant of the three updates to the Talos report. The malware has a data wiping mechanism built into it that it utilizes at every opportunity in an attempt to delete files on network shares. Since it only seems to target shared files, it’s not deleting items key to OS functionality. Even so, these shared files are important, and this is what’s causing operational disruptions.

More details will no doubt become available as the various teams researching Olympic Destroyer get a better understanding of what they’re looking at. The bottom line is, it’s a pretty advanced threat and will likely inspire copycats in the months ahead.

Joseph Martin

Changes To Google Images Will Make Image Theft Difficult

February 27, 2018 by Joseph Martin

Image theft is one of the biggest problems on the internet. If you’re a photographer, you’ve almost certainly lost money because people find your work online and make a copy of it rather than paying for the right to use it.

Unfortunately, Google has made that incredibly easy to do, but that’s changing. Until recently, if you did a Google image search, you’d get a list of images that matched your search phrase, and one of the buttons displayed was a “View Image” button that would take you to the image file itself, as opposed to viewing the image in the context of whatever web page it was displayed on.

This, of course, made stealing the image a trivial task. Content providers have been complaining loudly, and Google listened. Effective February 15, the “View Image” button is no longer listed. Of course, it’s still possible to steal the image in question, but users will have to jump through at least a couple more hoops to do so.

A second, smaller and somewhat less impactful change is the fact that Google has also removed the “Search By Image” button that formerly appeared when you navigated straight to an image file. Savvy users will still be able to drag the image itself to the search bar and accomplish the same thing, but relatively few people are aware of this, which will cut down on its use significantly. The thinking here is that netizins were making use of this feature to find copies of images that didn’t have a watermark visible.

While these two changes give photographers reason to cheer, it definitely negatively impacts the user experience, as there are a number of perfectly legitimate uses for copyrighted image material. The bottom line is that if you’re accustomed to the old way of searching for and acquiring images, you’ll have a bit of an adjustment period ahead.

Joseph Martin

Apple And Google No Longer World’s Top Brands

February 20, 2018 by Joseph Martin

The latest Brand Finance Global 500 report out and contains some surprises this year.

In the battle of the Brands, two companies have long topped the list: Apple and Google. This year, there’s a new Sheriff in town. Amazon blew past the top two claiming the top spot for itself. It is now the most valuable brand in the world with an impressive $150.8 billion dollar value.

David Haigh, the CEO of Brand Finance had this to say about the upset in the rankings:

“Jeff Bezos once said that ‘brands are more important online than they are in the physical world.’ He has proved himself right by choosing the name Amazon, known as the largest, most powerful river in the world, as 23 years later the Amazon brand carries all before it as an unstoppable force. The strength and value of the Amazon brand gives it stakeholder permission to extend relentlessly into new sectors and geographies. All evidence suggests that the amazing Amazon brand is going to continue growing indefinitely and exponentially.”

The new number two, Apple, saw the value of its brand increase by a hefty 37% to $146.3 billion. While impressive, the report stresses that Apple’s long-term prospects look bleak because the company has failed to diversify. It relies on its aging line of iPhones for more than a third of its total revenue, which hampers its opportunities for growth.

Third ranked, Google’s brand saw more modest growth in value (just 10 percent), and now stands at $120.9 billion. Like Apple, the report stresses that although Google is a Titan in certain sectors (search, cloud, and Mobile OS), its relatively narrow focus has kept it from unleashing the full power of its brand in the same way Amazon has.

All hail the new King of the brands, Amazon!

Joseph Martin

Some Smartwatches May Be Able To Diagnose Diabetes

February 20, 2018 by Joseph Martin

That smartwatch you’re wearing might save your life. Literally.

A new study conducted by the University of California San Francisco, and a healthcare startup called Cardiogram revealed that smartwatches and other wearables were able to detect diabetes in previously diagnosed patients an impressive 85 percent of the time.

The study monitored health statistics of more than 14,000 smartwatch wearers (both Android and Apple) over the course of several months. All health data that was collected was fed into a deep neural network which compared the collected data to samples taken from people both with, and without diabetes.

Obviously, while 85 percent is good, it falls short of greatness. Then again, the AI routine (dubbed “DeepHeart”) is still in its infancy and is all but certain to continue improving over time.

That’s important, given how many people in America have diabetes. It is estimated that there are more than 100 million Americans who either have the disease or who are prediabetic, and many of these haven’t been diagnosed yet.

Given these results, and in a bid to further improve DeepHeart’s accuracy, the company plans to incorporate the AI into the next update of its app on both iOS and Android platforms.

All that to say, if you currently have and wear a smartwatch or other wearable, it may help you in ways you can’t even begin to imagine. This is the bleeding edge of a segment of the market that is only just beginning to emerge. At this point, it’s so new that it would be difficult even to say it’s in its infancy. Although we can’t know for certain what new revelations and advances wearable technology will bring to the medical field, based on what we’ve seen so far, we can say there will be a bunch of them, and they’ll all be exciting.

If you’ve been considering getting one but haven’t yet, this is a pretty solid reason to do so.

Joseph Martin

Microsoft is Adding Much Needed Feature To Windows Defender

February 16, 2018 by Joseph Martin

Microsoft is getting tough on so-called “registry cleaners”, and it’s about time. The company recently announced a planned change to Windows Defender (the anti-malware program that comes standard with every Windows installation). The change will see to the deletion of an increasing number of these registry cleaners. It’s a great move, and the company deserves credit for it, but there’s a catch. This type of software has been around for decades. So the move, as welcome as it is, comes very late in the game.

It’s overwhelmingly likely that you’ve seen these programs in action. They’re usually free downloads (though there are a few web based services too) that scan your system to find problems with your registry that the software claims are causing performance issues and slowing your machine down.

There are two major problems with this: First, the software tends to be light on details, refusing to provide much information about exactly why the “problems” that have been identified are impacting system performance. Worse, the software often incorrectly identifies critical system files and registry entries as being problematic. So of course, when they are deleted, they actually create many more problems than they solve.

Second, in order to actually fix the problems that have been identified, you’ve got to buy the premium version of the package. The result is that you’re losing money, and the software often breaks your system. Not a pretty picture.

This latest move by Microsoft builds on action they took back in 2016, when the company started penalizing the makers of such registry cleaners if their software didn’t provide adequate information. This missing information included why the problems they found needed to be fixed in the first place, and if they utilized a high pressure up-sell technique.

Ultimately, those moves proved to be insufficient, so Microsoft decided to take things to the next level. Now, they’re simply going to start deleting these no- or low-value programs. Late or not, that’s one less headache for you, and a very good thing.

Joseph Martin

Malware Makers Testing Vulnerability Of Meltdown And Spectre

February 14, 2018 by Joseph Martin

Security researchers from around the web are reporting finding an increasing number of instances of proof of concept (PoC) code that incorporates the recently discovered Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities.

If you somehow missed those earlier reports, Spectre and Meltdown are a pair of critical security flaws recently discovered in literally every Intel chip set made over the last decade. Exploiting these vulnerabilities would give a hacker root-level access to the impacted system.

Since the discovery, the chip giant has been scrambling to fix the issue. However, their first attempt to do so caused so many system problems for people who installed the patch that the company is now recommending that users avoid it until they can come up with a better solution.

Unfortunately, that leaves you between the proverbial rock and a hard place. Installing the patch will protect you, but cause you to experience system reboots several times a day and seriously degraded performance. Not installing it leaves you at the mercy of the hackers.

So far, at least, it appears that most of the proof of concept code found is the result of security researchers playing with the exploits. This includes testing them, seeing how they work, and how to prevent them. That said, the researchers point out that it’s all but certain that some of the PoC examples were created by teams of hackers who plan to use them in their next round of attacks.

To make matters worse, Mozilla has confirmed that the Spectre flaw can be executed remotely by inserting commands into Javascript. Given that, plus the increased appearance of PoC code fragments, it seems it’s just a matter of time before we see the first ever Spectre-based hack. The clock is ticking.

Joseph Martin

Google Calls Out Microsoft For Security Issue

5G Cellular Service Is Beginning To Roll Out

Android Ransomware Infections Declined in 2017

Known Bug On Macs May Be Causing Lost Data

2018 Olympics Hit By Malware

Changes To Google Images Will Make Image Theft Difficult

Apple And Google No Longer World’s Top Brands

Some Smartwatches May Be Able To Diagnose Diabetes

Microsoft is Adding Much Needed Feature To Windows Defender

Malware Makers Testing Vulnerability Of Meltdown And Spectre

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