The First Stop for Security News. Help Net Security. The Security Industry Has Failed - read all about it on artofhacking.com! Twitter to open source Android security tech. December 20, 2011, 4:25 PM — Twitter plans to open source some of the Android security products built by the developers behind Whisper Systems, which Twitter acquired last month. Twitter is starting with Whisper Systems' TextSecure, an Android text messaging client that encrypts messages. Developers can view the source code at GitHub. "We hope that as an open source project, TextSecure will be able to reach even more people, with an even larger number of contributors working to make it a great product," developers and Whisper Systems' founders Moxie Marlinspike and Stuart Anderson wrote on the Whisper Systems blog.
Twitter plans to open source "some" of Whisper Systems software but in a blog post about the move it did not specify which other products it would target. Other products include WhisperCore, software that enables full disk encryption and management tools for Android phones, as well as products that offer voice encryption, firewall software and encrypted backup. The websecurity Archives. Technology | Hiding messages in plain sight. A technology that can "hide" information in plain sight on printed images has begun to see the first commercial applications.
Japanese firm Fujitsu is pushing a technology that can encode data into a picture that is invisible to the human eye but can be decoded by a mobile phone with a camera. The company believes the technology will have spin off implications for the publishing industry. "The concept is to be able to link the printed page into the digital domain," said Mike Nelson, general manager for sales operations at Fujitsu Europe. The technique stems from a 2,500-year-old practice called steganography, which saw the Greeks sending warnings of attacks on wooden tablets and then covering them in wax and tattooing messages on shaved heads that were then covered by the regrowth of hair.
Fujitsu's technique works by taking advantage of the sensitivities of the human eye, which struggles to see the colour yellow. "Any camera, even those in mobile phones, can decode it very easily. " 10 Immutable Laws of Security. Here at the Microsoft Security Response Center, we investigate thousands of security reports every year. In some cases, we find that a report describes a bona fide security vulnerability resulting from an issue in one of our products; when this happens, we develop a corrective update as quickly as possible.
In other cases, the reported problems simply result from a mistake someone made in using the product, or our investigation finds a problem with the product that, while troublesome for users, does not expose them to a security vulnerability. But many fall in between. They are genuine security problems, but the problems don't result from product flaws. Over the years, we've developed a list of issues like these that we call the 10 Immutable Laws of Security. Don't hold your breath waiting for an update that will protect you from the issues we'll discuss below. The 10 Immutable Laws Law #2: If a bad guy can alter the operating system on your computer, it's not your computer anymore. Threat Description: Summary Fu is one of the most widely utilized rootkits in the wild. Other malware, such as rbot and sdbot variants, have used its features to hide themselves.
Fu is a kernel-mode rootkit that modifies kernel data structures, which allows it to hide e.g. processes. Disinfection & Removal Automatic Disinfection Allow F-Secure Anti-Virus to disinfect the relevant files. For more general information on disinfection, please see Removal Instructions. Technical Details Fu rootkit does not try to hide itself on the compromised machine. Fu rootkit is publicly available in binary and source code format. Installation The public version of Fu rootkit consists of two files: one executable file (.exe) and one kernel-mode driver file (.sys). Fu requires administrative privileges to install successfully. HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\[driver_name] where [driver_name] represents the name of the driver file without the .sys extension. Hiding Technique Processes Kernel-mode modules. Compliance : Tech Center.
Information Security News, IT Security News & Expert Insights: SecurityWeek.Com. WikiLeaks Releases Spyware Firm Videos That Show How to Hack Email, Skype, WiFi. Study Finds Popular Sites Guilty of Hi-Jacking History. Security Research & Defense. In our previous posts in this series, we described various mitigation improvements that attempt to prevent the exploitation of specific classes of memory safety vulnerabilities such as those that involve stack corruption, heap corruption, and unsafe list management and reference count mismanagement.
These mitigations are typically associated with a specific developer mistake such as writing beyond the bounds of a stack or heap buffer, failing to correctly track reference counts, and so on. As a result, these mitigations generally attempt to detect side-effects of such mistakes before an attacker can get further along in the exploitation process, e.g. before they gain control of the instruction pointer. Another approach to mitigating exploitation is to focus on breaking techniques that can apply to many different classes of memory safety vulnerabilities.
Prior to Windows 8, bottom-up and top-down allocations were not randomized by ASLR. High Entropy Bottom-up Randomization - Matt Miller.