This Week In Security: Unicode Strikes Again, Trust No One (Redditor), And More

There’s a popular Sysadmin meme that system problems are “always DNS”. In the realm of security, it seems like “it’s always Unicode”. And it’s not hard to …

This Week In Security: Recall, Modem Mysteries, And Flipping Pages

Microsoft is racing to get into the AI game as part of Windows 11 on ARM, calling it Copilot+. It’s an odd decision, but clearly aimed at competing with the Apple M series of MacBooks. Our fo…

This Week In Security: Operation Endgame, Appliance Carnage, And Router Genocide

This week saw an impressive pair of takedowns pulled off by law enforcement agencies around the world. The first was the 911 S5 botnet, Which the FBI is calling “likely the world’s larg…

This Week In Security: Drama At The C-Level, Escape Injection, And Audits

There was something of a mystery this week, with the c.root-servers.net root DNS server falling out of sync with it’s 12 siblings. That’s odd in itself, as these are the 13 servers that…

This Week In Security: TunnelVision, Scarecrows, And Poutine

There’s a clever “new” attack against VPNs, called TunnelVision, done by researchers at Leviathan Security. To explain why we put “new” in quotation marks, I’ll …

This Week In Security: Default Passwords, Lock Slapping, And Mastodown

The UK has the answer to all our IoT problems: banning bad default passwords. Additionally, the new UK law requires device makers to provide contact info for vulnerability disclosures, as well as a…

This Week In Security: Cisco, Mitel, And AI False Flags

There’s a trend recently, of big-name security appliances getting used in state-sponsored attacks. It looks like Cisco is the latest victim, based on a report by their own Talos Intelligence.…

This Week In Security: Putty Keys, Libarchive, And Palo Alto

It may be time to rotate some keys. The venerable PuTTY was updated to 0.81 this week, and the major fix was a change to how ecdsa-sha2-nistp521 signatures are generated. The problem was reported o…

This Week In Security: BatBadBut, DLink, And Your TV Too

So first up, we have BatBadBut, a pun based on the vulnerability being “about batch files and bad, but not the worst.” It’s a weird interaction between how Windows uses cmd.exe to…

This Week In Security: XZ, ATT, And Letters Of Marque

The xz backdoor is naturally still the top story of the week. If you need a refresher, see our previous coverage. As expected, some very talented reverse engineers have gone to work on the code, an…

This Week In Security: Peering Through The Wall, Apple’s GoFetch, And SHA-256

The Linux command wall is a hold-over from the way Unix machines used to be used. It’s an abbreviation of Write to ALL, and it was first included in AT&T Unix, way back in 1975. wall is a…

This Week In Security: Loop DOS, Flipper Responds, And More!

Here’s a fun thought experiment. UDP packets can be sent with an arbitrary source IP and port, so you can send a packet to one server, and could aim the response at another server. What happe…

This Week In Security: Apple Backdoors Curl, Tor’s New Bridge, And GhostRace

OK, that headline is a bit of a cheap shot. But if you run the curl binary that Apple ships, you’re in for a surprise if you happen to use the –cacert flag. That flag specifies that TLS…

This Week In Security: Blame The Feds, Emergency Patches, And The DMA

The temptation to “take the money and run” was apparently too much for the leadership of the AlphV ransomware crime ring. You may have heard of this group as being behind the breach of …

This Week In Security: Forksquatting, RustDesk, And M&Ms

Github is struggling to keep up with a malware campaign that’s a new twist on typosquatting. The play is straightforward: Clone popular repositories, add malware, and advertise the forks as t…

This Week In Security: Filename Not Sanitized, MonikerLink, And Snap Attack!

Reading through a vulnerability report about ClamAV, I came across a phrase that filled me with dread: “The file name is not sanitized”. It’s a feature, VirusEvent, that can be en…

This Week In Security: Broken Shims, LassPass, And Toothbrushes?

Linux has a shim problem. Which naturally leads to a reasonable question: What’s a shim, and why do we need it? The answer: Making Linux work wit Secure Boot, and an unintended quirk of the G…

This Week In Security: Glibc, Ivanti, Jenkins, And Runc

There’s a fun buffer overflow problem in the Glibc __vsyslog_internal() function. This one’s a real rollercoaster, because logging vulnerabilities are always scary, but at a first look,…

This Week In Security: MOAB, Microsoft, And Printers

This week, news has broken of the Mother of All Breaches, MOAB. It’s 12 terabytes and 26 billion records, averaging about 500 bytes each. Now note that a record here is likely not a discrete …