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Project Zero: Breaking the chain

• “Much as we’d like it to be true, it seems undeniable that we’ll never fix all security bugs just by looking for them. One of most productive ways to dealing with this fact is to implement exploit mitigations. Project Zero considers mitigation work just as important as finding vulnerabilities. Sometimes we can get our hands dirty, such as helping out Adobe and Microsoft in Flash mitigations. Sometimes we can only help indirectly via publishing our research and giving vendors an incentive to add their own mitigations.”
• “This blog post is about an important exploit mitigation I developed for Chrome on Windows. It will detail many of the challenges I faced when trying to get this mitigation released to protect end-users of Chrome. It’s recently shipped to users of Chrome on Windows 10 (in M54), and ended up blocking the sandbox escape of an exploit chain being used in the wild.”
• “It’s possible to lockdown a sandbox such as Chrome’s pretty comprehensively using Restricted Tokens. However one of the big problems on Windows is locking down access to system calls. On Windows you have both the normal NT system calls and Win32k system calls for accessing the GUI which combined represents a significant attack surface.”
• “While the NT system calls do have exploitable vulnerabilities now and again (for example issue 865) it’s nothing compared to Win32k. From just one research project alone 31 issues were discovered, and this isn’t counting the many font issues Mateusz has found and the hundreds of other issues found by other researchers.”
• “Much of Win32k’s problems come from history. In the first versions of Windows NT almost all the code responsible for the windowing system existed in user-mode. Unfortunately for 90’s era computers this wasn’t exactly good for performance so for NT 4 Microsoft moved a significant portion of what was user-mode code into the kernel (becoming the driver, win32k.sys). This was a time before Slammer, before Blaster, before the infamous Trustworthy Computing Memo which focussed Microsoft to think about security first. Perhaps some lone voice spoke for security that day, but was overwhelmed by performance considerations. We’ll never know for sure, however what it did do was make Win32k a large fragile mess which seems to have persisted to this day. And the attack surface this large fragile mess exposed could not be removed from any sandboxed process.”
• “That all changed with the release of Windows 8. Microsoft introduced the System Call Disable Policy, which allows a developer to completely block access to the Win32k system call table. While it doesn’t do anything for normal system calls the fact that you could eliminate over a thousand win32k system calls, many of which have had serious security issues, would be a crucial reduction in the attack surface.”
• “However no application in a default Windows installation used this policy (it’s said to have been introduced for non-GUI applications such as on Azure) and using it for something as complex as Chrome wasn’t going to be easy. The process of shipping Win32k lockdown required a number of architectural changes to be made to Chrome. This included replacing the GDI-based font code with Microsoft’s DirectWrite library. After around two years of effort Win32k lockdown was shipping by default.”
• The problem is that plugins, like Flash and PDFium, run via the PPAPI, and cannot have access to the Win32k blocked
• “This would seem a pretty large weak point. Flash has not had the best security track record (relevant), making the likelihood of Flash being an RCE vector very high. Combine that with the relative ease of finding and exploiting Win32k vulnerabilities and you’ve got a perfect storm.”
• “It would seem reasonable to assume that real attackers are finding Win32k vulnerabilities and using them to break out of restrictive sandboxes including Chrome’s using Flash as the RCE vector. The question was whether that was true. The first real confirmation that this was true came from the Hacking Team breach, which occurred in July 2015. In the dumped files was an unfixed Chrome exploit which used Flash as the RCE vector and a Win32k exploit to escape the sandbox. While both vulnerabilities were quickly fixed I came upon the idea that perhaps I could spend some time to implement the lockdown policy for PPAPI and eliminate this entire attack chain.”
• “For a better, more robust solution I needed to get changes made to Flash. I don’t have access to the Flash source code, however Google does have a good working relationship with Adobe and I used this to get the necessary changes implemented. It turned out that there was a Pepper API which did all that was needed to replace the GDI font handling, pp::flash::FontFile. Unfortunately that was only implemented on Linux, however I was able to put together a proof-of-concept Windows implementation of pp::flash::FontFile and through Xing Zhang of Adobe we got a full implementation in Chrome and Flash.”
• So, with some work, most of the code in Flash that needed access to the Win32k API could be removed, so access to it could be blocked
• “From this point I could enable Win32k lockdown for plugins and after much testing everything seemed to be working, until I tried to test some DRM protected video. While encrypted video worked, any Flash video file which required output protection (such as High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP)) would not.”
• “Still this presents a problem, as video along with games are some of the only residual uses of Flash. In testing, this also affected the Widevine plugin that implements the Encrypted Media Extensions for Chrome. Widevine uses PPAPI under the hood; not fixing this issue would break all HD content playback.”
• “The ideal way of fixing this would be to implement a new API in Chrome which exposed enabling HDCP then get Adobe and Widevine to use that implementation. It turns out that the Adobe DRM and Widevine teams are under greater constraints than normal development teams. After discussion with my original contact at Adobe they didn’t have access to the DRM code for Flash. I was able to have meetings with Widevine (they’re part of Google) and the Adobe DRM team but in the end I decided to go it alone and implement redirection of these APIs as part of the sandbox code.”
• It seems that the DRM code is so locked down, that even the developers at the companies that created it, cannot modify it
• So the Chrome developer just created a compatibility layer, that brokers the Win32k calls to a separate process, that is outside of the Win32k API blocking, so the calls can succeed
• “From the first patch submitted in September 2015 to the final patch in June it took almost 10 months of effort to come up with a shipping mitigation. The fact that it’s had its first public success (and who knows how many non-public ones) shows that it was worth implementing this mitigation.”
• “In the latest version of Windows 10, Anniversary Edition, Microsoft have implemented a Win32k filter which makes it easier to reduce the attack surface without completely disabling all the system calls which might have sped up development. Microsoft are also taking pro-active effort to improve the Win32k code base.”

‘Avalanche’ Global Fraud Ring Dismantled

• “In what’s being billed as an unprecedented global law enforcement response to cybercrime, federal investigators in the United States, United Kingdom and Europe today say they’ve dismantled a sprawling cybercrime machine known as “Avalanche” — a distributed, cloud-hosting network that for the past seven years has been rented out to fraudsters for use in launching countless malware and phishing attacks.”
• “The Avalanche network was used as a delivery platform to launch and manage mass global malware attacks and money mule recruiting campaigns. It has caused an estimated EUR 6 million in damages in concentrated cyberattacks on online banking systems in Germany alone. In addition, the monetary losses associated with malware attacks conducted over the Avalanche network are estimated to be in the hundreds of millions of euros worldwide, although exact calculations are difficult due to the high number of malware families managed through the platform.”
• “The global effort to take down this network involved the crucial support of prosecutors and investigators from 30 countries. As a result, 5 individuals were arrested, 37 premises were searched, and 39 servers were seized. Victims of malware infections were identified in over 180 countries. Also, 221 servers were put offline through abuse notifications sent to the hosting providers. The operation marks the largest-ever use of sinkholing[1] to combat botnet[2] infrastructures and is unprecedented in its scale, with over 800 000 domains seized, sinkholed or blocked.”
• “Built as a criminal cloud-hosting environment that was rented out to scammers, spammers other ne’er-do-wells, Avalanche has been a major source of cybercrime for years. In 2009, when investigators say the fraud network first opened for business, Avalanche was responsible for funneling roughly two-thirds of all phishing attacks aimed at stealing usernames and passwords for bank and e-commerce sites. By 2011, Avalanche was being heavily used by crooks to deploy banking Trojans.”
• ““Cyber criminals rented the servers and through them launched and managed digital fraud campaigns, sending emails in bulk to infect computers with malware, ransomware and other malicious software that would steal users’ bank details and other personal data,” the NCA said in a statement released today on the takedown. The criminals used the stolen information for fraud or extortion. At its peak 17 different types of malware were hosted by the network, including major strains with names such as goznym, urlzone, pandabanker and loosemailsniffer. At least 500,000 computers around the world were infected and controlled by the Avalanche system on any given day.””
• “The Avalanche network was especially resilient because it relied on a hosting method known as fast-flux, a kind of round-robin technique that lets botnets hide phishing and malware delivery sites behind an ever-changing network of compromised systems acting as proxies.”
• By constantly changing addresses, it is hard for researchers and others to report the compromised hosts. Even when trying constant lookups, a researcher will only see a fraction of the actual hosts in the network.
• “It’s worth noting here that Avalanche has for many years been heavily favored by crime gangs to deploy Zeus and SpyEye malware variants involved in cleaning out bank accounts for a large number of small to mid-sized businesses. These attacks relied heavily on so-called “money mules,” people willingly or unwittingly recruited into helping fraudsters launder stolen funds.”
• “The Shadowserver Foundation, a non-profit organization of security professionals that assisted in what the organization described in a post on the takedown as an 18-month collaboration with law enforcement, described Avalanche as a “Double Fast Flux” botnet. Individual nodes within the botnet are registered and then quickly de-registered as the host associated with a Domain Name Service A address record for a single DNS name The destination addresses for a DNS record often change as quickly as once every 5 minutes, and can cycle through hundreds or thousands of IP addresses. And there are multiple domain names for command and control nodes hard-coded into the botnet malware, allowing the bots to switch to a different domain name if a specific domain is blocked.”
• Additional Coverage
• EuroPol Announcement
• EuroPol Technical Infographic

Meet the men who spy on women through their webcams

• The article describes some miscreants using RATs (Remote Administration Trojans) to control people’s computers, then using it to harass them and/or spy on them in various ways
• It describes a scenario of a ratter watching and taunting a victim. Trying to scare and shock them
• “See! That shit keeps popping up on my fucking computer!” says a blond woman as she leans back on a couch, bottle-feeding a baby on her lap.
• “The woman is visible from thousands of miles away on a hacker’s computer. The hacker has infected her machine with a remote administration tool (RAT) that gives him access to the woman’s screen, to her webcam, to her files, to her microphone. He watches her and the baby through a small control window open on his Windows PC, then he decides to have a little fun. He enters a series of shock and pornographic websites and watches them appear on the woman’s computer.”
• “The woman is startled. “Did it scare you?” she asks someone off camera. A young man steps into the webcam frame. “Yes,” he says. Both stare at the computer in horrified fascination. A picture of old naked men appears in their Web browser, then vanishes as a McAfee security product blocks a “dangerous site.””
• “Far away, the hacker opens his “Fun Manager” control panel, which provides a host of tools for messing with his RAT victims. He can hide their Windows “Start” button or the taskbar or the clock or the desktop, badly confusing many casual Windows users. He can have their computer speak to them. Instead, he settles for popping open the remote computer’s optical drive”
• “Copies of the incident aren’t hard to find. They’re on YouTube, along with thousands of other videos showing RAT controller (or “ratters,” as they will be called here) taunting, pranking, or toying with victims. But, of course, the kinds of people who watch others through their own webcams aren’t likely to limit themselves to these sorts of mere hijinks—not when computers store and webcams record far more intimate material.”
• “”Man I feel dirty looking at these pics,” wrote one forum poster at Hack Forums, one of the top “aboveground” hacking discussion sites on the Internet (it now has more than 23 million total posts). The poster was referencing a 134+ page thread filled with the images of female “slaves” surreptitiously snapped by hackers using the women’s own webcams. “Poor people think they are alone in their private homes, but have no idea they are the laughing stock on HackForums,” he continued. “It would be funny if one of these slaves venture into learning how to hack and comes across this thread.””
• “Whether this would in fact be “funny” is unlikely. RAT operators have nearly complete control over the computers they infect; they can (and do) browse people’s private pictures in search of erotic images to share with each other online. They even have strategies for watching where women store the photos most likely to be compromising.”
• I have always found people’s storage and organization strategies fascinating, especially for material they are trying to ‘hide in plain sight’
• “RAT tools aren’t new; the hacker group Cult of the Dead Cow famously released an early one called BackOrifice at the Defcon hacker convention in 1998. The lead author, who went by the alias Sir Dystic, called BackOrifice a tool designed for “remote tech support aid and employee monitoring and administering [of a Windows network].” But the Cult of the Dead Cow press release made clear that BackOrifice was meant to expose “Microsoft’s Swiss cheese approach to security.” Compared to today’s tools, BackOrifice was primitive. It could handle the basics, though: logging keystrokes, restarting the target machine, transferring files between computers, and snapping screenshots of the target computer.”
• “”I seem to get a lot of female slaves by spreading Sims 3 with a [RAT] server on torrent sites,” wrote one poster. Another turned to social media, where “I’ve been able to message random hot girls on facebook (0 mutual friends) and infect (usually become friends with them too); with the right words anything is possible.””
• “Calling most of these guys “hackers” does a real disservice to hackers everywhere; only minimal technical skill is now required to deploy a RAT and acquire slaves. Once infected, all the common RAT software provides a control panel view in which one can see all current slaves, their locations, and the status of their machines. With a few clicks, the operator can start watching the screen or webcam of any slave currently online.”
• “One of the biggest problems ratters face is the increasing prevalence of webcam lights that indicate when the camera is in use. Entire threads are devoted to bypassing the lights, which routinely worry RAT victims and often lead to the loss of slaves.”
• “Unfortunately she asked her boyfriend why the light on her cam kept coming on,” one RAT controller wrote. “And he knew, she never came back :)”
• “RATs can be entirely legitimate. Security companies have used them to help find and retrieve stolen laptops, for instance, and no one objects to similar remote login software such as LogMeIn. The developers behind RAT software generally describe their products as nothing more than tools which can be used for good and ill. And yet some tools have features that make them look a lot like they’re built with lawlessness in mind.”
• “RATs aren’t going away, despite the occasional intervention of the authorities. Too many exist, plenty of them are entirely legal, and source code is in the wild (a version of the Blackshades source leaked in 2010). Those who don’t want to end up being toyed with in a YouTube video are advised to take the same precautions that apply to most malware: use a solid anti-malware program, keep your operating system updated, and make sure plugins (especially Flash and Java) aren’t out of date. Don’t visit dodgy forums or buy dodgy items, don’t click dodgy attachments in e-mail, and don’t download dodgy torrents. Such steps won’t stop every attack, but they will foil many casual users looking to add a few more slaves to their collections.”
• “If you are unlucky enough to have your computer infected with a RAT, prepare to be sold or traded to the kind of person who enters forums to ask, “Can I get some slaves for my rat please? I got 2 bucks lol I will give it to you :b” At that point, the indignities you will suffer—and the horrific website images you may see—will be limited only by the imagination of that most terrifying person: a 14-year-old boy with an unsupervised Internet connection.”
• Honestly, this article was rather tame in its list of possibly things the ratters could do to you.
• To pay off webcam spies, Detroit kid pawns $100k in family jewels for $1,500

Feedback:

• OpenVPN Ciphers

• Participating in BSD / Linux Projects

• Encrypted Hard Drive

Round Up:

• Millions exposed to malvertising that hid attack code in banner pixels
• SysAdmin Advent Calendar
• Private Internet Access funds OpenVPN 2.4 audit by noted cryptographer Dr. Matthew Green
• 80 models of Sony security/IP cameras, many used in large enterprise, found to hard coded usernames “primana” and “debug”
• HP shutting down default FTP, Telnet access to network printers
• 6 of the 10 top vulnerabilities used in exploit kits in 2016 were in Flash — Exploit kits adopting the Adobe bug in the past year include Neutrino, Angler, Magnitude, RIG, Nuclear Pack, Spartan, and Hunter
• At least 10 million Android users imperiled by popular AirDroid app
• Crooks can guess Visa card details in six seconds by querying lots of websites at once
• Microsoft bringing full Windows 10 to ARM devices with Qualcomm partnership
• Lenovo: If you value your server, block Microsoft’s November security update
• Court: ‘Falsely’ Accused ‘Movie Pirate’ Deserves $17K Compensation
• The chatroom isn’t dead
• Announcing the AWS Canada (Central) Region
• TR-064: When Shoddy Implementations Come Back to Haunt You

The post Schoolhouse Exploits | TechSNAP 296 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Find out why everyone’s just a little disappointed in Badlock, the bad security that could be connected to the Panama Papers leak & the story of a simple delete command that took out an entire hosting provider.

Plus your batch of networking questions, our answers & a packed round up!

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• Get Paid to Write for DigitalOcean

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Show Notes:

Badlock vulnerability disclosed

• The badlock vulnerability was finally disclosed on Tuesday after 3 weeks of hype
• It turns out to not have been as big a deal as we were lead to believe
• The flaw was not in the SMB protocol itself, but in the related SAM and LSAD protocols
• The flaw itself is identified as https://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2016-2118
• It affects all versions of Samba clear back to 3.0
• “Samba 4.4.2, 4.3.8 and 4.2.11 Security Releases are available”
• “Please be aware that Samba 4.1 and below are therefore out of support, even for security fixes. There will be no official security releases for Samba 4.1 and below published by the Samba Team or SerNet (for EnterpriseSAMBA). We strongly advise users to upgrade to a supported release.”
• See the Samba Release Planning page for more details about support lifetime for each branch
• Microsoft releases MS16-047 but rated it only “Important”, not “Critical”
• The patch fixes an “elevation of privilege bug in both SAM and LSAD that could be exploited in a man-in-the-middle attack, forcing a downgrade of the authentication level of both channels. An attacker could then impersonate an authenticated user”
• Microsoft was also careful to note: “Only applications and products that use the SAM or LSAD remote protocols are affected by this issue. The SMB protocol is not vulnerable.”
• It seems most of the “badlock” bugs were actually in Samba itself, rather than the protocol as we were lead to believe
• “There are several MITM attacks that can be performed against a variety of protocols used by Samba. These would permit execution of arbitrary Samba network calls using the context of the intercepted user. Impact examples of intercepting administrator network traffic:”
• Samba AD server – view or modify secrets within an AD database, including user password hashes, or shutdown critical services.
• standard Samba server – modify user permissions on files or directories.
• There were also a number of related CVEs that are also fixed:
  • CVE-2015-5370 3.6.0 to 4.4.0: Errors in Samba DCE-RPC code can lead to denial of service (crashes and high cpu consumption) and man in the middle attacks. It is unlikely but not impossible to trigger remote code execution, which may result in an impersonation on the client side.
  • CVE-2016-2110 3.0.0 to 4.4.0: The feature negotiation of NTLMSSP is not downgrade protected. A man in the middle is able to clear even required flags, especially NTLMSSP_NEGOTIATE_SIGN and NTLMSSP_NEGOTIATE_SEAL. Which has implications on encrypted LDAP traffic.
  • CVE-2016-2111 3.0.0 to 4.4.0: When Samba is configured as Domain Controller it allows remote attackers to spoof the computer name of a secure channel’s endpoints, and obtain sensitive session information, by running a crafted application and leveraging the ability to sniff network traffic.
  • CVE-2016-2112 3.0.0 to 4.4.0: A man in the middle is able to downgrade LDAP connections to no integrity protection. It’s possible to attack client and server with this.
  • CVE-2016-2113 4.0.0 to 4.4.0: Man in the middle attacks are possible for client triggered LDAP connections (with ldaps://) and ncacn_http connections (with https://).
  • CVE-2016-2114 4.0.0 to 4.4.0: Due to a bug Samba doesn’t enforce required smb signing, even if explicitly configured. In addition the default for the active directory domain controller case was wrong.
  • CVE-2016-2115 3.0.0 to 4.4.0: The protection of DCERPC communication over ncacn_np (which is the default for most the file server related protocols) is inherited from the underlying SMB connection. Samba doesn’t enforce SMB signing for this kind of SMB connections by default, which makes man in the middle attacks possible.
• Additional Coverage: Threadpost – Badlock vulnerability falls flat against its type
• “As it turns out, Badlock was hardly the remote code execution monster many anticipated. Instead, it’s a man-in-the-middle and denial-of-service bug, allowing an attacker to elevate privileges or crash a Windows machine running Samba services.”
• “Red Hat security strategist Josh Bressers said Badlock could have been much worse, especially if it had turned out to be a memory corruption issue in SMB as some had surmised. Such a scenario would have cleared a path for remote code execution, for example.”
• Additional Coverage: sadlock.org

Panama Papers: Mossack Fonseca

• Eleven million documents were leaked from one of the world’s most secretive companies, Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca.
• They show how Mossack Fonseca has helped clients launder money, dodge sanctions and avoid tax.
• The documents show 12 current or former heads of state and at least 60 people linked to current or former world leaders in the data.
• Eleven million documents held by the Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca have been passed to German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung, which then shared them with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. BBC Panorama is among 107 media organisations – including UK newspaper the Guardian – in 76 countries which have been analysing the documents.
• There are many conspiracy theories about the source of the Panama Papers leak. One of the more prominent theories today blames the CIA.
• Bradley Birkenfeld is “the most significant financial whistleblower of all time,” and he has opinions about who’s responsible for leaking the Panama Papers rattling financial and political power centers around the world.
• Wikileaks is also getting attention today for blaming USAID and George Soros for the leaks.
• What little is known about the source of the leak comes from details published by German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung. Communicating via encrypted chat in late 2014, the source warned his or her life was “in danger” but that they had data from law firm Mossack Fonseca that they wanted to share. When asked how much data they had, the source replied “more than you have ever seen,” according to the newspaper.
• Regardless, the front-end computer systems of Mossack Fonseca are outdated and riddled with security flaws, analysis has revealed.
• Mossack Fonseca’s client portal is also vulnerable to the DROWN attack, a security exploit that targets servers supporting the obsolete and insecure SSL v2 protocol. The portal, which runs on the Drupal open source CMS, was last updated in August 2013, according to the site’s changelog.
• On its main website Mossack Fonseca claims its Client Information Portal provides a “secure online account” allowing customers to access “corporate information anywhere and everywhere”. The version of Drupal used by the portal has at least 25 vulnerabilities, including a high-risk SQL injection vulnerability that allows anyone to remotely execute arbitrary commands. Areas of the portal’s backend can also be accessed by guessing the URL structure, a security researcher noted.
• Mossack Fonseca’s webmail system, which runs on Microsoft’s Outlook Web Access, was last updated in 2009, while its main site runs a version of WordPress that is three months out of date. A further vulnerability makes it possible to easily access files uploaded to the backend of Mossack Fonseca’s site simply by guessing the URL.
• Mossack Fonseca’s emails were also not transport encrypted, according to privacy expert Christopher Soghoian who noted the company did not use the TLS security protocol.
• Who leaked the Panama Papers? A famous financial whistleblower says: CIA. / Boing Boing
• Wikileaks Accuses US Of Funding Panama Papers Putin Expose | The Daily Caller
• Panama Papers: The security flaws at the heart of Mossack Fonseca (Wired UK)
• Additional Coverage: The Register – Mossack Fonseca website found vulnerable to SQL injection
• Additional Coverage: Forbes
• Additional Coverage: WordFence
• Additional Coverage: Slashdot
• In general, it seems there were so many flaws in the website we may never know which one was used to compromise the server

I accidently rm -rf /’d, and destroyed my entire company

• “I run a small hosting provider with more or less 1535 customers and I use Ansible to automate some operations to be run on all servers. Last night I accidentally ran, on all servers, a Bash script with a rm -rf {foo}/{bar} with those variables undefined due to a bug in the code above this line.”
• “All servers got deleted and the offsite backups too because the remote storage was mounted just before by the same script (that is a backup maintenance script).
  How I can recover from a rm -rf / now in a timely manner?”
• There is not usually any easy way to recover from something like this
• That is why you need backups. Backups are not just a single copy of your files in another location, you need time series data, in case you need to go back more than the most recent backup
• It is usually best to not have your backups mounted directly, for exactly this reason
• Even if you will never rm -rf /, an attacker might run rm -rf /backup/*
• While cleaning up after an attacker attempted to use a Linux kernel exploit against my FreeBSD machine in 2003, I accidently rm -rf /’d in a roundabout way, Trying to remove a symlink to / that had a very funky name (part of the exploit iirc), i used tab complete, and instead of: rm -rf badname, it did rm -rf badname/, which deletes the target of the symlink, which was /.
• Obviously this was my fault for using -r for a symlink, since I only wanted to delete one thing
• When the command took too long, I got worried, and when I saw ‘can’t delete /sbin/init’, I panicked and aborted it with control+c
• Luckily, I had twice daily backups with bacula, to another server. 30 minutes later, everything was restored, and the server didn’t even require a reboot. The 100+ customers on the machine never noticed, since I stopped the rm before it hit /usr/home
• There are plenty of other examples of this same problem though
• Steam accidently deletes ALL of your files
• Bryan Cantrill tells a similiar story from the old SunOS days
• Discussion continues and talks about why rm -rf / is blocked by on SunOS and FreeBSD
• Additional Coverage: ServerFault
• When told to dd the drive to a file, to use testdisk to try to recover files, the user reports accidentally swapping if= and of=, which likely would just error out if the input file didn’t exist, but it might also mean that this entire thing is just a troll. Further evidence: rm -rf / usually doesn’t work on modern linux, without the –no-preserve-root flag

Feedback:

• NAS or SAN?
• Full SSD ZFS array

Round Up:

• “FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS” has been released as ebook for $9.99, print version in a few weeks
• Book features a fancy “Wrap Around” cover, the secret art not revealed yet
• How to not get pwned on Windows: Don’t run any virtual machines, open any web pages, Office docs, hyperlinks
• OpenWhisperSystems has integrated its Signal Protocol public key encryption systems into WhatsApp, now fully end-to-end encrypted with identity verification
• FBI bought previously undisclosed zeroday to crack the iPhone 5c
• After Apple claims to have fixed iOS 1970 bug in February, researchers demo a new remote version, bricks your device 20 minutes after connecting to their rouge WiFi, if your battery doesn’t catch fire first…
• 0-day exploits more than double as attackers prevail in security arms race
• Proving apps don’t take data security seriously, new website uses Tinder’s official API to let you spy on other users
• Google’s monthly Android update fixes Linux kernel flaw from 2014 that was being used to root Android devices
• Nest pulls the plug on the Resolv Hub, leaving owners who were promised a lifetime service subscription with a $299 paperweight
• The entire Turkish citizenship database appears to have been hacked and leaked online
• Python, Go, and PHP (before 5.6), failed to check for self-signed, expired, or worse revoked SSL certificates, also older versions may still accept RC4 and weak DH (logjam)
• Cellebrite, the company originally rumoured to have helped the FBI crack the iPhone, set to release a road side ‘textalyzer’, to determine if you were using your cell phone at the time of an accident
• Google’s new “BeyondCorp” security model, all networks are untrusted, users earn trust with good behaviour, devices earn trust with known good state
• All the resources in the world are not use if you don’t know how to use them

The post rm -rf $ALLTHETHINGS/ | TechSNAP 262 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Kaia is the CEO cofounder of keyboardio – premium ergonomic keyboard using open source and open hardware!

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Show Notes:

• Keyboardio: heirloom-grade keyboards for serious typists
• keyboardio (@keyboardio) | Twitter
• (1) Keyboardio
• Keyboardio (@keyboardio) • Instagram photos and videos
• Adafruit Industries, Unique & fun DIY electronics and kits
• Welcome to delightful, modern payroll | ZenPayroll
• HipChat – Private group chat, video chat, instant messaging for teams | HipChat
• Kaia Dekker (@quince) | Twitter

Transcription:

ANGELA: This is Women’s Tech Radio.
PAIGE: A show on the Jupiter Broadcasting Network, interviewing interesting women in technology. Exploring their roles and how they’re successful in technology careers. I’m Paige.
ANGELA: And I’m Angela.
PAIGE: So, Angela, today we’re interviewing Kaia, she is from Keyboardio, which is a badass software company that is trying to reinvent the way that we use keyboards, and we talked to her about the Kickstarter process, the open hardware process, the open software process, and how she got involved in all that, so it’s a really fascinating interview.
ANGELA: And before we get into that, I just want to mention that you can support Women’s Tech Radio and the Jupiter Broadcasting Network by going to Patreon.com/today. That is a general bucket of Jupiter Broadcasting support. We have a bunch of other shows, but specifically if you go there and you donate, it is also contributing to Women’s Tech Radio.
PAIGE: And we get started by asking Kaia what she’s up to in tech today.
KAIA: I am Kaia Dekker and I’m currently the co-founder and CEO of a company called Keyboardio. We make premium ergonomic keyboards that are also open hardware, so they’re super hackable. We give you the firmware source, we give you schematics for the electronics, and still are selling it fully assembled as a finished product, but at the same time, it’s also open hardware. So if you want to open it up and hack it, you can.
PAIGE: So, an open hardware keyboard. How did you get there?
KAIA: My co-founder who is also my husband had really bad wrists and cubital tunnel, like a repetitive stress injury from typing too much. He professionally had been a programmer for most of his life, and had tried out something like 20 or 30 different ergonomic keyboards, and none of them were really working for him. So he started out as sort of a hobby project trying to build his own that would be tailored specifically to him and have a working keyboard that wouldn’t make his wrists hurt too much. And he started sort of spending more time on this and I was just getting out of business school and was trying to kind of what I wanted to do next. I knew I didn’t want to go back to the companies that I had worked at before, but hey, we may be able to spin this into a business! And keyboards in particular were really interesting to me, mostly from a blank slate design perspective where it’s this thing that most of us are using for eight hours plus almost every day that we literally have our hands on every day. It’s a very intimate, long lasting relationship with an object, but it’s not something that had seen a lot of design or really thought put into the design. Innovation, the basic keyboard design, it’s based on what a typewriter looked like in the nineteenth century which was based on how you could build something in the nineteenth century. The technology has come a lot farther, the understanding of what makes for good design has come a lot farther, and there is no reason not to make something that would be better. So I was really attracted to the idea of being able to rethink this tool that we use all the time and what would it be like if you were to start over a little bit. We ended up with something, it’s a little weird, a little different. So the materials are different. We have an enclosure made out of wood as opposed to plastic or aluminum. The shape is really different. It’s based around originally research on different hand shapes and what keys people can reach easily, and iterated probably two dozen times before we ended up where we are today. It’s fully programmable, so it’s trying to be a little bit smarter as a piece of hardware as opposed to just sort of a dumb input device.
ANGELA: Right, and specifically one of the first things I pick up when I see your keyboard is that it’s the left and the right hand are separated. They’re broken in the middle if that makes sense. And we’ve seen Microsoft put out a keyboard like that, but what they did was they took a standard keyboard and just broke it in half essentially and moved it at an angle, whereas yours, the actual keys are placed differently with more focus on thumb work than any other keyboard that I’ve seen.
KAIA: Yeah, so we’ve put the keys in columns because that’s the way, if you look at your hands and sort of bend your fingers, they move in a column. They don’t move in a sort of strange diagonal method, the staggered layout of a traditional keyboard. And we’ve actually somewhat subtly arched them to follow the actual arch that your fingers make. It takes a bit of retraining to follow an ergonomic layout, but once you do, it just feels a lot more natural, which makes sense. It’s building something designed around how your hands work as opposed to just following the sort of cargo culting the same thing that we’ve done for a very long time.
ANGELA: Now, I have a question. It is reprogrammable, but when I was taking typing classes back in seventh and eighth grade, I learned some history about keyboards, and that is that they used to be in alphabetical order, and this may or may not be accurate.
PAIGE: It’s accurate.
ANGELA: Okay. And that it was scrambled onto the keyboard because people were too fast. They learned it, they knew the prediction of where the letters would be based on the alphabet was too fast, so they scrambled them up to slow people down because the technology couldn’t keep up. Well, I think technology can keep up now, and I am wondering have you, well, because it’s reprogrammable, I think anybody can change how the letters are, but have you done any specific keyboards with it in alphabetical order instead of scrambled?
KAIA: Yeah, so there are a lot of stories. It’s actually really fascinating the history of why people stuck with QWERTY when it isn’t a particularly good design. I still type QWERTY because I’ve been typing it for decades, and for me, learning a new layout wasn’t going to be enough faster, enough more efficient. For me the limiting factor isn’t usually how fast I can type, it’s how fast my brain goes. And so, until I learn how to think faster, I’m not going to worry too much about optimizing for speed. Definitely, some of the people we’ve had beta testing are people who used vorac or other alternative key layouts. There’s actually a very fascinating group of people who have a community online where they will basically track all of their key presses and then feed it into a program to figure out their own personal custom layout that minimizes finger movement. So you can have your own thing that’s completely different from anyone else’s. Otherwise, QWERTY is pretty standard. Vorac is pretty common, and then there is something sort of similar to vorac but based on a more recent and bigger purpose of data to figure out where to put the keys called culmac and that’s actually built into Mac OS and other things as well, so it’s pretty popular. Not as popular as vorac, and of course, not nearly as popular as qwerty, but those three plus one other alternative are built into the firmware by default, and then if you want to change what any particular key does, you are able to do that as well.
ANGELA: Now, if I go to keyboard.ao, there is a lot of information on here, and it shows the keyboard, but I’m wondering, what I don’t see is, and/or, are you planning to put out a ten key?
KAIA: We’ve thought about it. Right now we are just about to ink a contract for manufacturing our first product, the model one, which is what’s called a 60 percent keyboard. It doesn’t have a separate tenkey pad, and I think once we’ve got that produced, or a little further down the line, we’re going to really kind of look at the product road map and figure out what comes next. Right now we’re a small company and we don’t quite have the resources.
ANGELA: Honestly, if the keyboard were better and more functional, easier to reach the numbers, maybe ten key, maybe it would eliminate that need which I think is what Paige was kind of snobbily implying with her–you didn’t even comment, but you said you and your tenkeys or whatever.
PAIGE: I have a lot of friends that I’ve gotten into this argument, because I have friends who won’t buy laptops that don’t have tenkeys.
ANGELA: Well, you could always get a USB tenkey.
PAIGE: How often do you actually use a ten key?
ANGELA: That’s the thing, if your work is in numbers, it is very handy.
PAIGE: If you’re an accountant or something.
ANGELA: Well, even some things I do, I would really prefer a ten key, so I was just curious.
KAIA: We do have a numlock mode that turns kind of the right hand side into basically a ten key, which is definitely, I’m the one that gets stuck doing all of the accounting, and I switched to that for doing that. It’s easier.
PAIGE: That actually makes even more sense than a separate tenkey.
ANGELA: Yes, it does, you’re right.
PAIGE: So, you’ve been kind of on this journey. What was it like to go from kind of a business background kind of into this crazy tech world? You dove in deep. This is hardware, software, open source on both side, it’s a pretty complex crazy project.
KAIA: Yeah, I’ve never been one for just sticking my toe in. I’m kind of a jump all the way in kind of girl. I’d always been interested in tech. I went to a technology magnet focused high school and then I went to MIT which has a very strong engineering culture and a lot of people building things for fun on the weekends and in the evenings, and I’ve always followed that and been interested in that. I ended up sort of in business almost somewhat accidentally. I had been a physics major and undergrad and thought that I’d been sort of pushed that way by teachers and so on, and I thought okay, this is what I’ll do as a career. And then I sort of realized junior year that I didn’t have, one the type of mind that works really well doing physics research, and two, I didn’t really have the temperament to live an academic type of life. You need to be a type of person who can work by themselves and be very driven and work in a very hardworking, but in many ways, a very slow paced environment. That just wasn’t, I realized by that time, that wasn’t the kind of environment where I did my best work or where I was happiest. I preferred working with other people, like things that are much more fast paced, even if you’re working on something that’s not as fundamental as understanding new things about the universe, I’m just happier when I’m working on fast paced things with a lot of different people to bounce ideas off of and to learn from. So I kind of pivoted I guess into doing then technology investment banking which has paid very well, but I sort of left as soon as I got my first bonus check, and I did managing consulting for a while, and then software marketing, then ended up doing this. It’s interesting. There is definitely things that you get used to when you’re working for large companies or on behalf of very large companies that just don’t apply in the startup world where you have to learn to get by with a lot fewer resources when you’re a startup, and there’s no one a lot of times where you can go out and find the person in such and such department who knows about something because you are the such and such department.
PAIGE: You’re every department.
KAIA: Yeah, but it’s been great. We relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area which has been amazing just in terms of there is a community of hardware startups out here, and anything from you need to borrow a part last minute or getting someone to take a second look at your boards and trying to figure out why they’re not working or getting advice on how to choose a manufacturer, whether or not paying for a sourcing agent is worth it. Anything from the business end to a big architectural type decisions to just day to day prototyping help, like it’s been so amazing to be around so many really talented, really interesting people working on hardware. It’s really been amazing.
PAIGE: That’s really neat that the community would still play such a role. You would think hardware is so much more of a, I don’t know, a set thing, that there’s more like set ways to do it, but I think it’s just as mutable as software.
KAIA: It’s much more so now than it was 20 years ago or even five or ten years ago and I think it’s still shaking out a little bit. Historically, at least, hardware was something that took huge investment and had very low returns and was something that you could only do if you were a big company or had a lot of money. The prototyping phase of things has gotten so much easier with it being very accessible to have rapid prototyping technologies like 3D printing or laser cutters and CNC mills and so on being much more accessible due to things like tech shop or Hackerspaces where they have these machines available and let people from the community access them, to things like Arduino or teensy or other microcontrollers or environments where the first embedded programming is done for you, so you don’t really have to start from scratch, you can hook together things and do a quick prototype without having to put in quite as much of an investment as you used to. And things like Digikey or Adafruit where being able to access, I need ten of a part is very easy and affordable now, and you don’t have to buy an entire real component to get it, you can find pretty much any component you want and order it in pretty much any quantity that you want. So the prototyping phase is a lot easier.
PAIGE: Yeah, it’s like we’re finally catching up with hardware where we’ve been with software for a long time. Like we’re building these hardware frameworks almost that kind of piece together in a way that makes things fast, easy, and accessible. I’ve seen so many things around Portland or other places where it’s like hey, come over and work on Arduino’s for the day, and just seeing like little kids up to big adults playing with hardware for the first time is really fascinating.
KAIA: Yeah, it’s amazing. That’s one of the reasons we wanted to make our product open source was that getting people, like the moment, whenever you have a programming language that you’re learning and you get Hello World to work, and when it’s like your first time programming anything, it’s a really magical feeling that like I got the computer to do this thing, and when you do it in hardware, when you get a light pattern to flash up or do things like that, it’s even more magical. It’s a tangible piece of the world that you are controlling through the code that you’re writing and it’s a really, really awesome feeling.
PAIGE: Yeah, I totally agree. This winter I played with my Raspberry Pie and some relays for the first time and made some lights light up and it was like as inspiring as Hello World is. This was even more like woah!
KAIA: Yeah, and I think the question for hardware is like the prototyping phase, we’re finally catching up, and it’s getting from your first working prototype into production which is obviously not something that every project wants, but if you’re trying to build a company and build products, you do eventually have to make the change away from 3D printing and hooking things together with cables and Arduino and so on. You have to make a fundamental shift in the technologies you’re using to move to even small scale mass production, and that’s something where there is a bunch of different people trying to figure out how to make it easier and make it better. But it’s still just very complicated that there is, not only do you have all of these systems where the changes you make to your electrical layout are going to make your actual physical hardware layout change, and that involves, you might need to get mechanical engineering skill and electrical engineering skill and industrial design type of skill all involved just to make what seems like it should be a really small change, which I mean, that’s a hard problem. And then figuring out what does that do when you take it into production, how does that change things, and very small changes can make very big changes and very big costs down the line.
PAIGE: Your margin for error is very small.
KAIA: Yeah, and it’s something from software where I think people have gotten so used to Agile or other sort of sprints to make quick changes in small increments and keep building on that, and it’s not something that transfers over to hardware necessarily as well, which is frustrating to someone who likes being able to fool around and try different things and realizing that there is much more kind of top down planning you have to do is not necessarily how people have trained to do it.
PAIGE: Yeah, you have to give a pivot for polish.
KAIA: Yeah that’s a great way of putting it.
PAIGE: So, in that vein, you guys ran an amazingly successful Kickstarter, originally reaching for $120,000.00 goal, you hit $650. What was that like to go through? What are some of the challenges you’ve had afterwards or during? Can you talk to us a little bit about that?
KAIA: Sure. It was an amazing experience in Kickstarter. Especially as the person who ends up being in charge of the business stuff, there is always the primary question in my mind, and before we did the Kickstarter was like I think there is a market for this. We’ve got a bunch of people on our mailing list, people seem to think it’s really interesting, but does anyone actually want this? You don’t really trust that people will want a product until they put in their credit card number. So that was great and sort of took this thing that I’ve been worrying about for months and sort of just eliminated it really quickly. It’s like yeah, there are a lot of people who kind of get what we’re trying to do and see why we’re trying to do it that way. And yeah, the whole Kickstarter experience was really cool. We did a cross country road trip from Boston where we used to live to San Francisco and stopped at Makerspaces just about every day and did little meet ups talking about here is how you could build your own keyboard with the materials and tools that are in this Makerspace, and letting people put their hands on our product. It’s a somewhat weird and different product, and so being able to put your hands on it, actually see it, actually try it out is the time when a lot of people sort of get it for the first time, and it was also kind of a great way, like Kickstarter, or any crowdfunding is a lot of work where you have people writing you every day and you have to manage are you doing ads, and there is all this stuff you have to kind of manage and being able to have something that we were doing every day that took the focus away from–its hyper focused on this campaign, and let us look and see what people were doing at different Makerspaces was really cool. We were lucky that it was sort of something that was on grand for us that we are open hardware, we did come out of kind of a hobby maker type of place, but honestly, it’s always so cool to see like what people are making and what people are doing and talk to people who do cool things and put cool things together.
ANGELA: How big is your team? Is it just you and your husband and some 1099?
KAIA: Yeah, we’ve floated up and down. We don’t have quite enough work in any one discipline to have another full time person coming on, but we have had in the past full time contractors from–currently we have a friend of mine who is working on EE, and she is, I don’t know, it will be a couple of weeks contract probably. We’re pretty close to being done with the electrical, and we’ve had people helping out with industrial design and mechanical as well at different points in the past, so I think peak size would be like five people and sometimes it’s just the two of us.
PAIGE: This is fascinating, a very cool story. I don’t know, I was wondering, so you said there is kind of embedded software for this. Do you guys actually run an embedded processor in the keyboard? Like is there something it’s actually running on like Arduino, Lennox, or whatever?
KAIA: The chip is an Apple chip. It’s an 18 mega 30T4, which is the same thing that’s in an Arduino Leonardo, so it’s not technically an Arduino because we’re not buying a board from Arduino, but we’re what we call Arduino at heart where essentially what we’ve done is take the Arduino and squish it onto our own board and made a couple of little changes, but it’s compatible with the Arduino developer environment. So right now I can just pull up the Arduino ID, use it to make changes to the firmware and use that to flash the keyboard which is cool. When we were trying to decide which architecture to use, we had actually originally been using something else and ended up switching over to this branch of Arduino because you just, you’re going to have to have some kind of processor anyway, like why not pick one that has this huge ecosystem of other people writing code and making devices that are compatible with it.
PAIGE: That makes total sense. Making that approachable is huge. So just one final question for you before we get out of here. Oh, I have two actually. First, I would love to know what you work in day to day for tools. I love to know other people’s stacks like what kind of tools are you using. You mentioned the Arduino IDE. Is there anything else that kind of keeps you going day to day? Especially I’m always interested in the business stack because I don’t touch that most of the time.
KAIA: We do sort of a mix of ad hoc tools and otherwise available tools. I would say the most important tool that we use is slack, which I’m sure you hear a lot is great for communication both within our team, with investors and contractors.
PAIGE: I think that might have actually been one of the first–you might be the first person to bring slack up on the show.
KAIA: Okay. It’s a great tool. I’m happy to evangelize about it. it’s a team communication tool, and it’s an example of really good design where it sort of sets the norms for communication being friendly and kind of fun, but also very easy to–it’s designed by the team that had made flikr back in the day, or a lot of the same team anyway, and it’s really software sort of made with love.
PAIGE: It’s a fantastic tool. I’m in slack every day, and I agree. I think it’s interesting because in my mind, like as a super old nerd, it’s like IRC with user friendliness. But super useful.
KAIA: We use hackpad for a lot of other things that don’t quite fit into slack in terms of communication, so daily to do lists, we’ve tried out probably most of the tools that are out there like Trello and so on for keeping track of thing and product management type tools, and every time we sort of just end up reverting back to Excel or Google Sheets in terms of they don’t add enough–the complexity that they add doesn’t add enough value to be worth it. And then some of the more mundane things like for payroll and accounting and stuff, I use Zero and Zenpayroll and all these SAS providers which are great and definitely much easier to use than some of the things that I had been using even a couple of years ago.
PAIGE: That’s a neat stack. I like that–slack is very cool. I definitely encourage people to check that out. I actually just signed up for the, there is a, I’m pretty sure it’s just Women in Tech Slack. It’s an invite only, but you can apply for an invitation and then you get invited and the community has been really great so far. They are very friendly and there is a lot of resource sharing and just general helping each other out which has been really cool. And my last question, before we ramble on any more is, looking at the future of kind of what’s happening in technology–be it hardware or software–what gets you the most excited?
KAIA: I think the thing that excites me the most is the fact that there are companies out there that are taking things that we already have technologies for and really applying a lot of thought and design to them. I mean, slack is an example of that where Hipchat had been around there for a long time, IRC has been around for decades, but they aren’t adding a lot of new functionality, they’re just taking a user experience that hadn’t been very good and transforming it into something that’s awesome.
ANGELA: Sounds like Apple.
PAIGE: A lot of people make that argument for things like Airbnb. Really originally it was Craig’s List, but ten percent better.
ANGELA: And focused.
PAIGE: And focused, yeah, and Uber. Uber is just a cab service.
KAIA: Yeah, and that’s a trend, as a user I completely appreciate and it’s starting to come into more enterprise tools as well. We just put in a preorder for a Glowforge which is a laser cutter which is something that is a great tool to have, but traditionally it costs $10,000.00 and you’ve ended up spending about a third to a half of your time with it trying to fix problems with different issues with it, and they’re coming out with a laser cutter at a lower price point that is also supported by software that takes away a lot of the pain points of using this tool. This is something that is a prototyping tool, it’s not used by consumers for the most part, but they’re still taking that philosophy and applying it to that. I think people’s expectations in terms of design have come up a lot, and that’s an amazing thing.
ANGELA: Thank you for listening to this episode of Women’s Tech Radio. Remember you can go to JupiterBroadcasting.com for the show notes as well as a full transcription, and you can find us on Twitter @heywtr.
PAIGE: We’d love to hear what you think about the show. If you’d like to tell us, you can use the contact form on the website or email us at wtr@jupiterbroadcasting.com. You can also follow us on Twitter @heywtr. Thanks for listening.

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter | Transcription@cotterville.net

The post Keyboardio | WTR 44 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Adobe’s latest flaw has being exploited by an advanced persistent threat, we’ve got the details, Heartbleed follow ups, and getting started with Virtualization.

Plus our thoughts on the fate of net neutrality, your questions, our answers, and much much more!

On this week’s episode of TechSNAP!

Thanks to:

— Show Notes: —

Adobe releases patch for critical Flash flaw affecting all OSs

• A new exploit has been discovered that works against all versions of Adobe Flash Player
• This is a zero-day exploit, meaning that even a fully patched computer can be exploited
• Adobe has since released the fix, and users are encouraged to apply the patch as soon as possible
• The attack used two different exploits, one general exploit against Flash and the other exploiting a flaw in Internet Explorer
• One of the malware files was detected by Kaspersky using a heuristic signature, but the other was new
• The exploits slightly alter the attack methodology if Windows 8 or newer is detected, to work around mitigations provided by the OS
• The first bit of malware (movie.swf) was generic, downloading more malware from a URL and running it
• The second bit of malware (include.swf) was very specific, targeting “Cisco MeetingPlace Express Add-In version 5”
• “This add-in is used by web-conference participants to view documents and images from presenter\’s screen. It should be noted that the exploit will not work if the required versions of Adobe Flash Player ActiveX and Cisco MPE are not present on the system”
• This suggests that the malware was written with a very specific target in mind, rather than designed to target the general Internet
• The malware was hosted on an official Syrian government website, although it appears that the site may have been compromised to store the files there
• Kaspersky was not able to examine the payload of the second exploit because the files had already been taken down from the website, and there is evidence to suggest there was a 3rd payload (stream.swf)
• “We are sure that all these tricks were used in order to carry out malicious activity against a very specific group of users without attracting the attention of security solutions. We believe that the Cisco add-in mentioned above may be used to download/implement the payload as well as to spy directly on the infected computer.”
• “It\’s likely that the attack was carefully planned and that professionals of a pretty high caliber were behind it. The use of professionally written 0-day exploits that were used to infect a single resource testifies to this.”
• CVE-2015-0515
• Adobe Security Bulletin
• Additional Coverage – ARS Technica
• Additional Coverage – Krebs on Security
• Since IE uses a separate version of Flash from other browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Opera, etc), Windows users will need to apply the patch twice, one to their browser and once to IE, which is used as a component in many other applications including Skype and Steam

Exploit used in the wild against all versions of Internet Explorer 6 through 11

• As part of the same attack from the previous story, an exploit for all versions of Internet Explorer was found
• The exploit was used as part of a watering hole attack
• CVE-2014-1776
• This was to be the first of many 0day exploits that will not be fixed on Windows XP, however Microsoft issued a statement and released the update for Windows XP , inspite of the fact that it is no longer supported

[Heartbleed Followups]

• The heartbleed bug was used to attack and compromise a number of blackhat and underground forums – Many sites were compromised, upgraded OpenSSL but did not revoke SSL certificates or reset passwords
• US-CERT issues advisory warning business and users to update their Apple AirPort devices that are vulnerable to Heartbleed
• CERT has issued an advisory about the NetSSL library failing to properly validate wildcard certificates
• Whitehouse comments, says they did not know about Heartbleed before hand
• Even heartbleed can’t convince people to change their passwords and stop reusing passwords
• Android 4.1.1 has not received OpenSSL patches yet

Feedback:

• Kids WiFi

• Looking for virtualization advice

• XP in a VM

• What advice do you have to help tech geeks find their dream job?

• Suggestion for Brett for backup

• Mondo Rescue – Disaster recovery solution

Round-Up:

• Sony\’s 185TB data tape puts your hard drive to shame
• CERT issues advisory about Toshiba Point-of-Sales systems using weak hashing algorithm for passwords
• SanDisk Announces 4TB SSDs, 8TB & 16TB SSDs to Follow
• Phishers hack email accounts and divert home loan funds
• AOL Finally Admits They Were Hacked
• MIT students raise half million dollars to give every undergraduate student $100 in bitcoins next semester in an effort to build the first true cryptocurrency economy
• FCC chairman \’won\’t hesitate\’ to regulate broadband like a utility if proposed rules fail
• What the internet might look like without Net Neutrality
• Netflix researching “large-scale peer-to-peer technology” for streaming
• This trend shows with Net Neutrality is important — Sonic.net comments on net neutrality
• CISPA 3.0 introduced to the senate
• AT&T’s possible acquisition of DirecTV increases net neutrality concerns

The post Not Neutrality | TechSNAP 161 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

A zero day vulnerability takes down some major wikis, how Polish researchers hide secret messages in Skype’s silence.

Plus quitting your job and make your successors life a little easier, a war story, and a big batch of your questions, and our answers!

All that and more on this week’s TechSNAP!

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