browser Archives - IT Security Guru

UK spooks snarf everything through Karma Police system

The Gurus — Mon, 28 Sep 2015 09:09:32 +0000

UK SPY AGENCY GCHQ has been accused of being even more nosey, a Radiohead fan, and of being a bit of a nuisance when it comes to privacy.
GCHQ has excelled itself in the snooping stakes, according to a report on The Intercept, a news site that is close to Edward Snowden, and thus close to this kind of revelation.
The report said, quite simply, that the aim of the Karma Police system is to “record the website browsing habits of every visible user on the internet”. The suggestion is that this includes everything from radio shows to adult websites.
We have asked GCHQ about this, but we suspect that it was already aware of the interest. The department replied rather quickly, saying in an official statement that this is not the sort of thing that it talks about or condones.

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Eleven security flaws found in popular internet browsers

The Gurus — Fri, 14 Aug 2015 09:16:46 +0000

Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing developed a new cyber security analysis method that discovered 11 previously unknown Internet browser security flaws. Their findings were honored with the Internet Defense Prize, an award presented by Facebook in partnership with USENIX this week at the 24th USENIX Security Symposium.

Their research, “Type Casting Verification: Stopping an Emerging Attack Vector,” explores vulnerabilities in C++ programs (such as Chrome and Firefox) that result from “bad casting” or “type confusion.” Bad casting enables an attacker to corrupt the memory in a browser so that it follows a malicious logic instead of proper instructions. The researchers developed a new, proprietary detection tool called CAVER to catch them. CAVER is a run-time detection tool with 7.6 percent — 64.6 percent overhead on browser performance (Chrome and Firefox, respectively). The 11 vulnerabilities identified by Georgia Tech have been confirmed and fixed by vendors.
“It is time for the Internet community to start addressing the more difficult, deeper security problems,” says Wenke Lee, professor in the School of Computer Science and an adviser to the team. “The security research community has been working on various ways to detect and fix memory safety bugs for decades, and have made progress on ‘stack overflow’ and ‘heap overflow’ bugs, but these have now become relatively easy problems. Our work studied the much harder and deeper bugs — in particular ‘use-after-free’ and ‘bad casting’ — and our tools discovered serious security bugs in widely used software, such as Firefox and libstdc++. We are grateful to Facebook for this recognition.”

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More than 50% of malvertisements hosted on news and entertainment sites

The Gurus — Thu, 30 Jul 2015 10:25:58 +0000

Bromium Threat Report Identifies Security Risks of Popular Websites and Software
News and entertainment websites unknowingly host more than 50 percent of malvertisments; Flash exploits increase 60 percent and ransomware increases 80 percent since 2014
Bromium®, Inc., the pioneer of threat isolation to prevent data breaches, today announced the publication of “Endpoint Exploitation Trends 1H 2015,” a Bromium Labs research report that analyzes the ongoing security risk of popular websites and software. The report highlights that more than 50 percent of malvertising is unknowingly hosted on news and entertainment websites, Flash exploits have increased 60 percent in the past six months and the growth of ransomware families has doubled each year since 2013.
“For the last couple years, Internet Explorer was the source of the most exploits, but before that it was Java, and now it is Flash; what we are witnessing is that security risk is a constant, but it is only the name that changes,” said Rahul Kashyap, SVP and chief security architect, Bromium. “Hackers continue to innovate new exploits, new evasion techniques and even new forms of malware – recently ransomware – preying on the most popular websites and commonly used software.”
Key findings from “Endpoint Exploitation Trends 1H 2015” include:

News and Entertainment Websites Hotbed for Malvertising — More than 58 percent of malvertisments (online advertisements with hidden malware) were delivered through news websites (32 percent) and entertainment websites (26 percent); notable websites unknowingly hosting malvertising included cbsnews.com, nbcsports.com, weather.com, boston.com and viralnova.com.
Attackers Targeting Flash — During the first six months of 2015, Flash experienced eight exploits, an increase of 60 percent since 2014, when there were five exploits. Most active exploit kits are now serving Flash exploits, potentially impacting a large number of Internet users, given the ubiquity of Adobe Flash.
Continuous Growth of Ransomware — In the first six months of 2015, nine new ransomware families emerged: CoinVault, TeslaCrypt, Cryptofortress, PClock, AlphaCrypt, El-Polocker, CoinVault 2.0, Locker and TOX; this is an 80 percent increase from 2014 and represents a significant growth in ransomware since 2013, when there were only two ransomware families: Cryptolocker and Cryptowall. Ransomware continues to grow, as cybercriminals realize it is a lucrative form of attack.
Malware Evasion Avoids Detection — Bromium Labs analyzed malware evasion technology and found it is rapidly evolving to bypass even the latest detection techniques deployed by organizations, including antivirus, host intrusion prevention systems (HIPS), honeypots, behavioral analysis, network filters and network intrusion detection systems (NIDS).

Download “Endpoint Exploitation Trends 1H 2015” – www.bromium.com/sites/default/files/rpt-threat-report-1h2015-us-en.pdf

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BT broadband in broad-based brownout and TITSUP incidents

The Gurus — Wed, 29 Jul 2015 09:19:27 +0000

If you can’t reach a chum in the UK, chances are they’ve fallen victim to a substantial outage that’s hit BT’s voice and broadband services. Or a Total Inability To Support Usual Performance (TITSUP) incident.
The carrier appears to be suffering from two issues, the first reported to us by Reg readers Colin and Neil who’ve complained of very slow downloads, difficulties accessing the Web, dropped packets galore and traceroutes that don’t make it past the home gateway.
A glance at the carrier’s service status page omits mention of the slow access problem, but does reveal 15 outstanding issues including one that’s hitting over 40 communities from Manchester to Newquay.
BT says “A small number of our customers in the areas shown below, may experience a loss of telephone and/or broadband services. We hope to have service restored as quickly as possible and apologise for any inconvenience this may be causing. Services can be affected by a variety of reasons such as damage caused by 3rd parties or cable theft.”

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Whitehat's Aviator browser now available in Windows beta

The Gurus — Fri, 28 Mar 2014 11:15:14 +0000

Whitehat Security has announced that it has launched a version of its Aviator for Windows.

Now available in Beta, the company said that this was the most requested feature since the Mac version was launched last October, which has seen “tens of thousands of downloads”

Robert Hansen, director of product management at WhiteHat Security, said: “Outside of keeping our blog and Twitter followers up-to-date since its release in October, we have done little-to-nothing to get attention for Aviator. There has been no marketing or sales resources invested in Aviator. Despite this, we’ve gotten tens of thousands of downloads with our Mac OSX version, and that number has been growing rapidly as the world takes notice.

“Now the obvious next question everyone will ask is ‘when do I get a version for XYZ operating system?’ While we know this is highly important to a lot of our users, we have to balance that with a number of other features — which leads us to perhaps the second most-asked question ‘how are you making money on Aviator?’ The answer is, right now we aren’t. Therefore, some of our efforts will also be directed towards determining how to sell this in a way that does not involve profiting from our users’ information as many other browsers are in the unfortunate business of doing. As the saying goes, ‘if you aren’t paying for it, you’re the product’.”

In an interview with IT Security Guru, Hansen said that the browser was developed after it needed to look at websites in a safe environment internally “to do what we saw as a major hole in the security industry around browsers to identify and fix in browsers what are the most common attack vectors”.

Asked if this was a deliberate issue to fix issues where other browsers had missed out, Hansen said he and his colleagues had told major browser vendors about problems and the issue was what to do about it.

“The biggest problem that we found with the browser companies was not knowledge, talent or expertise or anything like that; it was the business part as they make it hard for people to protect their privacy, as they are paid when a user’s privacy is given to an advertiser through advertising systems and that simple fact is that one thing leads to all kinds of downstream security problems,” he said.

Hansen said that it has plans to support a number of additional operating systems and has plans for exciting features on the horizon.

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Kaspersky Lab Launches Safe Browser for Windows Phone

The Gurus — Fri, 28 Feb 2014 16:36:21 +0000

Many mobile device users are still not aware that they are just as vulnerable to cybercrime on their smartphones as they are on their PCs. in response, Kaspersky Lab has today launched the free Kaspersky Safe Browser for Windows Phone app to safeguard web surfing on smartphones running Microsoft’s mobile OS. The application is now available for download from Windows Phone Store.
The new browser boasts protection against phishing, a widespread threat that affects PCs and mobile devices alike. It also blocks links to content that may be harmful. The application receives information about malicious sites in real time from the anti-phishing database in the cloud-based Kaspersky Security Network. This allows the application to block even those phishing pages that have only recently appeared on the Internet.
Victor Yablokov, Head of Mobile Product Line at Kaspersky Lab, commented: “Smartphones are becoming an essential part of modern life and the web browser is one of the most popular features. People use them for all sorts of things. However, even the most tech-savvy web user may sometimes struggle to distinguish fake sites from the real thing. Now, Kaspersky Safe Browser for Windows Phone is here to help, providing automatic protection against fraudulent and inappropriate sites.”
In addition to blocking phishing links, the application makes it possible to filter web resources according to their content. Users can choose which categories of sites should be blocked, such as pornographic sites, pages containing obscene words or scenes of violence, gaming sites, social networking sites, etc.

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