comp527

A recent bug in Times Warner cable modem had caused the wireless admin site exposed to a potential hacker. About 65,000 users are affected by this. More details can be found here

The most amazing part of this is that the administrative portion was guarded off by JavaScript code. A simple toggling of JavaScript option exposed this vulnerability.

I admire David Chen for reporting this issue to the concerned authorities. His ethics would go a long way.

A question which always seems to pop off is ” How secure is wireless access?”. Ever since the first draft of 802.11 specifications, people have been able to exploit wireless networks easily.

A classic paper which uncovered the lame security aspects was “Intercepting Mobile Communications: The Insecurity of 802.11″ (link) . This paper showed some very simple tricks to attack wireless medium. It was an eye opener to the 802.11 committee who formed the very basis of the protocol.

In my opinion, we require a new framework to test these vulnerabilities. Even if the protocol is safe, there is some implementation problem. If the implementation is right, there is an issue with hardware and this chain keeps going on…

As most of you know, Windows 7 RTM is officially out as of yesterday. According to Gregg Keizer’s article, we do not need to buy full versions of Windows 7, instead we can just use the upgrade versions (which are considerably cheaper) for a clean install.

The hack is actually quite simple:

1. First we need to install Windows 7 from the upgrade DVD without entering a key.
2. After installing, we just need to change one registry key (1 to 0) and enter “slmgr /rearm” to command prompt.
3. After rebooting,  we can activate Windows with our upgrade key (before the hack, the key was not valid)

Actual details can be found in this blog. There was a similar (but more tedious) “install twice” hack for vista, now with Windows 7, it is even simpler.

Thank you again, Microsoft!

Tor is a system for users to communicate anonymously on the Internet, but in China, it is also a tool to break the restrictions provided by Great Firewall of China, a powerful censorship system which block lots of websites in and out of China.

There are some reports said that at the end of last month, most part of tor’s service was also blocked by GFC. Also on tor’s web page you can find the corresponding blog and data.

It was said that GFC blocked most of the directory servers of tor, thus a tor user cannot accesses them to get a list of available and trusted onion routers. The user can add bridges manually to avoid being blocked as long as he/she can get a list of them by other means.

“An election integrity advocacy group has found extensive voting machine source code in election databases that were provided in response to public records requests. The code, which powers Sequoia voting machines, is said to be a possible a violation of Federal Election Commission rules.”

It seems more evidence comes forward for not using the Sequoia voting machines.

For more info check  this out.

BitBucket, a major host of Mercurial repositories, experienced a major outage on October 2nd, preventing many users from accessing their online code repositories (thank goodness for DVCS). The situation has drawn the interest of many on the web because BitBucket is hosted on Amazon’s cloud computing services, EC2 and EBS. Indeed, this highlights one of the significant drawbacks of cloud computing services in that when things go wrong, direct access to your systems infrastructure simply isn’t possible. BitBucket wrangled with Amazon sales representatives and engineers to get them to admit there was a problem on Amazon’s side, which turned out to be a flood of UDP packets consuming all available bandwidth.

More can be read about the story in a BitBucket blog post found here.

Now gmail is attacked!, more than 30000 usernames and passwords have been posted online.
it was hotmail and now gmail.

source BBC

It seems that there has been a major Phishing attack on Hotmail accounts ( more than 10,000 accounts affected).

Furthermore, the passwords of users were posted online.

Beware, Be secure and avoid unwanted mails.

Read more of the news here.

Facebook on Thursday fended off an attack in which multiple identical profiles were created to spread malware.

Antivirus provider AVG Technologies said users of its LinkScanner service detected numerous profiles that were identical except with different names and each included a link to what was represented as a home video but which instead displayed a fake antivirus alert when clicked. The scams are designed to trick people into paying for software they don’t need, to get credit card information from victims for identity fraud purposes, and often to install spyware on the computer.

“Clearly, the Data Snatchers have found a way to automate the creation of Facebook accounts, which means they’ve found a way to bypass the Facebook Captcha,” Roger Thompson, chief of research at AVG, wrote in a blog post. Successfully translating a Captcha, a hard-to-read image of letters supposed to ensure that a human is involved, is required for a new account .

The malicious link was blacklisted by the major Web browsers and Facebook was blocking the URL from being shared on its site, said Facebook spokesman Simon Axten. Meanwhile, the company was working to identify all the fake accounts and disable them, he added.

Axten disagreed with the AVG speculation that the Captcha system had been broken.

“We’re looking into how these accounts were created, but it’s very likely that the sign-up process was manual, or that the person behind the attack farmed out the Captchas to be solved by humans for a price,” Axten wrote in an e-mail.

For its Captcha system Facebook uses ReCaptcha, “which was recently acquired by Google and is about as well-regarded a Captcha provider as there is,” he said.

From http://news.cnet.com/security/?tag=bc

As mentioned in class yesterday, I’ve set up a Trac bug reporting site for the Quiltwork project.

You can find it here: https://sys.cs.rice.edu/trac/comp527/f09/quiltwork

Your login credentials are the same as the ones you use for subversion access.

I do not know if this is really blog material or not, but i would just like to share with you that there is still places on earth that still do not know the true meaning of security, they make silly mistakes in their implementations and they usually got exploited for the wrong reasons.

Before even getting into the details of why it was hacked and by whom. If you just visit both websites you will find that the presidency website is under construction (Their response to the Hack :D) and the Defense ministry’s is a funny html website :) that is dated back to 2002!!!

The Hack was done by an Algerian Hacker called “Kader” in response to an Egyptian hacker who hacked an Algerian newspaper website.

Why is all that, it just because of soccer!, Egypt and Algeria have this important match in the World Cup Qualifiers.

So is it really a good motive to hack these important websites (although you will not find any important information on them!) for the sake of Soccer.

In the source link you may find more details and a video by the hacker, the videos has Arabic words if you want any help with that just tell me.

And btw i am an Egyptian !

Source