Operation n

It looks like everyone is jumping on the home router attacks bandwagon. Zulfikar Ramzan restates his definition of drive-by pharming where it “It allows attackers to create a Web page that, simply when viewed, results in substantive configuration changes to your home broadband router or wireless access point.” There are some examples in there including attacks against the standard router used in Mexico. A combination of flaws in the router allow the reconfiguration of the router to point to a rogue DNS server, which can point to a popular/trusted website to an ip address of host of an attacker. All this comes with the recent findings that the BT home hubs had an authentication bypass vulnerability (requiring an user to click a malicious link) found by gnucitizen.

This highlights the need to be very weary off anything you can get free. Public terminals at Heathrow airport allowed attackers to install software (keyloggers, backdoors, trojans, etc). RedOracle were informed by an Italian hacker (prego) and passed it on to the terminals’ owners, Spectrum Interactive. They have provided full information advisory.

I’ve been browsing through a PCI Compliance book. This gives a good approach on how to secure your framework if nothing else. Of course you can get yourself PCI compliant but there have been a few teething problems, changes and some countries can’t keep up with PCI. From a testing point of view, it usually is a scan but testing companies don’t tend to see the overall picture unless they are a Qualified Security Auditor (QSA) company.

We are off to Liverpool now. The home of 2005 European champions of football. There has been recent spate of burglaries to a number of Liverpool of players. So much so they are considering to hire a security company to protect their worldly possessions. All this is happening due to a simple fact that the team were playing away from home and of course the players are not home! That’s all the information needed for this attack!
It begs the question, how much information do you need to harm someone. On this evidence, not very much! Simply knowing someone’s whereabouts and what they have maybe good enough. And that’s nothing much confidential right there!

Wikipedia is the well-known free content encyclopedia, which allows anyone in the world to edit, update and modify data. As a consequence, the information at wikipedia may be wrong and can be misleading as an education resource.

As mentioned anyone can “edit” content. Some can be done anonymously. But there have been situations where controversial content have been modified/removed anonymously. That’s where Wikiscanner comes in. This scanner can identify who/where/how often an IP address is modifying content. Conversely,
Wikileaks claim they can ensure that any content (controversial or not) can be placed anonymously and be protected.