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Security: Data Breaches, Apple, and DRM Threats

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Friday 9th of February 2018 11:22:45 AM Filed under

Security

Data breach law: primary concern is information security, says expert

The primary concern for businesses after the Australian data breach law takes effect on 22 February will be information security, as without that in place, it will not be possible to protect personal information, an expert in cyber security and law says.
Apple confirms source code for iBoot leaked to GitHub

Apple has confirmed that the source code for iBoot from a version of iOS was posted on GitHub on Thursday, with the company forced to make the admission as it filed a DMCA takedown request to the hosting site.
Warning hackers quick to bypass anti-virus walls in latest attacks

Anti-virus software doesn’t stop new threats or advanced malicious-email attacks.as hackers use scam emails to deliver new ‘fast-break’ or ‘zero-day’ attacks, according to security firm MailGuard.
Thousands of students affected in online data leak

According to Helsingin Sanomat the leak was due to an online security breach on the servers of the matriculation examination board's website. Approximately 7,695 students have fallen victim to the leak.
EFF vs IoT DRM, OMG!

What with the $400 juicers and the NSFW smart fridges, the Internet of Things has arrived at that point in the hype cycle midway between "bottom line" and "punchline." Hype and jokes aside, the reality is that fully featured computers capable of running any program are getting cheaper and more powerful and smaller with no end in sight, and the gadgets in our lives are transforming from dumb hunks of electronics to computers in fancy cases that are variously labeled "car" or "pacemaker" or "Alexa."

We don't know which designs and products will be successful in the market, but we're dead certain that banning people from talking about flaws in existing designs and trying to fix those flaws will make all the Internet of Things' problems worse.

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The Spectre/Meltdown Performance Impact On Linux 4.20, Decimating Benchmarks With New STIBP Overhead

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Fedora: Flatpak, PHP Builds, Ansible and NeuroFedora

Flatpak – a solution to the Linux desktop packaging problem

In hindsight I must say the situation was not as bad as I thought on the server level: Linux in the data center grew and grew. Packaging simply did not matter that much because admins were used to problems deploying applications on servers anyway and they had the proper knowledge (and time) to tackle challenges. Additionally, the recent rise of container technologies like Docker had a massive impact: it made deploying of apps much easier and added other benefits like sandboxing, detailed access permissions, clearer responsibilities especially with dev and ops teams involved, and less dependency hell problems. Together with Kubernetes it seems as there is an actual standard evolving of how software is deployed on Linux servers. To summarize, in the server ecosystem things never were as bad, and are quite good these days. Given that Azure serves more Linux servers than Windows servers there are reasons to believe that Linux is these days the dominant server platform and that Windows is more and more becoming a niche platform.
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Back in September Code Sourcery / Mentor Graphics posted the Radeon GCC back-end they have been developing with the cooperation of AMD. This is for allowing the GCC compiler to eventually offload nicely to Radeon GPUs with its different programming languages and supported parallel programming models, particularly with OpenMP and OpenACC in mind. But for now this patch series just works with single-threaded C and Fortran programs. The second version of this port was posted for review. Hitting the GCC mailing list on Friday was the updated version of this AMD GCN port targeting Tonga/Fiji through Vega graphics hardware. Code Sourcery will post the OpenACC/OpenMP support bits at a later date while for now the code works with single-threaded C/Fortran programs with C++ not yet supported, among other initial shortcomings. For now the AMDGPU LLVM back-end is far more mature in comparison, which is what's currently used by the open-source AMD Linux driver compute and graphics stacks.
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Security: Japan's Top Cybersecurity Official, SuperCooKey, Information Breach on HealthCare.gov

Security News This Week: Japan's Top Cybersecurity Official Has Never Used a Computer
SuperCooKey – A SuperCookie Built Into TLS 1.2 and 1.3

TLS 1.3 has a heavily touted feature called 0-RTT that has been paraded by CloudFlare as a huge speed benefit to users because it allows sessions to be resumed quickly from previous visits. This immediately raised an eyebrow for me because this means that full negotiation is not taking place.

After more research, I’ve discovered that 0-RTT does skip renegotiation steps that involve generating new keys.

This means that every time 0-RTT is used, the server knows that you’ve been to the site before, and it knows all associated IPs and sign-in credentials attached to that particular key.
Information Breach on HealthCare.gov

In October 2018, a breach occurred within the Marketplace system used by agents and brokers. This breach allowed inappropriate access to the personal information of approximately 75,000 people who are listed on Marketplace applications.