• Cybersecurity Research Shows Risks Continue to Rise [Ed: Sean Michael Kerner says that cybersecurity market will grow, according to the cybersecurity market]

• Oracle Improves Security, Performance in Java 11

• Another Linux Kernel Bug Surfaces, Allowing Root Access [Ed: Far less severe than back doors like Microsoft Windows back doors, which can be remotely exploited without even a local account on the target machine]

  A high-severity cache invalidation bug in the Linux kernel has been uncovered, which could allow an attacker to gain root privileges on the targeted system.

• Not allowed to code? Really?

  Lots of interesting, but not surprising, information is being made public about the Singhealth data breach.

  The Commitee of Inquiry has been told that there was an IHIS employee who found a bug in the Allscripts “Sunrise Clinic Manager” EMR in 2014 who then made the loophole known to a rival of Allscripts, Epic Systems Corporation. Both of these vendors products are closed, proprietary and, IMHO, unnecessarily and excessively expensive products.

  [...]

  If a bug is reported – whether it is a “the button is of the wrong shape” or “this option dumps out the entire database”, assuming that proprietary vendors have a bug reporting process – nope, they don’t – then things can be moved along without too much excitement. All software have bugs. If a vendor (open or closed) does not offer a way to report bugs, you have to demand that there is a way to do it. Red Hat has both bugzilla.redhat.com and access.redhat.com to submit bug reports on all of the open source projects and open source products (go here for an understanding of the differences between open source projects and an open source products) that Red Hat is involved in and makes available to paying customers (access.redhat.com).

  Maybe there is a some place at Allscripts and at Epic Systems that one can file bug reports, but it is not immediately evident.

Tomb is a free open source, small, powerful and simple tool for encrypting files on GNU/Linux. At the time of this writing, it comprises of a shell script (zsh) using generic filesystem GNU tools and the Linux kernel crypto API (cryptsetup and LUKS).

It also employs various GNU/Linux tools such as steghide, lsof, mlocate, resizefs, dcfld and many more, to extend its functionality.

Tomb is used to create secure backups of secret or personal files in encrypted, password-protected directories called tombs. These directories can only be opened using their associated keyfiles and passwords.

After creating a tomb, you can store its key files separately, for example your tomb file can exist on a remote server while the key file is on your laptop or desktop at home or in office. If the tomb file is on your laptop or desktop, you can hide it within the filesystem or as a more secure option, store the key in a USB drive.

• Security updates for Friday

• Facebook's been caught using their customers' 2FA information to spam them with text ads

  Just when you thought that Facebook couldn't get any more greasy, they have outdone themselves in a manner that places them well beyond even the most succulent of French Chef finger-kisses: the phone numbers that many folks gave them in order to activate the service's two-factor authentication protection? Zuckerberg and his crew are using it to serve up advertisements to unsuspecting users.

• Yes Facebook is using your 2FA phone number to target you with ads

  Facebook has confirmed it does in fact use phone numbers that users provided it for security purposes to also target them with ads.

  Specifically a phone number handed over for two factor authentication (2FA) — a security technique that adds a second layer of authentication to help keep accounts secure.

• Hacker [sic] to Live-Stream Attack on Zuckerberg’s Facebook Page

  Self-professed bug bounty-hunter Chang Chi-yuan, who ferrets out software flaws in return for cash, says he’ll live-stream an endeavor to delete the billionaire’s account at 6 p.m. local time from his own Facebook page. He didn’t get into details or respond to an online query.

• Defcon Voting Village report: bug in one system could “flip Electoral College”

  Today, six prominent information-security experts who took part in DEF CON's Voting Village in Las Vegas last month issued a report on vulnerabilities they had discovered in voting equipment and related computer systems. One vulnerability they discovered—in a high-speed vote-tabulating system used to count votes for entire counties in 23 states—could allow an attacker to remotely hijack the system over a network and alter the vote count, changing results for large blocks of voters. "Hacking just one of these machines could enable an attacker to flip the Electoral College and determine the outcome of a presidential election," the authors of the report warned.

• NSA Tools Used to Unleash Crypto Mining Malware by Hackers [Ed: More suitable headline would be, "Microsoft back doors Used to Unleash Crypto Mining Malware by Hackers"]

  Hackers are now using software developed by the US National Security Agency (NSA) to illicitly mine cryptocurrencies. According to a recent report released by the Cyber Threat Alliance (CTA), compiled by a collective of cyber-security experts from McAfee, Cisco Talos, NTT Security, Rapid7 and Sophos, among others, crypto mining malware detections have jumped to over 400 percent within the past one and a half years.

  Malicious actors are hijacking computer processor resources via internet network infrastructure intrusions, and computer hacks, among other means. One of the more worrying trends is the use of an NSA exploit leaked early last year by Shadow Brokers dubbed EternalBlue.

• LoJax: First UEFI rootkit found in the wild, courtesy of the Sednit group

  UEFI rootkits are widely viewed as extremely dangerous tools for implementing cyberattacks, as they are hard to detect and able to survive security measures such as operating system reinstallation and even a hard disk replacement. Some UEFI rootkits have been presented as proofs of concept; some are known to be at the disposal of (at least some) governmental agencies. However, no UEFI rootkit has ever been detected in the wild – until we discovered a campaign by the Sednit APT group that successfully deployed a malicious UEFI module on a victim’s system.

• 16-Year-Old Who Hacked Apple Servers Repeatedly Evades Prison

  A 16-year-old Australian teenager who repeatedly hacked Apple servers over a period of two years has evaded jail. He is set to serve a probation period of 8 months.

• Apple’s Device Enrollment Program Has A Security Flaw; Allows Hackers To Steal Company Passwords

  Researchers have found a security flaw in Apple’s Device Enrollment Program (DEP) that can allow an attacker to gain complete access to a corporate or school network.

• MDM Me Maybe: Device Enrollment Program Security

  The Device Enrollment Program (DEP) is a service provided by Apple for bootstrapping Mobile Device Management (MDM) enrollment of iOS, macOS, and tvOS devices. DEP hosts an internet-facing API at https://iprofiles.apple.com, which - among other things - is used by the cloudconfigurationd daemon on macOS systems to request DEP Activation Records and query whether a given device is registered in DEP.

  In our research, we found that in order to retrieve the DEP profile for an Apple device, the DEP service only requires the device serial number to be supplied to an undocumented DEP API. Additionally, we developed a method to instrument the cloudconfigurationd daemon to inject Apple device serial numbers of our choosing into the request sent to the DEP API. This allowed us to retrieve data specific to the device associated with the supplied serial number.

• ARMv8.5-A Support Being Prepped To Battle Spectre-Style Vulnerabilities

  Earlier this month Arm began publishing details of the ARMv8.5-A instruction set update, which is expected to be officially documented and released by the end of Q1'2019, while the LLVM compiler stack has already received initial support for the interesting additions.

  Landing yesterday in LLVM Git/SVN is the new ARMv8.5-A target while hitting the tree today is the more interesting work.