Senator Asks DoD to Secure Its Websites
Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) on Tuesday asked the chief information officer at the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) to take immediate action to ensure that the organization’s websites use HTTPS. The senator noted that some of the DoD’s websites, such as the ones belonging to the NSA, the Army, and the Air Force, do use…
GitHub Exposed Passwords of Some Users
GitHub has instructed some users to reset their passwords after a bug caused internal logs to record passwords in plain text. Several users posted screenshots on Twitter of the security-related email they received from GitHub on Tuesday. The company told impacted customers that the incident was discovered during a regular audit. GitHub claims only a “small number”…
Over a Million Dasan Routers Vulnerable to Remote Hacking
Researchers have disclosed the details of two unpatched vulnerabilities that expose more than one million home routers made by South Korea-based Dasan Networks to remote hacker attacks. In a blog post published on Monday, vpnMentor revealed that many Gigabit-capable Passive Optical Network (GPON) routers, which are used to provide fiber-optic Internet, are affected by critical…
Why You Should Drop Everything and Enable Two-Factor Authentication Immediately
If you haven’t done so already after seeing the title of this article, please stop reading immediately and enable two-factor authentication (2FA) on every system and service you use that allows it. The reality is that no matter how strong your password is — even that 48-character one with uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and…
Tracking Malicious Insiders: Catch Me If You Can
The idea of malicious insiders stealing valuable assets brings to mind a picture of masked men breaking into a bank vault or museum and making a getaway with their illicit stash. But what if the enemy is one of us — someone who knows exactly where we keep our most valuable items, how we safeguard…
Young People May Shun Passwords, But That Doesn’t Mean They’re Less Identity-Conscious
Pity the poor password. Maligned for years, it’s nevertheless still hanging on as the dominant form of access and identity protection for online accounts of all types. Despite years of industrywide efforts to educate users about the importance of employing difficult-to-guess passwords, the list of the most frequently used passwords has changed little. One analysis of 10…
Beyond the Password Era: Changing Consumer Habits Signal the End Is Near
The death of the password has been rumored for years, but to this day it remains the primary way we identify ourselves online, with the average user now managing well over 100 accounts that require a password. Yet changing tides in the cybersecurity landscape, combined with evolving technology and consumer preferences, indicate that the end of…
Asus Router Flaws Disclosed by Several Researchers
Several security researchers and companies have recently disclosed the details of potentially serious vulnerabilities they discovered in the past months in various Asus routers. Fortinet reported on Tuesday that its researchers had found a vulnerability in some Asus routers that allows an authenticated attacker to execute arbitrary commands with root privileges.
Gemalto Licensing Tool Exposes ICS, Corporate Systems to Attacks
A significant number of industrial and corporate systems may be exposed to remote attacks due to the existence of more than a dozen vulnerabilities in a protection and licensing product from Gemalto. Gemalto Sentinel LDK is a software licensing solution used by many organizations worldwide on both their enterprise and industrial control systems (ICS) networks….
Can Biometrics Solve the Authentication Problem?
When Apple introduced the Touch ID fingerprint access button, commentators believed it would kick-start the ever-promising, never-quite-delivering biometric market. But Touch ID was defeated by hackers within days. When Apple introduced the FaceID biometric, the same happened – it was defeated within weeks. In November 2017, F-Secure demonstrated that Android’s Trusted Face Smart Lock can be defeated by…