CCTV Installations

Earlier this month I spoke at a cybersecurity conference in Albany, N.Y. alongside Tony Sager , senior vice president and chief evangelist at the Center for Internet Security and a former bug hunter at the U.S. National Security Agency . We talked at length about many issues, including supply chain security, and I asked Sager whether he’d heard anything about rumors that Supermicro — a high tech firm in San Jose, Calif. — had allegedly inserted hardware backdoors in technology sold to a number of American companies. Tony Sager, senior vice president and chief evangelist at the Center for Internet Security. The event Sager and I spoke at was prior to the publication of Bloomberg Businessweek ‘s controversial story alleging that Supermicro had duped almost 30 companies into buying backdoored hardware. Sager said he hadn’t heard anything about Supermicro specifically, but we chatted at length about the challenges of policing the technology supply chain . Below are some excerp...

Microsoft this week released software updates to fix roughly 50 security problems with various versions of its Windows operating system and related software, including one flaw that is already being exploited and another for which exploit code is publicly available. The zero-day bug — CVE-2018-8453 — affects Windows versions 7, 8.1, 10 and Server 2008, 2012, 2016 and 2019. According to security firm Ivanti , an attacker first needs to log into the operating system, but then can exploit this vulnerability to gain administrator privileges. Another vulnerability patched on Tuesday — CVE-2018-8423 — was publicly disclosed last month along with sample exploit code. This flaw involves a component shipped on all Windows machines and used by a number of programs, and could be exploited by getting a user to open a specially-crafted file — such as a booby-trapped Microsoft Office document. KrebsOnSecurity has frequently suggested that Windows users wait a day or two after Microsoft relea...

What do we do with a company that regularly pumps metric tons of virtual toxic sludge onto the Internet and yet refuses to clean up their act? If ever there were a technology giant that deserved to be named and shamed for polluting the Web, it is Xiongmai — a Chinese maker of electronic parts that power a huge percentage of cheap digital video recorders (DVRs) and Internet-connected security cameras. A rendering of Xiongmai’s center in Hangzhou, China. Source: xiongmaitech.com In late 2016, the world witnessed the sheer disruptive power of Mirai , a powerful botnet strain fueled by Internet of Things (IoT) devices like DVRs and IP cameras that were put online with factory-default passwords and other poor security settings . Security experts soon discovered that a majority of Mirai-infected devices were chiefly composed of components made by Xiongmai (a.k.a. Hangzhou Xiongmai Technology Co., Ltd. ) and a handful of other Chinese tech firms that seemed to have a history of pla...

From time to time, there emerge cybersecurity stories of such potential impact that they have the effect of making all other security concerns seem minuscule and trifling by comparison. Yesterday was one of those times. Bloomberg   Businessweek on Thursday published a bombshell  investigation alleging that Chinese cyber spies had used a U.S.-based tech firm to secretly embed tiny computer chips into electronic devices purchased and used by almost 30 different companies. There aren’t any corroborating accounts of this scoop so far, but it is both fascinating and terrifying to look at why threats to the global technology supply chain can be so difficult to detect, verify and counter. In the context of computer and Internet security, supply chain security refers to the challenge of validating that a given piece of electronics — and by extension the software that powers those computing parts — does not include any extraneous or fraudulent components beyond what was specified by ...

A ridiculous number of companies are exposing some or all of their proprietary and customer data by putting it in the cloud without any kind of authentication needed to read, alter or destroy it. When cybercriminals are the first to discover these missteps, usually the outcome is a demand for money in return for the stolen data. But when these screw-ups are unearthed by security professionals seeking to make a name for themselves, the resulting publicity often can leave the breached organization wishing they’d instead been quietly extorted by anonymous crooks. Last week, I was on a train from New York to Washington, D.C. when I received a phone call from Vinny Troia , a security researcher who runs a startup in Missouri called NightLion Security . Troia had discovered that All American Entertainment , a speaker bureau which represents a number of celebrities who also can be hired to do public speaking, had exposed thousands of speaking contracts via an unsecured Amazon cloud instance...

Most of us have been trained to be wary of clicking on links and attachments that arrive in emails unexpected, but it’s easy to forget scam artists are constantly dreaming up innovations that put a new shine on old-fashioned telephone-based phishing scams. Think you’re too smart to fall for one? Think again: Even technology experts are getting taken in by some of the more recent schemes (or very nearly). Matt Haughey is the creator of the community Weblog MetaFilter and a writer at Slack . Haughey banks at a small Portland credit union, and last week he got a call on his mobile phone from an 800-number that matched the number his credit union uses. Actually, he got three calls from the same number in rapid succession. He ignored the first two, letting them both go to voicemail. But he picked up on the third call, thinking it must be something urgent and important. After all, his credit union had rarely ever called him. Haughey said he was greeted by a female voice who explained t...

Facebook said today some 90 million of its users may get forcibly logged out of their accounts after the company fixed a rather glaring security vulnerability in its Web site that may have let attackers hijack user profiles. In a short blog post published this afternoon, Facebook said hackers have been exploiting a vulnerability in Facebook’s site code that impacted a feature called “View As,” which lets users see how their profile appears to other people. “This allowed them to steal Facebook access tokens which they could then use to take over people’s accounts,” Facebook wrote. “Access tokens are the equivalent of digital keys that keep people logged in to Facebook so they don’t need to re-enter their password every time they use the app.” Facebook said it was removing the insecure “View As” feature, and resetting the access tokens of 50 million accounts that the company said it knows were affected, as well as the tokens for another 40 million users that may have been impacted o...

The U.S. Secret Service is warning financial institutions about a recent uptick in a form of ATM skimming that involves cutting cupcake-sized holes in a cash machine and then using a combination of magnets and medical devices to siphon customer account data directly from the card reader inside the ATM. According to a non-public alert distributed to banks this week and shared with KrebsOnSecurity by a financial industry source, the Secret Service has received multiple reports about a complex form of skimming that often takes thieves days to implement. This type of attack, sometimes called ATM “wiretapping” or “eavesdropping,” starts when thieves use a drill to make a relatively large hole in the front of a cash machine. The hole is then concealed by a metal faceplate, or perhaps a decal featuring the bank’s logo or boilerplate instructions on how to use the ATM. A thin metal faceplate is often used to conceal the hole drilled into the front of the ATM. The PIN pad shield pictured ...