Antivirus software giant Avast has announced that it will wind down one of its subsidiary businesses just days after leaked documents revealed the extent to which the Czech company was selling users' browsing data to third parties. From a report: On Monday, Vice and PCMag published details about how Avast had been collating browsing data covering web properties such as Google Maps and Search, LinkedIn, and YouTube and then repackaging it for sale under a subsidiary called Jumpshot, which has claimed clients such as Google, Microsoft, Yelp, Pepsi, Home Depot, and Conde Nast. Although the data was not thought to contain any personally identifiable information, it is often possible to "de-anonymize" data by combining and aligning it with different data sets to unearth shared patterns. Jumpshot was founded back in 2010 but officially launched from a Kickstarter-funded project in 2012. In its original guise, Jumpshot offered a PC-based software that promised to rid machines of viruses, spyware, and the like, and the company was eventually bought by Avast.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The U.S. Department of the Interior has confirmed it has grounded its fleet of non-emergency drones amid concerns over cybersecurity. In a brief statement, the department said the move will help to ensure that "the technology used for these operations is such that it will not compromise our national security interests." Interior spokesperson Carol Danko said the department affirms with a formal order the "temporary cessation of non-emergency drones while we ensure that cybersecurity, technology and domestic production concerns are adequately addressed," months after the department said it was grounding its approximately 800 drones. But the drones will still be used for emergency purposes, such as search and rescue and assisting with natural disasters, the statement said.

The order did not specifically mention threats from China, but said that information collected during drone missions "has the potential to be valuable to foreign entities, organizations, and governments." Danko told TechCrunch that the department currently has 121 drones made by DJI and 665 drones that are Chinese-built but not made by DJI. She added that 24 drones are made in the U.S. but have Chinese components. "The review is to help us identify and assess any potential threats or risks," said Danko.

Matt Warman, the minister for digital and broadband in the UK, writes: From washing machines and children's toys to personal assistants, we are increasingly seeing more of our daily lives connected to the internet. In fact, research suggests by 2025 there will be 75 billion internet connected devices in homes around the world. However, the current security standards of many of these devices are low and the security and privacy risks are too great. Last week, for example, the usernames and for more 500,000 devices including Internet of Things (IoT) products were made available online.

Our aim is to make the UK the world's leading digital economy. But if we are to achieve this ambition we need to make sure people trust technology. I believe we can do this through pro-innovation regulation. So today I've announced we are developing new legislation to hold firms manufacturing and stocking internet-connected devices to account to stop hackers threatening people's privacy and safety. These new laws will mean consumers are protected from devices which do not adhere to the three rigorous security requirements we've developed alongside a code of conduct. These measures will mean all the passwords pre-programmed in internet-connected devices must be unique and not resettable to any universal factory setting.

harrymcc writes: New legislation in Russia -- known as the 'law against Apple' -- mandates that smartphone makers must preinstall government apps that will give authorities access to an array of information about the phone's user. Apple, not surprisingly, is trying to wriggle its way out of complying. But whatever happens, it's another case of an authoritarian government pushing around a U.S. tech company for very un-democratic reasons. Over at Fast Company, Josh Nadeau reports on the issue and why the stakes are so high.

Sophisticated hackers infiltrated U.N. offices in Geneva and Vienna last year in an apparent espionage operation, and their identity and the extent of the data they obtained is unknown. From a report: An internal confidential document from the United Nations, leaked to The New Humanitarian and seen by The Associated Press, says dozens of servers were compromised including at the U.N. human rights office, which collects sensitive data and has often been a lightning rod of criticism from autocratic governments for exposing rights abuses. Asked about the report, one U.N. official told the AP that the hack appeared "sophisticated" and that the extent of the damage remained unclear, especially in terms of personal, secret or compromising information that may have been stolen. The official, who spoke only on condition of anonymity to speak freely about the episode, said systems have since been reinforced. The skill level was so high it is possible a state-backed actor might have been behind it, the official said.

"It's as if someone were walking in the sand, and swept up their tracks with a broom afterward," the official said. "There's not even a trace of a clean-up." The leaked Sept. 20 report says logs that would have betrayed the hackers' activities inside the U.N. networks -- what was accessed and what may have been siphoned out -- were "cleared." It also shows that among accounts known to have been accessed were those of domain administrators -- who by default have master access to all user accounts in their purview. "Sadly ... still counting our casualties," the report says.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google has paid out over $21 million since launching its bug bounty program in November 2010. In the past year alone, the company distributed $6.5 million to 461 different security researchers, almost double the previous record set in 2018: $3.4 million to 317 different security researchers. Bug bounty programs motivate individuals and hacker groups to not only find flaws but disclose them properly, instead of using them maliciously or selling them to parties that will. Rewarding security researchers with bounties costs peanuts compared to paying for a serious security snafu.

The German government is in possession of evidence that Huawei, the leading maker of telecoms network equipment, has collaborated with Chinese intelligence, the Handelsblatt daily reported on Wednesday. Reuters: "At the end of 2019, intelligence was passed to us by the U.S., according to which Huawei is proven to have been cooperating with China's security authorities," the newspaper quoted a confidential foreign ministry document as saying. Chancellor Angela Merkel's government and her conservative ruling party are split on whether Huawei's equipment poses a security threat to Europe's largest economy, where the three mobile network operators are all customers of the Chinese firm.

chicksdaddy writes: The Security Ledger is reporting that more than 50 Emergency Alert System (EAS) devices made by Monroe Electronics (now Digital Alert Systems) are un-patched and accessible from the public Internet, seven years after security researchers alerted the public about security flaws in the devices. More than 50 EAS deployments across the United States still use a shared SSH key, a security vulnerability first discovered and reported by IOActive in 2013, according to a warning posted by the security researcher Shawn Merdinger on January 19, seven years after the initial vulnerability report was issued.

Security Ledger viewed the exposed web interfaces for Monroe/Digital Alerts Systems EAS hardware used by two FM broadcasters in Texas and an exposed EAS belonging to a broadband cable provider in North Carolina. Also publicly accessible: EAS systems for two stations (FM and AM) serving the Island of Hawaii. Residents there received a false EAS alert about an incoming ICBM in 2018. That incident was found to be the result of human error but prompted the FCC to issue new guidance about securing EAS systems. Digital Alert Systems said it is aware of the problem and is contacting the customers whose gear is exposed. However, a search using the Shodan search engine suggests that few have taken steps to remove their EAS systems from the public Internet in the past week. Security Ledger is withholding the names of the broadcasters whose EAS systems were exposed for security reasons. None of the stations contacted for the story was able to provide comment prior to publication.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Krebs on Security: In late December 2019, fuel and convenience store chain Wawa said a nine-month-long breach of its payment card processing systems may have led to the theft of card data from customers who visited any of its 850 locations nationwide. Now, fraud experts say the first batch of card data stolen from Wawa customers is being sold at one of the underground's most popular crime shops, which claims to have 30 million records to peddle from a new nationwide breach.

On the evening of Monday, Jan. 27, a popular fraud bazaar known as Joker's Stash began selling card data from "a new huge nationwide breach" that purportedly includes more than 30 million card accounts issued by thousands of financial institutions across 40+ U.S. states. Two sources that work closely with financial institutions nationwide tell KrebsOnSecurity the new batch of cards that went on sale Monday evening -- dubbed "BIGBADABOOM-III" by Joker's Stash -- map squarely back to cardholder purchases at Wawa. A spokesperson for Wawa confirmed that the company today became aware of reports of criminal attempts to sell some customer payment card information potentially involved in the data security incident announced by Wawa on December 19, 2019. "We have alerted our payment card processor, payment card brands, and card issuers to heighten fraud monitoring activities to help further protect any customer information," Wawa said in a statement released to KrebsOnSecurity. "We continue to work closely with federal law enforcement in connection with their ongoing investigation to determine the scope of the disclosure of Wawa-specific customer payment card data."

"We continue to encourage our customers to remain vigilant in reviewing charges on their payment card statements and to promptly report any unauthorized use to the bank or financial institution that issued their payment card by calling the number on the back of the card," the statement continues. "Under federal law and card company rules, customers who notify their payment card issuer in a timely manner of fraudulent charges will not be responsible for those charges. In the unlikely event any individual customer who has promptly notified their card issuer of fraudulent charges related to this incident is not reimbursed, Wawa will work with them to reimburse them for those charges."

A security flaw in LabCorp's website exposed thousands of medical documents, like test results containing sensitive health data. From a report: It's the second incident in the past year after LabCorp said in June that 7.7 million patients had been affected by a credit card data breach of a third-party payments processor. The breach also hit several other laboratory testing companies, including Quest Diagnostics. This latest security lapse was caused by a vulnerability on a part of LabCorp's website, understood to host the company's internal customer relationship management system. Although the system appeared to be protected with a password, the part of the website designed to pull patient files from the back-end system was left exposed. That unprotected web address was visible to search engines and was later cached by Google, making it accessible to anyone who knew where to look. The cached search result only returned one document -- a document containing a patient's health information. But changing and incrementing the document number in the web address made it possible to access other documents. The bug is now fixed.

The organizers of the DEF CON cyber-security conference have announced today that they are putting this year's China edition "on hold" due to the ongoing Wuhan coronavirus (2019-nCoV) outbreak. From a report: "China has announced a six-month hold on events like ours as part of the effort to combat the coronavirus outbreak," the DEF CON team said in a forum post today. DEF CON is one of the Top 3 most prestigious cyber-security conferences today. The conference is held each year in Las Vegas, in the month of August. The Chinese edition of the DEF CON conference, which would have reached its second edition this year, was set to take place in Beijing between April 17 and April 19. Organizers said they are currently putting the DEF CON China 2.0 conference on hold, but have not officially canceled the event.

Britain will allow Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei to play a limited role in its next generation 5G mobile networks. From a report: The U.K. government said that Huawei will be restricted from being involved in "sensitive functions" in a network of features labeled as "core." There is also a limit in place on how much equipment networks can buy from one "high risk vendor" for a particular part of the infrastructure known as the Radio Access Network (RAN.) This is essentially the part of the network that hooks up your devices with the actual 5G signal. That cap is set at 35%. "The cap at 35% ensures the U.K. will not become nationally dependent on a high risk vendor while retaining competition in the market and allowing operators to continue to use two Radio Access Network (RAN) vendors," the U.K.'s National Cyber Security Centre said in its review of the country's telecommunications supply chain on Tuesday.

A proposed law introduced in Maryland's state senate last week would criminalize the possession of ransomware and other criminal activities with a computer. However, CEO of Luta Security Katie Moussouris warns that the current bill "would prohibit vulnerability disclosure unless the specific systems or data accessed by the helpful security researcher were explicitly authorized ahead of time and would prohibit public disclosure if the reports were ignored." Ars Technica reports: The bill, Senate Bill 3, covers a lot of ground already covered by U.S. Federal law. But it classifies the mere possession of ransomware as a misdemeanor punishable by up to 10 years of imprisonment and a fine of up to $10,000. The bill also states (in all capital letters in the draft) that "THIS PARAGRAPH DOES NOT APPLY TO THE USE OF RANSOMWARE FOR RESEARCH PURPOSES."

Additionally, the bill would outlaw unauthorized intentional access or attempts to access "all or part of a computer network, computer control language, computer, computer software, computer system, computer service, or computer database; or copy, attempt to copy, possess, or attempt to possess the contents of all or part of a computer database accessed." It also would criminalize under Maryland law any act intended to "cause the malfunction or interrupt the operation of all or any part" of a network, the computers on it, or their software and data, or "possess, identify, or attempt to identify a valid access code; or publicize or distribute a valid access code to an unauthorized person." There are no research exclusions in the bill for these provisions. "While access or attempted access would be a misdemeanor (punishable by a fine of $1,000, three years of imprisonment, or both), breaching databases would be a felony if damages were determined to be greater than $10,000 -- punishable by a sentence of up to 10 years, a fine of $10,000, or both," the report adds. "The punishments go up if systems belonging to the state government, electric and gas utilities, or public utilities are involved, with up to 10 years of imprisonment and a $25,000 fine if more than $50,000 in damage is done."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: For the third time in less than a year, Intel has disclosed a new set of vulnerabilities related to the speculative functionality of its processors. On Monday, the company said it will issue a software update "in the coming weeks" that will fix two more microarchitectural data sampling (MDS) or Zombieload flaws. This latest update comes after the company released two separate patches in May and November of last year.

Compared to the MDS flaws Intel addressed in those two previous patches, these latest ones have a couple of limitations. To start, one of the vulnerabilities, L1DES, doesn't work on Intel's more recent chips. Moreover, a hacker can't execute the attack using a web browser. Intel also says it's "not aware" of anyone taking advantage of the flaws outside of the lab. In response to complaints of the company's piecemeal approach, Intel said that it has taken significant steps to reduce the danger the flaws represent to its processors.

"Since May 2019, starting with Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS), and then in November with TAA, we and our system software partners have released mitigations that have cumulatively and substantially reduced the overall attack surface for these types of issues," a spokesperson for the company said. "We continue to conduct research in this area -- internally, and in conjunction with the external research community."

Malicious cryptocurrency miners took control of Bitcoin Gold's blockchain recently to double-spend $72,000 worth of BTG. The Next Web reports: Bad actors assumed a majority of the network's processing power (hash rate) to re-organize the blockchain twice between Thursday and Friday last week: the first netted attackers 1,900 BTG ($19,000), and the second roughly 5,267 BTG ($53,000). Cryptocurrency developer James Lovejoy estimates the miners spent just $1,200 to perform each of the attacks, based on prices from hash rate marketplace NiceHash. This marks the second and third times Bitcoin Gold has suffered such incidents in two years.

Any entity that controls more than 51 percent of a blockchain's hash rate can decide what version of the blockchain is accepted (or rejected) by the network. These scenarios also allow for "double-spending," attacks that initiate a transaction with intent to quickly reverse it by "re-organizing" the blockchain, so that they can spend their original cryptocurrency again. What results is a third party accepting the original transaction and the network returns the cryptocurrency spent to the attacker, essentially allowing their funds to be used twice -- hence the name "double-spending." With Bitcoin, a transaction is generally deemed legitimate once found six blocks deep in the blockchain. These particular 51-percent attackers performed re-organizations up to 16 blocks deep, seemingly in a bid to trick exchanges like Binance into paying out BTG destined to be double-spent.

Sweeping cyberattacks targeting governments and other organizations in Europe and the Middle East are believed to be the work of hackers acting in the interests of the Turkish government, Reuters reported Monday, citing three senior Western security officials said. From the report: The hackers have attacked at least 30 organizations, including government ministries, embassies and security services as well as companies and other groups, according to a Reuters review of public internet records. Victims have included Cypriot and Greek government email services and the Iraqi government's national security advisor, the records show. The attacks involve intercepting internet traffic to victim websites, potentially enabling hackers to obtain illicit access to the networks of government bodies and other organizations. According to two British officials and one U.S. official, the activity bears the hallmarks of a state-backed cyber espionage operation conducted to advance Turkish interests. The officials said that conclusion was based on three elements: the identities and locations of the victims, which included governments of countries that are geopolitically significant to Turkey; similarities to previous attacks that they say used infrastructure registered from Turkey; and information contained in confidential intelligence assessments that they declined to detail.

Mark Wycislik-Wilson, writing for BetaNews: Some Windows 7 users who installed the KB4534310 update found that their desktops turned black. With the operating system having now reached end of life, the company said that it would only make a fix available to organizations paying for Windows 7 Extended Security Updates (ESU). But Microsoft has changed its mind. It now says that it will make a patch available for all Windows 7 users, addressing the bug introduced by the last ever freely available Windows 7 update. As we reported the other day, Microsoft had already suggested some workarounds for the black desktop problem. The company had said that it was working on a fix that would be released next month: "We are working on a resolution and estimate a solution will be available in mid-February for organizations who have purchased Windows 7 Extended Security Updates (ESU)."

Over the past two weeks, Mozilla's add-on review team has banned 197 Firefox add-ons that were caught executing malicious code, stealing user data, or using obfuscation to hide their source code. From a report: The add-ons have been banned and removed from the Mozilla Add-on (AMO) portal to prevent new installs, but they've also been disabled in the browsers of the users who already installed them. The bulk of the ban was levied on 129 add-ons developed by 2Ring, a provider of B2B software. The ban was enforced because the add-ons were downloading and executing code from a remote server. According to Mozilla's rules, add-ons must self-contain all their code, and not download code dynamically from remote locations. Mozilla has recently begun strictly enforcing this rule across its entire add-on ecosystem. A similar ban for downloading and executing remote code in users' Firefox browsers was also levied against six add-ons developed by Tamo Junto Caixa, and three add-ons that were deemed fake premium products (their names were not shared).

An antivirus program used by hundreds of millions of people around the world is selling highly sensitive web browsing data to many of the world's biggest companies, a joint investigation by Motherboard and PCMag has found. From the report: Our report relies on leaked user data, contracts, and other company documents that show the sale of this data is both highly sensitive and is in many cases supposed to remain confidential between the company selling the data and the clients purchasing it. The documents, from a subsidiary of the antivirus giant Avast called Jumpshot, shine new light on the secretive sale and supply chain of peoples' internet browsing histories. They show that the Avast antivirus program installed on a person's computer collects data, and that Jumpshot repackages it into various different products that are then sold to many of the largest companies in the world. Some past, present, and potential clients include Google, Yelp, Microsoft, McKinsey, Pepsi, Sephora, Home Depot, Conde Nast, Intuit, and many others. Some clients paid millions of dollars for products that include a so-called "All Clicks Feed," which can track user behavior, clicks, and movement across websites in highly precise detail.

secwatcher writes: When it comes to the release of proof-of-concept (PoC) exploits, more security experts agree that the positives outweigh the negatives, according to a recent and informal Threatpost poll.

In fact, almost 60 percent of 230 security pundits thought it was a "good idea" to publish PoC code for zero days. Up to 38 percent of respondents, meanwhile, argued it wasn't a good idea.
Dr. Richard Gold, head of security engineering at Digital Shadows, told Threatpost that PoC code makes it easier for security teams to do penetration testing: "Rather than having to rely on vendor notifications or software version number comparisons, a PoC allows the direct verification of whether a particular system is exploitable," Gold told Threatpost. "This ability to independently verify an issue allows organizations to better understand their exposure and make more informed decisions about remediation." In fact, up to 85 percent of respondents said that the release of PoC code acts as an "effective motivator" to push companies to patch. Seventy-nine percent say that the disclosure of a PoC exploit has been "instrumental" in preventing an attack. And, 85 percent of respondents said that a PoC code release is acceptable if a vendor won't fix a bug in a timely manner...

On the flip-side of the argument, many argue that the release of the Citrix PoC exploits were a bad idea. They say attacks attempting to exploit the vulnerability skyrocketed as bad actors rushed to exploit the vulnerabilities before they are patched... Matt Thaxton, senior consultant at Crypsis Group, thinks that the "ultimate function of a PoC is to lower the bar for others to begin making use of the exploit... In many cases, PoC's are put out largely for the notoriety/fame of the publisher and for the developer to 'flex' their abilities...."

This issue of a PoC exploit timeline also brings up important questions around patch management for companies dealing with the fallout of publicly-released code. Some, like Thaxton, say that PoC exploit advocates fail to recognize the complexity of patching large environments: "I believe the release of PoC code functions more like an implied threat to anyone that doesn't patch: 'You'd better patch . . . or else,'" he said "This kind of threat would likely be unacceptable outside of the infosec world. This is even more obvious when PoCs are released before or alongside a patch for the vulnerability."
And Joseph Carson, chief security scientist at Thycotic, tells them "Let's be realistic, once a zero-day is known, it is only a matter of time before nation states and cybercriminals are abusing them."