JustAnotherOldGuy shares a report from Boing Boing: Early versions of the free/open Unix variant BSD came with password files that included hashed passwords for such Unix luminaries as Dennis Ritchie, Stephen R. Bourne, Eric Schmidt, Brian W. Kernighan and Stuart Feldman. Leah Neukirchen recovered an BSD version 3 source tree and revealed that she was able to crack many of the weak passwords used by the equally weak hashing algorithm from those bygone days.

Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie's was "dmac," Bourne's was "bourne," Schmidt's was "wendy!!!" (his wife's name), Feldman's was "axlotl," and Kernighan's was "/.,/.,." Four more passwords were cracked by Arthur Krewat: Ozalp Babaolu's was "12ucdort," Howard Katseff's was "graduat;," Tom London's was "..pnn521," Bob Fabry's was "561cml.." and Ken Thompson's was "p/q2-q4!" (chess notation for a common opening move). BSD 3 used Descrypt for password hashing, which limited passwords to eight characters, salted with 12 bits of entropy.

Not a great start to the day for Cisco employees, many of which are struggling in the face of an internal IT outage. From a report: The technology and networking giant confirmed in a tweet it was "aware of some disruption" to its IT systems and is "working" on restoring the network. Worse, the company's corporate blog also went kaput. For a period, Cisco's blog was displaying the default WordPress install page. But at the time of publication, the blog had been restored. Some customers were unable to login through Cisco's single sign-on.

itwbennett shares a report from CSO: iTerm2 users: It's time to upgrade. A security audit sponsored by the Mozilla Open Source Support Program uncovered a critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in the popular open-source terminal app for macOS. ITerm2 is an open-source alternative to the built-in macOS Terminal app, which allows users to interact with the command-line shell. Terminal apps are commonly used by system administrators, developers and IT staff in general, including security teams, for a variety of tasks and day-to-day operations.

The iTerm2 app is a popular choice on macOS because it has features and allows customizations that the built-in Terminal doesn't, which is why the Mozilla Open Source Support Program (MOSS) decided to sponsor a code audit for it. The MOSS was created in the wake of the critical and wide-impact Heartbleed vulnerability in OpenSSL with the goal of sponsoring security audits for widely used open-source technologies. The flaw, which is now tracked as CVE-2019-9535, has existed in iTerm2 for the past seven years and is located in the tmux integration. Tmux is a terminal multiplexer that allows running multiple sessions in the same terminal window by splitting the terminal screen. The flaw was fixed in iTerm2 version 3.3.6, which was released today.

An anonymous reader writes: The Tor Project has removed from its network this week more than 800 servers that were running outdated and end-of-life (EOL) versions of the Tor software. The removed servers represent roughly 13.5% of the 6,000+ servers that currently comprise the Tor network and help anonymize traffic for users across the world. Roughly 750 of the removed servers represent Tor middle relays, and 62 are exit relays -- where users exit the Tor network onto the world wide web after having their true location hidden through the Tor network. The organization said it plans to release a Tor software update in November that will natively reject connections with EOL Tor server versions by default, without any intervention from the Tor Project staff. "Until then, we will reject around 800 obsolete relays using their fingerprints," the Tor Project said in a statement this week.

Governments breaking encryption is bad, and "will get worse once breaking encryption means people can die," says one of the world's leading security experts. From a report: "Australia has some pretty draconian laws about forcing tech companies to break security," says cryptographer and computer security professional Bruce Schneier. He's referring to the controversial Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Act 2018, which came into force in December. "I actually don't like that, because stuff that you do flows downhill to the US. So stop doing that," he told the Australian Cybersecurity Conference, or CyberCon, in Melbourne on Wednesday. Schneier's argument against breaking encrypted communications is simple. "You have to make a choice. Either everyone gets to spy, or no one gets to spy. You can't have 'We get to spy, you don't.' That's not the way the tech works," he said. "As this tech becomes more critical to life, we simply have to believe, accept, that securing it is more important than leaving it insecure so you can eavesdrop on the bad guys."

Senator Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) introduced a bill, dubbed the Protecting Privacy in our Homes Act, that would require tech companies to include a label on products disclosing the presence of internet-connected microphones or cameras. "The proposed law does not define what kind of labels would need to be appended but rather would order the Federal Trade Commission to put in place specific regulations 'under which each covered manufacturer shall be required to include on the packaging of each covered device manufactured by the covered manufacturer a notice that a camera or microphone is a component of the covered device,'" reports Ars Technica. From the report: "Consumers face a number of challenges when it comes to their privacy, but they shouldn't have a challenge figuring out if a device they buy has a camera or microphone embedded into it," Gardner said. "This legislation is about consumer information, consumer empowerment, and making sure we're doing everything we can to protect consumer privacy." Most products that ship with cameras or microphones included tout the inclusion of such recording devices as a selling point, which could make this kind of regulation feel redundant at best. That said, there's quite a difference between "most" and "all." A rule such as the regulation Gardner proposes would close the gap that, for example, led owners of Nest Secure devices to the unpleasant discovery earlier this year that the products had shipped with undisclosed microphones.

D-Link won't patch a critical unauthenticated command-injection vulnerability in its routers that could allow an attacker to remotely take over the devices and execute code. Threatpost reports: The vulnerability (CVE-2019-16920) exists in the latest firmware for the DIR-655, DIR-866L, DIR-652 and DHP-1565 products, which are Wi-Fi routers for the home market. D-Link last week told Fortinet's FortiGuard Labs, which first discovered the issue in September, that all four of them are end-of-life and no longer sold or supported by the vendor (however, the models are still available as new via third-party sellers). The root cause of the vulnerability, according to Fortinet, is a lack of a sanity check for arbitrary commands that are executed by the native command-execution function. Fortinet describes this as a "typical security pitfall suffered by many firmware manufacturers." With no patch available, affected users should upgrade their devices as soon as possible.

doconnor writes: On the Mozilla Thunderbird blog it was announced that for the future Thunderbird 78 release, planned for summer 2020, they will add built-in functionality for email encryption and digital signatures using the OpenPGP standard. This addresses a feature request opened on Bugzilla almost 20 years ago and has been one of the top voted bugs for most of that period.

A bipartisan panel of U.S. senators Tuesday called for sweeping action by Congress, the White House and Silicon Valley to ensure social media sites aren't used to interfere in the coming presidential election, delivering a sobering assessment about the weaknesses that Russian operatives exploited in the 2016 campaign. From a report: The Senate Intelligence Committee, a Republican-led panel that has been investigating foreign electoral interference for more than two and a half years, said in blunt language that Russians worked to damage Democrat Hillary Clinton while bolstering Republican Donald Trump -- and made clear that fresh rounds of interference are likely ahead of the 2020 vote. "Russia is waging an information warfare campaign against the U.S. that didn't start and didn't end with the 2016 election," said Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), the committee's chairman. "Their goal is broader: to sow societal discord and erode public confidence in the machinery of government. By flooding social media with false reports, conspiracy theories, and trolls, and by exploiting existing divisions, Russia is trying to breed distrust of our democratic institutions and our fellow Americans." Though the 85-page report itself had extensive redactions, in the visible sections lawmakers urged their peers in Congress to act, including through the potential adoption of new regulations that would make who bought an ad more transparent. The report also called on the White House and the executive branch to adopt a more forceful, public role, warning Americans about the ways in which dangerous misinformation can spread while creating new teams within the U.S. government to monitor for threats and share intelligence with industry.

Fast Company highlights some of the "privacy nightmares" surrounding low-cost Android smartphones, which can be very attractive for those on a tight budget. One example is the MYA2 MyPhone: According to an analysis by the advocacy group Privacy International, a $17 Android smartphone called MYA2 MyPhone, which was launched in December 2017, has a host of privacy problems that make its owner vulnerable to hackers and to data-hungry tech companies. First, it comes with an outdated version of Android with known security vulnerabilities that can't be updated or patched. The MYA2 also has apps that can't be updated or deleted, and those apps contain multiple security and privacy flaws. One of those pre-installed apps that can't be removed, Facebook Lite, gets default permission to track everywhere you go, upload all your contacts, and read your phone's calendar. The fact that Facebook Lite can't be removed is especially worrying because the app suffered a major privacy snafu earlier this year when hundreds of millions of Facebook Lite users had their passwords exposed.

Philippines-based MyPhone said the specs of the MYA2 limited it to shipping the phone with Android 6.0, and since then it says it has "lost access and support to update the apps we have pre-installed" with the device. Given that the MYA2 phone, like many low-cost Android smartphones, runs outdated versions of the Android OS and can't be updated due to their hardware limitations, users of such phones are limited to relatively light privacy protections compared to what modern OSes, like Android 10, offer today. The MYA2 is just one example of how cheap smartphones leak personal information, provide few if any privacy protections, and are incredibly easy to hack compared to their more expensive counterparts.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Three Alabama hospitals have paid a ransomware demand to the criminals who waged a crippling malware attack that's forcing the hospitals to turn away all but the most critical patients, the Tuscaloosa News reported. As reported last Tuesday, ransomware shut down the hospitals' computer systems and prevented staff from following many normal procedures. Officials have been diverting non-critical patients to nearby hospitals and have warned that emergency patients may also be relocated once they are stabilized. An updated posted on Saturday said the diversion procedure remained in place. All three hospitals are part of the DCH health system in Alabama. Over the weekend, the Tuscaloosa News said DCH officials made a payment to the people responsible for the ransomware attack. The report didn't say how much officials paid. Saturday's statement from DCH officials said they have obtained a decryption key but didn't say how they obtained it. The statement read in part: "In collaboration with law enforcement and independent IT security experts, we have begun a methodical process of system restoration. We have been using our own DCH backup files to rebuild certain system components, and we have obtained a decryption key from the attacker to restore access to locked systems.

We have successfully completed a test decryption of multiple servers, and we are now executing a sequential plan to decrypt, test, and bring systems online one-by-one. This will be a deliberate progression that will prioritize primary operating systems and essential functions for emergency care. DCH has thousands of computer devices in its network, so this process will take time.

We cannot provide a specific timetable at this time, but our teams continue to work around the clock to restore normal hospital operations, as we incrementally bring system components back online across our medical centers. This will require a time-intensive process to complete, as we will continue testing and confirming secure operations as we go."

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) last month sent a security advisory to private industry partners about the rising threat of attacks against organizations and their employees that can bypass multi-factor authentication (MFA) solutions. From a report: "The FBI has observed cyber actors circumventing multi-factor authentication through common social engineering and technical attacks," the FBI wrote in a Private Industry Notification (PIN) sent out on September 17. While nowadays there are multiple ways of bypassing MFA protections, the FBI alert specifically warned about SIM swapping, vulnerabilities in online pages handling MFA operations, and the use of transparent proxies like Muraen and NecroBrowser.

An anonymous reader quotes ZDNet: A Russian cyber-espionage hacker group has been spotted using a novel technique that involves patching locally installed browsers like Chrome and Firefox in order to modify the browsers' internal components. The end goal of these modifications is to alter the way the two browsers set up HTTPS connections, and add a per-victim fingerprint for the TLS-encrypted web traffic that originates from the infected computers...

According to a Kaspersky report published this week, hackers are infecting victims with a remote access trojan named Reductor, through which they are modifying the two browsers. This process involves two steps. They first install their own digital certificates to each infected host. This would allow hackers to intercept any TLS traffic originating from the host. Second, they modify the Chrome and Firefox installation to patch their pseudo-random number generation (PRNG) functions. These functions are used when generating random numbers needed for the process of negotiating and establishing new TLS handshakes for HTTPS connections.

Turla hackers are using these tainted PRNG functions to add a small fingerprint at the start of every new TLS connection.
The attack is being attributed to Turla, "a well-known hacker group believed to operate under the protection of the Russian government," ZDNet reports. And though the remote-access trojan already grants full control over a victim's device, one theory is the modified browsers offer "a secondary surveillance mechanism" if that trojan was discovered and removed. Researchers believe the malware is installed during file transfers over HTTP connections, suggesting an ISP had been compromised, according to the article.

"A January 2018 report from fellow cyber-security firm ESET revealed that Turla had compromised at least four ISPs before, in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet space, also with the purpose of tainting downloads and adding malware to legitimate files."

"Attackers are exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in Google's Android mobile operating system that can give them full control of at least 18 different phone models," reports Ars Technica, "including four different Pixel models, a member of Google's Project Zero research group said on Thursday night." The post also says there's evidence the vulnerability is being actively exploited.

An anonymous reader quotes Ars Technica: Exploits require little or no customization to fully root vulnerable phones. The vulnerability can be exploited two ways: (1) when a target installs an untrusted app or (2) for online attacks, by combining the exploit with a second exploit targeting a vulnerability in code the Chrome browser uses to render content. "The bug is a local privilege escalation vulnerability that allows for a full compromise of a vulnerable device," Stone wrote. "If the exploit is delivered via the Web, it only needs to be paired with a renderer exploit, as this vulnerability is accessible through the sandbox...."

Google representatives wrote in an email: "Pixel 3 and 3a devices are not vulnerable to this issue, and Pixel 1 and 2 devices will be protected with the October Security Release, which will be delivered in the coming days. Additionally, a patch has been made available to partners in order to ensure the Android ecosystem is protected against this issue."

The use-after-free vulnerability originally appeared in the Linux kernel and was patched in early 2018 in version 4.14, without the benefit of a tracking CVE. That fix was incorporated into versions 3.18, 4.4, and 4.9 of the Android kernel. For reasons that weren't explained in the post, the patches never made their way into Android security updates.

Google has been testing the Linux kernel with its "sanitizer" testing software that hunts for memory corruption bugs and undefined behaviors. Now Phoronix reports on Google's newest sanitizer: Kernel Concurrency Sanitizer (KCSAN) is focused on discovering data-race issues within the kernel code. This dynamic data-race detector is an alternative to the Kernel Thread Sanitizer. In their testing just last month, in two days they found over 300 unique data race conditions within the mainline kernel.

There was a recent discussion about the Kernel Concurrency Sanitizer on the LKML.

"Today we're announcing that Chrome will gradually start ensuring that https:// pages can only load secure https:// subresources," promises an announcement on the Chromium blog.

It notes that Chrome users already make HTTPS connections for more than 90% of their browsing time, and "we're now turning our attention to making sure that HTTPS configurations across the web are secure and up-to-date." In a series of steps outlined below, we'll start blocking mixed content (insecure http:// subresources on https:// pages) by default. This change will improve user privacy and security on the web, and present a clearer browser security UX to users...

HTTPS pages commonly suffer from a problem called mixed content, where subresources on the page are loaded insecurely over http://. Browsers block many types of mixed content by default, like scripts and iframes, but images, audio, and video are still allowed to load, which threatens users' privacy and security. For example, an attacker could tamper with a mixed image of a stock chart to mislead investors, or inject a tracking cookie into a mixed resource load. Loading mixed content also leads to a confusing browser security UX, where the page is presented as neither secure nor insecure but somewhere in between. In a series of steps starting in Chrome 79, Chrome will gradually move to blocking all mixed content by default. To minimize breakage, we will autoupgrade mixed resources to https://, so sites will continue to work if their subresources are already available over https://. Users will be able to enable a setting to opt out of mixed content blocking on particular websites...
Starting in December of 2019, Chrome 79 will include a new setting to unblock mixed content on specific sites. "This setting will apply to mixed scripts, iframes, and other types of content that Chrome currently blocks by default..."

Then in Chrome 80, mixed audio and video resources will be autoupgraded to https://, and if they fail to load Chrome will block them by default.

An anonymous reader writes: "DDoS-for-hire services, also known as DDoS booters, or DDoS stressors, are abusing macOS systems to launch DDoS attacks," reports ZDNet. "These attacks are leveraging macOS systems where the Apple Remote Desktop feature has been enabled, and the computer is accessible from the internet, without being located inside a local network, or protected by a firewall. More specifically, the attackers are leveraging the Apple Remote Management Service (ARMS) that is a part of the Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) feature. When users enable the Remote Desktop capability on their macOS systems, the ARMS service starts on port 3283 and listens for incoming commands meant for the remote Mac." Hackers have figured out a way to bounce traffic off these ports and carry out DDoS attacks with the help of internet connected Macs. Nearly 40,000 macOS systems are currently connected online and can be used to send out DDoS attacks.

Microsoft disclosed today that Iranian state-sponsored hackers tried to hack into email accounts belonging to current and former US government officials, and members of a 2020 US presidential campaign. From a report: The attacks have taken place "in a 30-day period between August and September," Tom Burt, Corporate Vice President, Customer Security & Trust at Microsoft, said today. Microsoft's Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) linked the attacks to a group the company calls Phosphorous (other names are APT35, Charming Kitten, and the Ajax Security Team). The group has been linked to Iran's government in reports from multiple cyber-security vendors. Burt said the group operated in different stages. It first made more than 2,700 probes to identify consumer email accounts belonging to specific Microsoft customers. Once the group had a list of high-value targets, it went after 241 of those accounts, which included "accounts are associated with a U.S. presidential campaign, current and former US government officials, journalists covering global politics and prominent Iranians living outside Iran."

Dutch police have taken down this week a bulletproof hosting provider that has sheltered tens of IoT botnets that have been responsible for hundreds of thousands of DDoS attacks around the world, ZDNet reports. From the report: Servers were seized, and two men were arrested yesterday at the offices of KV Solutions BV (KV hereinafter), a so-called bulletproof hosting provider, a term used to describe web hosting providers that ignore abuse reports and allow cybercrime operations to operate on their servers. For two years, the company has provided hosting infrastructure to internet criminals, and has been one of the most serious offender at that, hosting all sorts of badies, from phishing pages to vulnerability scanners, and from crypto-mining operations to malware repositories. But above all, the company has made a reputation in cyber-security circles for being a hotspot for DDoS botnets, with cyber-criminals renting KV servers to host their bot scanners, malware, and command-and-control (C&C) servers, knowing they'd be safe from "harm."

Attorney General Bill Barr, along with officials from the United Kingdom and Australia, is set to publish an open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg asking the company to delay plans for end-to-end encryption across its messaging services until it can guarantee the added privacy does not reduce public safety. From a report: A draft of the letter, dated Oct. 4, is set to be released alongside the announcement of a new data-sharing agreement between law enforcement in the US and the UK; it was obtained by BuzzFeed News ahead of its publication. Signed by Barr, UK Home Secretary Priti Patel, acting US Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan, and Australian Minister for Home Affairs Peter Dutton, the letter raises concerns that Facebook's plan to build end-to-end encryption into its messaging apps will prevent law enforcement agencies from finding illegal activity conducted through Facebook, including child sexual exploitation, terrorism, and election meddling.

"Security enhancements to the virtual world should not make us more vulnerable in the physical world," the letter reads. "Companies should not deliberately design their systems to preclude any form of access to content, even for preventing or investigating the most serious crimes." The letter calls on Facebook to prioritize public safety in designing its encryption by enabling law enforcement to gain access to illegal content in a manageable format and by consulting with governments ahead of time to ensure the changes will allow this access. While the letter acknowledges that Facebook, which owns Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram, captures 99% of child exploitation and terrorism-related content through its own systems, it also notes that "mere numbers cannot capture the significance of the harm to children."