Security | PC Perspective

Beware Of A Notepad++ Clone Or Not?

Jeremy Hellstrom — Mon, 08 Apr 2024 18:10:28 +0000

The makes of Notepad++ are sending out a warning today to avoid what they call a parasite website, which looks very similar to theirs. The new site, notepad.plus carries branding similar to…

Some Relief For Linux Admins Living In Terror Of The XZ Backdoor

Jeremy Hellstrom — Tue, 02 Apr 2024 18:21:10 +0000

Thanks to a curious and technically skilled engineer by the name of Andres Freud, Linux admins are living in a bit of a nightmare world. He discovered a backdoor in the XZ…

AI Assistants, Apart From Google Gemini, Are Spilling Your Secrets

Jeremy Hellstrom — Fri, 15 Mar 2024 17:18:19 +0000

AI assistants have been in the news lately, and not in a way that the designers hoped. If the Morris 2 self replicating AI worm wasn't enough to make you question…

Meet The First Generative AI Worm

Jeremy Hellstrom — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 19:37:51 +0000

A group of researchers at Cornell Tech have created the first generative AI worm, dubbed Morris II, which can steal information from AI email assistants as well as convincing them to start…

Ubiquiti EdgeRouters Hacks May Be Ubiquitous

Jeremy Hellstrom — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 17:56:45 +0000

The FBI sought after and received court approval to silently push out an update to Ubiquiti SOHO routers last week, which you may or may not be aware of. They added firewall…

Capturing The Pitter-pat Of Fingerprints On Touchscreens

Jeremy Hellstrom — Wed, 21 Feb 2024 18:15:41 +0000

Internet headlines are a never ending source of amusement, with the latest scare about capturing your fingerprints being no exception. While many of the stories would have you believe that attackers can…

BitLocker Gets Pi All Over It’s Face As A Pico Cracks The Encryption Key

Jeremy Hellstrom — Thu, 08 Feb 2024 19:20:50 +0000

As far a security nightmares go, being able to crack BitLocker encryption with a Raspberry Pi Pico in less than a minute is pretty high up there. Thankfully there are some caveats…

Of Fortinet, The Evil Toothbrush Botnet And Duplicate CVEs

Jeremy Hellstrom — Wed, 07 Feb 2024 18:59:34 +0000

You have probably heard tell of the three million toothbrush botnet by now, as the headline is too ridiculous to easily forget. There's just one small problem, the attack described by…

Mozilla Monitor Plus, Protecting US Users From Data Breaches … For A Price

Jeremy Hellstrom — Tue, 06 Feb 2024 18:37:55 +0000

Your first question might be why these data brokers, who sell people's personal information gathered via breaches and users being a little too generous with their personal information when signing up for…

Sorry Linux Users, glibc 2.37 And 2.36 Have A Serious Vulnerability

Jeremy Hellstrom — Wed, 31 Jan 2024 18:12:35 +0000

Hey Linux admins, time to update your GNU C Library to 2.38 as glibc 2.37 and glibc 2.36 have a rather nasty vulnerability. There is a difficult but not impossible to exploit…

PixieFail, The Brand New UEFI Infection To Worry About

Jeremy Hellstrom — Wed, 17 Jan 2024 21:31:04 +0000

PixieFail is a set of new UEFI vulnerabilities which affects devices running ARM, Insyde, AMI, Phoenix Technologies, or Microsoft's implementation of PXE, otherwise known as netboot. The UEFI need to be…

Network Connected Wrenches Are A Thing, And Of Course They’re Insecure

Jeremy Hellstrom — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 18:13:44 +0000

On first read you might be shaking your head at the thought of picking up a wrench which has network connectivity seems ridiculous, but the Bosch Nutrunner wrenches in question are used…

The Terror That Is Terrapin To Ruin Your New Year

Jeremy Hellstrom — Wed, 03 Jan 2024 17:35:33 +0000

In the distant past of December 2023 we learned about Terrapin, an SSH vulnerability which tore holes in what was one of our last secure communications protocols. Now that everyone has returned…

Oh Great, A Terrapin Broke SSH

Jeremy Hellstrom — Wed, 20 Dec 2023 23:38:27 +0000

Terrapin is the name given to a new exploit, one which can break the security of SSH network traffic in certain conditions. The first condition is that an attacker must already have…

AutoSpill, A Lot Of News For A Small Problem

Jeremy Hellstrom — Wed, 13 Dec 2023 19:23:10 +0000

There has been a fair amount of coverage of AutoSpill on Android devices, after all a bug which affects the major password managers including Google Smart Lock, Dashlane, 1Password, LastPass, Enpass,…

Microcode Patches Incoming For Intel And AMD

Jeremy Hellstrom — Wed, 15 Nov 2023 17:41:37 +0000

Today reveals another set of security concerns about the microcode on certain AMD and Intel CPUs. The flaws are not easy to leverage but theoretically could be used, and so patching is…

1000’s Of Lazy Admins Helping To Feed Citrix Bleed

Jeremy Hellstrom — Wed, 01 Nov 2023 17:16:08 +0000

Yes, there is always that user or app that works on critical applications that has no clue what their password is because they depend on persistent Citrix sessions. Sure, they can kick…

Cisco Starts Rolling Out IOS XE Patches

Jeremy Hellstrom — Mon, 23 Oct 2023 18:01:15 +0000

Yesterday Cisco made a patch available to customers which should resolve both of the vulnerabilities which were revealed last week. The number of infected edge devices is still unclear, with Cisco suggesting…

Use Cisco IOS XE Software? Have You Tried Turning It Off And Burning It?

Jeremy Hellstrom — Tue, 17 Oct 2023 23:25:13 +0000

Cisco and their users have two immense problems right now, and only one is the day 0 exploit that affects all devices running IOS XE software. The second is that Cisco's initial…

If You Know You Use Curl, Update Now!

Jeremy Hellstrom — Wed, 11 Oct 2023 17:21:01 +0000

While everyone uses Curl on a daily basis, not everyone needs to interface with it directly. If you are one of those who uses the ubiquitous command line data transfer tool you…