Showing only posts tagged backdoors. Show all posts.

China Possibly Hacking US “Lawful Access” Backdoor

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The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Chinese hackers (Salt Typhoon) penetrated the networks of US broadband providers, and might have accessed the backdoors that the federal government uses to execute court-authorized wiretap requests. Those backdoors have been mandated by law—CALEA—since 1994. It’s a weird story …

1.3 million Android-based TV boxes backdoored; researchers still don’t know how

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Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Researchers still don’t know the cause of a recently discovered malware infection affecting almost 1.3 million streaming devices running an open source version of Android in almost 200 countries. Security firm Doctor Web reported Thursday that malware named Android.Vo1d has backdoored the …

Australia Threatens to Force Companies to Break Encryption

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In 2018, Australia passed the Assistance and Access Act, which—among other things—gave the government the power to force companies to break their own encryption. The Assistance and Access Act includes key components that outline investigatory powers between government and industry. These components include: Technical Assistance Requests (TARs …

Here’s how carefully concealed backdoor in fake AWS files escaped mainstream notice

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Enlarge (credit: BeeBright / Getty Images / iStockphoto ) Researchers have determined that two fake AWS packages downloaded hundreds of times from the open source NPM JavaScript repository contained carefully concealed code that backdoored developers' computers when executed. The packages— img-aws-s3-object-multipart-copy and legacyaws-s3-object-multipart-copy —were attempts to appear as aws-s3-object-multipart-copy, a legitimate JavaScript …

Backdoor slipped into multiple WordPress plugins in ongoing supply-chain attack

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Enlarge (credit: Getty Images ) WordPress plugins running on as many as 36,000 websites have been backdoored in a supply-chain attack with unknown origins, security researchers said on Monday. So far, five plugins are known to be affected in the campaign, which was active as recently as Monday morning …

Supply Chain Attack against Courtroom Software

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No word on how this backdoor was installed: A software maker serving more than 10,000 courtrooms throughout the world hosted an application update containing a hidden backdoor that maintained persistent communication with a malicious website, researchers reported Thursday, in the latest episode of a supply-chain attack. The software …

Crooks plant backdoor in software used by courtrooms around the world

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Enlarge (credit: JAVS) A software maker serving more than 10,000 courtrooms throughout the world hosted an application update containing a hidden backdoor that maintained persistent communication with a malicious website, researchers reported Thursday, in the latest episode of a supply-chain attack. The software, known as the JAVS Viewer …

Hackers infect users of antivirus service that delivered updates over HTTP

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Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Hackers abused an antivirus service for five years in order to infect end users with malware. The attack worked because the service delivered updates over HTTP, a protocol vulnerable to attacks that corrupt or tamper with data as it travels over the Internet. The unknown …

Other Attempts to Take Over Open Source Projects

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After the XZ Utils discovery, people have been examining other open-source projects. Surprising no one, the incident is not unique: The OpenJS Foundation Cross Project Council received a suspicious series of emails with similar messages, bearing different names and overlapping GitHub-associated emails. These emails implored OpenJS to take action …

Backdoor in XZ Utils That Almost Happened

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Last week, the internet dodged a major nation-state attack that would have had catastrophic cybersecurity repercussions worldwide. It’s a catastrophe that didn’t happen, so it won’t get much attention—but it should. There’s an important moral to the story of the attack and its discovery …

xz Utils Backdoor

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The cybersecurity world got really lucky last week. An intentionally placed backdoor in xz Utils, an open-source compression utility, was pretty much accidentally discovered by a Microsoft engineer—weeks before it would have been incorporated into both Debian and Red Hat Linux. From ArsTehnica : Malicious code added to xz …

What we know about the xz Utils backdoor that almost infected the world

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Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) On Friday, a lone Microsoft developer rocked the world when he revealed a backdoor had been intentionally planted in xz Utils, an open source data compression utility available on almost all installations of Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. The person or people behind this …

Backdoor found in widely used Linux utility breaks encrypted SSH connections

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Enlarge / Internet Backdoor in a string of binary code in a shape of an eye. (credit: Getty Images) Researchers have found a malicious backdoor in a compression tool that made its way into widely used Linux distributions, including those from Red Hat and Debian. The compression utility, known as …

Backdoor found in widely used Linux utility targets encrypted SSH connections

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Enlarge / Internet Backdoor in a string of binary code in a shape of an eye. (credit: Getty Images) Researchers have found a malicious backdoor in a compression tool that made its way into widely used Linux distributions, including those from Red Hat and Debian. The compression utility, known as …

EU Court of Human Rights Rejects Encryption Backdoors

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The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that breaking end-to-end encryption by adding backdoors violates human rights : Seemingly most critically, the [Russian] government told the ECHR that any intrusion on private lives resulting from decrypting messages was “necessary” to combat terrorism in a democratic society. To back up …

New iPhone Exploit Uses Four Zero-Days

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Kaspersky researchers are detailing “an attack that over four years backdoored dozens if not thousands of iPhones, many of which belonged to employees of Moscow-based security firm Kaspersky.” It’s a zero-click exploit that makes use of four iPhone zero-days. The most intriguing new detail is the targeting of …

Backdoored firmware lets China state hackers control routers with “magic packets”

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Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Hackers backed by the Chinese government are planting malware into routers that provides long-lasting and undetectable backdoor access to the networks of multinational companies in the US and Japan, governments in both countries said Wednesday. The hacking group, tracked under names including BlackTech, Palmerworm, Temp …

Signal Will Leave the UK Rather Than Add a Backdoor

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Totally expected, but still good to hear : Onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, Meredith Whittaker, the president of the Signal Foundation, which maintains the nonprofit Signal messaging app, reaffirmed that Signal would leave the U.K. if the country’s recently passed Online Safety Bill forced Signal to build “backdoors …

New Revelations from the Snowden Documents

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Jake Appelbaum’s PhD thesis contains several new revelations from the classified NSA documents provided to journalists by Edward Snowden. Nothing major, but a few more tidbits. Kind of amazing that that all happened ten years ago. At this point, those documents are more historical than anything else. And …

Microsoft Signing Key Stolen by Chinese

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A bunch of networks, including US Government networks, have been hacked by the Chinese. The hackers used forged authentication tokens to access user email, using a stolen Microsoft Azure account consumer signing key. Congress wants answers. The phrase “ negligent security practices ” is being tossed about—and with good reason …

Backdoor in TETRA Police Radios

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Seems that there is a deliberate backdoor in the twenty-year-old TErrestrial Trunked RAdio (TETRA) standard used by police forces around the world. The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), an organization that standardizes technologies across the industry, first created TETRA in 1995. Since then, TETRA has been used in products …

Putting Undetectable Backdoors in Machine Learning Models

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This is really interesting research from a few months ago: Abstract: Given the computational cost and technical expertise required to train machine learning models, users may delegate the task of learning to a service provider. Delegation of learning has clear benefits, and at the same time raises serious concerns …

Manipulating Weights in Face-Recognition AI Systems

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Interesting research: “ Facial Misrecognition Systems: Simple Weight Manipulations Force DNNs to Err Only on Specific Persons “: Abstract: In this paper we describe how to plant novel types of backdoors in any facial recognition model based on the popular architecture of deep Siamese neural networks, by mathematically changing a small …

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