Security News Bites for the Week Ending Oct. 5, 2018

Web Page Load Times Double Due to Trackers

Trackers, those microscopic bits of pixie dust that web pages and advertisers insert into web pages to track our activities, make a significant negative contribution to user experience.

Full disclosure – this study was done by Ghostery, who makes software – free software – that blocks these trackers.

Ghostery looked at the page load time of the top 500 US web sites as defined by Alexa and discovered that it took, on average, 10 seconds longer to load with trackers enabled than when blocked by Ghostery.

The 10 slowest of the top 500 sites loaded 10x faster without trackers, saving users 84 seconds on average.

Obviously you could run their free software to reduce your page load times and I have run it for years.  It is amazing how many trackers can exist on one web page.  Source: Ghostery

Feds Issue Alert Regarding Remote Deskup Protocol

Sometimes it takes the feds a little while to realize what we have known for years.  Remote Desktop Protocol or RDP is a Microsoft mechanism for remotely logging in to another computer.  Sometimes people (not very wisely) enable this capability over the Internet.

RDP was designed for LAN administrators to remotely access a user’s computer or a server on the same network, so security considerations were never a top priority.  Over the years Microsoft has improved the security of RDP but still – my opinion – it is foolish to enable this so that a hacker in Timbuktu can try to hack into your network.

Finally, after several years of these widespread attacks, the FBI has issued an alert telling people this is not a good practice.  There are ways to secure that RDP connection, the easiest of which is to require remote users to establish a VPN connection first.  Source: Homeland Security.

Adobe Patches 85 Vulnerabilities in Acrobat and Reader

Adobe has released patches for 85 vulnerabilities in Acrobat and Acrobat Reader for both Windows and Mac.  85 is a pretty big number.  Some of the vulnerabilities allow for remote code execution while others allow for information disclosure or privilege elevation.  In other words, an entire buffet of problems.

This points to why it is so critical to understand what apps you have installed and make sure that they are patched quickly.  Every single time patches are released.  On every device in the network.  Desktops.  Laptops.  Servers.  Phones.  Tablets.  Everywhere.  As of today, Adobe says they are not being exploited in the wild – that they know of.  Tomorrow, at a minimum, every foreign intelligence agency in the world will have reverse engineered them and figured out how to use them as a weapon.  That doesn’t count the hackers.  Source:  The Register.

FBI Forces Child Abuse Suspect To Look at His Phone

In August, for the first time ever that we know of, the FBI obtained a warrant to force a person to look at his iPhone X to unlock it using Apple’s face recognition.  A month later he was charged with receiving and possessing child porn.

While no sane person is going to suggest that the judge should not have issued the warrant in this case, it points to the assumption that people have that stuff on their mobile devices is private.  A bad guy could put a gun to your head and that would likely have the same effect as the warrant.

Privacy is a relative term and as long as everyone understands that, we are all good.  Source: Forbes.

DoJ Indicts 7 Russian Hackers;  Odds of Them Standing Trial Are Almost Zero

The Department of Justice announced criminal charges against 7 Russian intelligence operatives this week, charging them with wire fraud, money laundering, identity theft and hacking.

Russia is unlikely to hand them over to the United States to stand trial and unless the Intelligence agents are not very intelligent, they will never visit any country that has an extradition treaty with the U.S.

That being said, a couple Russian criminal hackers (who are likely not as intelligent as GRU officers) have been known to visit countries friendly to us, so it is, technically possible, that they could wind up on trial in the U.S.  Just not very likely.

These indictments add more fuel to the fire that Russia is hacking us, although this is not specifically tied to the elections.  Source: CNN

Given that the President has

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