Security News for the Week Ending April 24, 2020

Corona Virus Puts Brakes on 5G Deployment

A research reports says that global cloud revenue from the operation of core 5G networks will fall 25% to 30% shy of the $9 billion forecasted for this year.

They predict that this will only be a short term problem and that 5G deployment will pick up next year.

*I* think a bigger problem is going to be network congestion, but what do I know; I am not trying to sell consumers and businesses a dream.

Samsung just demonstrated a 5G phone on a commercial cell site (TEST) was able to transmit at 4.2 gigabits a second. Two phones doing that fully consumes one 10 gigabit fiber. 100 of those at one cell site would consume 50 fiber strands from that site. One hundred cell sites with each filling up 50 fiber strands would, in the aggregate fill up 50×100= 5,000 strands of fiber and that is for just 100 cell sites. The forecast is for hundreds of thousands of cell sites in the U.S. Where do we get all of that network capacity? The answer of course, is to throttle down your speed to something they can digest, unless you pay a lot of money (which they would like). Most people will say that it is not worth it. That spells a problem, I predict. Credit: Computer Weekly.

Space Crime – Astronaut Accused of Hacking Spouse’s Bank Account from Space

In possibly the first space crime ever, the spouse of an astronaut on the U.S. space station, who was separated and filing for divorce, accused the astronaut of hacking into her bank account from outer space. I used to say that you could hack from half way around the globe, but I guess now I have to amend that to include outer space. It turns out that the spouse is now being charged with lying to the cops – she had given her spouse access to that bank account years earlier and never changed the password, even though she said that she had. Credit: CNN

Ticketmaster Changes Refund Policy After the Fact

While this is not really a security issue, I find the numbers staggering. And a warning.

Ticketmaster has postponed or cancelled 30,000 events and still has another 25,000 events scheduled for the rest of this year. Just the cancelled events represents $2 billion in ticket sales and, I am sure, hundreds of millions of dollars of profit. As a result, Ticketmaster decided to change their refund policy, AFTER PEOPLE PURCHASED THEIR TICKETS to say that you won’t get a refund unless the event is cancelled and not “indefinitely postponed”. Since the performer, venue and Ticketmaster all have a vested interest in keeping people’s money, many events will be “indefinitely postponed”. Not surprisingly, Ticketmaster is being sued.

Ticketmaster is working on offering refunds for 18,000 postponed events, likely due to a combination of the shaky legal strategy of changing contract terms after the fact and the bad publicity, but that still leaves maybe 30,000 to 40,000 events, representing maybe 100-500 million tickets (depending on average venue size), in limbo.

For consumers, this is a bit of a security warning in the sense that you should consider that any money that you spent on tickets for concerts and travel should be treated as a total loss for now. Plan for the worst and be happy if you wind up better than that. I assume that no one is buying tickets right now, but consider this when that option resumes.

For example, a high school class trip got cancelled here in the Denver area and the travel agency refunded 25% of the cost of the trip. The other 75% is, apparently, unknown.

Credit: Blabbermouth. For more information on the behind the scenes challenges that Ticketmaster is dealing with, see this article in Billboard.

Remote Worker’s Lack of Corporate Firewalls Blamed for Rise in Malicious Activity

SC Magazine says that the number of devices that have been commandeered to work for the bad guys has more than doubled since the pandemic.

The researchers believe that many of these devices were infected before the pandemic but the devices were blocked from the Internet by corporate firewalls.

Now that people are home and have a range of protection from NO firewalls to crappy firewalls that have never been patched to OK firewalls – but probably very few great firewalls, the malware can do it’s damage.

As a side note, reports from some corporate IT departments say that the availability of corporate grade firewalls suitable for home deployment is non-existent, so even companies that want to fix the problem by providing firewalls to employees can’t. The study says that the number of OBSERVED compromised companies increased by 400% between January and March in some countries. Credit: SC Magazine

Half a Billion iPhones at Risk Due to Email App Bug

While Apple is claiming that they don’t have any concrete evidence that hackers abused a bug in Apple’s default email application, they are not denying that the bug exposes email users to to having their phones compromised and data stolen just by receiving a blank email.

Apple is also saying that while they are developing a patch, the three bugs in mail that were reported were not enough to compromise phones.

Security firm Zecops says that at least 6 firms were targeted as far back as 2018. The bug dates back to iOS 6 — 2012!

For now, high risk users should not read their emails on their phones.

Credit: Tech Crunch and Engadget

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