Security News for the Week Ending September 24, 2021
Detecting Hidden Cameras in Your Airbnb and Similar Rentals
No one wants to think about this, but it is an issue. Especially in private home/condo rentals, owners are worried about you stealing or damaging their stuff. And some of them are just stalkers. Here is a TikTok video from well known security researcher Marcus Hutchins on some things that you can do to look for hidden cameras. Credit: Hack Read
Japan Sets New Internet Speed Record – 319,000,000,000,000 bits per second
While not a security issue, it is pretty impressive. This beats the old record of 178 terabits/second. The test was carried out in a lab, but simulated a 3,000 KM fiber. This is definitely still experimental, so don’t expect to get this speed at your house any time soon. Credit: Computing (free account required)
The Internet is Going to Break
Well, I don’t think so, but some people are concerned. Let’s Encrypt is that free service that lets web site owners encrypt traffic to and from their website. Let’s Encrypt’s original ROOT CERTIFICATE is going to expire in about a week. They updated their certificate in clients like Chrome and Edge and server software like Linux Apache a long time ago, but what about users that are running old, unsupported software. In a word, they are going to be SOL. The certificate will show as expired and depending on the situation, the user likely will not be able to establish the connection. If it is a server that has that expired certificate, even if the user has been updated, things won’t work. Bottom line, this is only going to be a problem for old, unsupported systems – but there are a lot of these. Stay tuned. Old IoT devices are most likely to break. If you are responsible for systems, now would be a good time to test. Credit: Portswigger
VoIP Phone Provider Hit by Denial of Service Attack; Has Been Down for a Week
This is the downside of the cloud. VoIP.ms has been battling a massive (they say) distributed denial of service attack since September 16th. They say they have over 80,000 (likely unhappy) customers in 125 countries. All of whom have limited voice service as a result of the attackers wanting VoIP.ms to pay them a ransom to stop the attack. How would your business operate if it did not have phone service for a week? Credit: ZDNet
100 Million IoT Devices Affected by New Bug
NanoMQ is an OPEN SOURCE messaging processing platform that is used in many critical IoT devices like patient monitors, fire detection, car system monitors and smart city applications, among many others. Researchers form Guardara detected multiple vulnerabilities affecting as many as 100 million devices. It could cause the device to crash – that is very simple to do – or worse. Attacks on these kinds of devices are spiking and until IoT vendors get serious about security, plan on a backup system for anything that is critical. While some people continue to spread the myth that Open Source software is secure, there is not much evidence for that as we see bug after bug revealed in super popular apps, never mind the really niche ones. Credit: Threat Post
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