Security News Update for the Week Ending September 9, 2022

Five Reasons to Replace Your Old Router

Your router is the gateway to your entire network – every single device in your home or office. It also is your security sentinel. The problem is that vendors, especially at the low end )meaning routers that cost less than, say, a few hundred bucks each), don’t want to spend much money supporting old hardware. It is much safer for you to replace the hardware every few years. Read why at Fox News.

China Doesn’t Like it When the Shoe is on the Other Foot

China is accusing the NSA of hacking China’s Northwestern Polytechnical University and stealing hundreds of gigabytes of data. Given the university is funded by and has close ties to the government, this is certainly possible. But China has not said a word as their hackers steal way more from us. This could just be a shot across the bow to China. Credit: Motherboard

CISA Warns of Potential Attack to Take Down All Contec Devices on a Hospital’s Network

It appears this is a bug, BUT, who knows. CISA is warning that a hacker with access inside a hospital’s network could send one mal-formed packet to a Contec patient monitoring machine and block access to every such device on the same network. A hacker with physical access to a device could modify the firmware also, since there are no credentials required to change the firmware. It also appears that the device uses hardcoded credentials and the company has not responded to CISA’s concerns. Is anyone really surprised? Credit: Data Breach Today

Coinbase Funds Lawsuit Complaining About Feds Blocking Tornado Cash

I think this lawsuit is a bit disingenuous on Coinbase’s part, but I understand why they are doing it. Tornado Cash is a mixer, a site that mixes multiple Cryptocurrency transactions to make it harder to trace. They say that there are some legitimate uses for Tornado, but I bet 99% of the users are using it for illegal purposes. We shall see what happens in court. Cred: Bleeping Computer

Yandex Taxi Hack Created Traffic Jam in Moscow

This probably is no surprise but hacked hacked the Yandex Taxi app in Moscow and caused a massive traffic jam by sending bunches of taxis to the same address. It took about 3 hours to unwind. It is interesting that just by sending a few dozen taxis to a particular address, you can cause a major traffic jam, but this is exactly what happened. Credit: Cybernews

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