technology 24 for you

Wednesday, March 9, 2022

The secret US mission to bolster Ukraine’s cyber defenses ahead of Russia’s invasion

Months before the Russian invasion, a team of Americans fanned out across Ukraine looking for a very specific kind of threat.

Some team members were soldiers with the US Army’s Cyber Command. Others were civilian contractors and some employees of American companies that help defend critical infrastructure from the kind of cyber attacks that Russian agencies had inflicted upon Ukraine for years.

The US had been helping Ukraine bolster its cyber defenses for years, ever since an infamous 2015 attack on its power grid left part of Kyiv without electricity for hours.

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Tuesday, March 8, 2022

New method that amplifies DDoSes by 4 billion-fold. What could go wrong?

Stylized illustration of a hooded figure at a laptop.

Cybercriminals who use giant floods of data to knock sites offline are leveraging a never-before-seen method that has the potential to increase the damaging effects of those floods by an unprecedented 4 billion times, researchers warned on Tuesday.

Like many other types of distributed denial-of-service attacks, the attacks send a modest amount of junk data to a misconfigured third-party service in a way that causes the service to redirect a much larger response at the intended target. So-called DDoS amplification attacks are popular because they lower the requirements needed to overwhelm their targets. Rather than having to marshal huge amounts of bandwidth and computing power, the DDoSer locates servers on the Internet that will do it for them.

It’s all about amplification

One of the oldest amplification vectors is misconfigured DNS servers, which increase DDoS volumes by about 54 times. New amplification routes have included the Network Time Protocol servers (about 556x), Plex media servers (about 5x), Microsoft RDP (86x), and the Connectionless Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (at least 50x). Just last week, researchers described a new amplification vector that achieves a factor of at least 65.

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Weight Watchers App Gathered Data From Children, F.T.C. Says

Kurbo by WW, a weight loss app geared toward children, illegally collected data from users as young as 8 without their parents’ consent, the Federal Trade Commission said in a complaint.

Monday, March 7, 2022

Linux has been bitten by its most high-severity vulnerability in years

Fanciful illustration of a shark attacking ones and zeroes.

Linux has yet another high-severity vulnerability that makes it easy for untrusted users to execute code capable of carrying out a host of malicious actions including installing backdoors, creating unauthorized user accounts, and modifying scripts or binaries used by privileged services or apps.

Dirty Pipe, as the vulnerability has been named, is among the most serious Linux threats to be disclosed since 2016. That's the year another high-severity and easy-to-exploit Linux flaw (named Dirty Cow) came to light as it was being used to hack a researcher's server. Researchers in 2016 demonstrated how to exploit Dirty Cow to root any Android phone regardless of the the mobile OS version. Eleven months later, researchers unearthed 1,200 Android apps in third-party markets that maliciously exploited the flaw to do just that.

When Nobody becomes all powerful

The name Dirty Pipe is meant to both signal similarities to Dirty Cow and provide clues about the new vulnerability's origins. "Pipe" refers to a pipeline, a Linux mechanism for one OS process to send data to another process. In essence, a pipeline is two or more processes that are chained together so that the output text of one process (stdout) is passed directly as input (stdin) to the next one.

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