Intel’s Security Exec Jumps Ship

Michael Fey has left Intel Security Group to become chief operating officer at Blue Coat. Blue Coat is apparently not the traditional garb of a British Holiday Camp entertainer, but apparently a privately owned network security company.

Fey was one of the few top McAfee managers to stay with the company after it was bought by Intel in 2011. McAfee is now part of Intel Security Group, where Fey had been chief technology officer. Fey said that his role at Blue Coat would be “very similar” to his old job but he was allowed to focus on the cloud and the advanced threats space more.

“Blue Coat had tremendous growth behind the scenes and now I get to focus on taking that growth and trying to get it to the billion-dollar revenue mark,” he told Reuters.

Since the $7.7 billion acquisition by Intel, McAfee has lost senior managers and key talent in technology development, research and sales. At Blue Coat, Fey will replace David Murphy, who will stay on as a strategic adviser to the board.

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McAfee’s Biometric Software Coming Soon

A McAfee security product that will use biometric technology to authenticate users will be available for download by the end of the year, said Kirk Skaugen, senior vice president and general manager of the PC Client Group at Intel, last week.

“Your biometrics basically eliminate the need for you to enter passwords for Windows log in and eventually all your websites ever again,” Skaugen said.

Further product details were not immediately available. But one of the major inconveniences in using PCs and tablets is remembering passwords, which biometrics can tame.

An average user has about 18 passwords and biometric authentication will make PCs easier to use, Skaugen said.

Biometric authentication isn’t new. It’s being used in Apple Pay, where fingerprint authentication helps authorize credit card payments through the iPhone or iPad. Intel has been working on multiple forms of biometric authentication through fingerprint, gesture, face and voice recognition.

McAfee is owned by Intel, and the chip maker is building smartphone, tablet and PC technology that takes advantage of the security software. Intel has also worked on biometric technology for wearable devices like SMS Audio’s BioSport In-Ear Headphones, which can measure a person’s heart rate.

Intel also wants to make PCs and tablets easier to use through wireless charging, display, docking and data transfers. Such capabilities would eliminate the need to carry power brick and cables for displays and data transfers. Such capabilities will start appearing in laptops next year with sixth-generation Core chips code-named Skylake, which will be released in the second half.

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OpenSSL Gets Updated

OPENSSL, the web security layer at the center of the Heartbleed vulnerability, has been issued with a further nine critical patches.

While none are as serious as Heartbleed, patching is recommended for all users according to an advisory released today. The vulnerabilities stem from various security research teams around the web including Google, Logmein and Codenomicom, based on their reports during June and July of this year.

Among the more interesting fixes involves a flaw in the ClientHello message process. If a ClientHello message is badly fragmented, it is vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack which could be used to force the server to downgrade itself to the TLS 1.0 protocol, a fifteen year old and therefore pre-Heartbleed patch variant.

Other reports include memory leaks caused by denial of service attacks (DoS) and conversely, crashes caused by an attempt to free up the same portions of memory twice.

OpenSSL now has two full time coders as a result of investment by a consortium of Internet industry companies to form the Core Infrastructure Initiative, a not-for-profit group administered by the Linux Foundation. The Initiative was set up in the wake of Heartbleed, as the industry vowed to ensure such a large hole would never be left unplugged again.

While OpenSSL is used by a large number of encrypted sites, there are a number of forks of the project including LibreSSL and the recently launched Google BoringSSL.

Google recently announced that it would be lowering the page rankings of unencrypted pages in its search results as an added security measure.

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Hackers Going After Traffic Signs

After hackers played several high-profile pranks with traffic signs, including warning San Francisco drivers of a Godzilla attack, the U.S. government advised operators of electronic highway signs to take “defensive measures” to better secure their property.

Last month, signs on San Francisco’s Van Ness Ave were photographed flashing “Godzilla Attack! Turn Back” and highway signs across North Carolina were tampered with last week to read “Hack by Sun Hacker.”

The Department of Homeland Security’s Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team, or ICS-CERT, this week advised cities, highway operators and other customers of digital-sign maker Daktronics Inc to take “defensive measures” to minimize the possibility of similar attacks.

It said that information had been posted on the Internet advising hackers how to access those systems using default passwords coded into the company’s software. “ICS-CERT recommends entities review sign messaging, update access credentials and harden communication paths to the signs,” the agency said in an alert posted on Thursday.

Jody Huntimer, a representative for Daktronics, declined to say if the recent attacks involved the bug reported by ICS-CERT.

“We are working with the ICS-CERT team to clarify the current alert and will release a statement once we have assessed the situation and developed customer recommendations,” Huntimer said via email.

Krebs on Security, a widely read security blog, posted a confidential report from the Center for Internet Strategy, or CIS, which was sent to state security officials. It warned that the pranks created a public safety risk because drivers often slow or stop to view the signs and take pictures.

CIS also predicated that amateur hackers might attempt to hack into other systems in the coming weeks following the May 27 release of “Watch Dogs,” a video game from Ubisoft focused on hacking critical infrastructure.

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Many Websites Still Exposed

The world’s top 1,000 websites have been updated to protect their servers against the “Heartbleed” vulnerability, but up to 2% of the top million remained unprotected as of last week, according to a California security firm.

On Thursday, Menifee, Calif.-based Sucuri Security scanned the top 1 million websites as ranked by Alexa Internet, a subsidiary of Amazon that collects Web traffic data.

Of the top 1,000 Alexa sites, all were either immune or had been patched with the newest OpenSSL libraries, confirmed Daniel Cid, Sucuri’s chief technology officer, in a Sunday email.

Heartbleed, the nickname for the flaw in OpenSSL, an open-source cryptographic library that enables SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) or TLS (Transport Security Layer) encryption, was discovered independently by Neel Mehta, a Google security engineer, and researchers from security firm Codenomicon earlier this month.

The bug had been introduced in OpenSSL in late 2011.

Because of OpenSSL’s widespread use by websites — many relied on it to encrypt traffic between their servers and customers — and the very stealthy nature of its exploit, security experts worried that cyber criminals either had, or could, capture usernames, passwords,\ and even encryption keys used by site servers.

The OpenSSL project issued a patch for the bug on April 7, setting off a rush to patch the software on servers and in some client operating systems.

The vast majority of vulnerable servers had been patched as of April 17, Sucuri said in a blog postthat day.

While all of the top 1,000 sites ranked by Alexa were immune to the exploit by then, as Sucuri went down the list and scanned smaller sites, it found an increasing number still vulnerable. Of the top 10,000, 0.53% were vulnerable, as were 1.5% of the top 100,000 and 2% of the top 1 million.

Other scans found similar percentages of websites open to attack: On Friday, San Diego-based Websense said about 1.6% of the top 50,000 sites as ranked by Alexa remained vulnerable.

Since it’s conceivable that some sites’ encryption keys have been compromised, security experts urged website owners to obtain new SSL certificates and keys, and advised users to be wary of browsing to sites that had not done so.

Sucuri’s scan did not examine sites to see whether they had been reissued new certificates, but Cid said that another swing through the Web, perhaps this week, would. “I bet the results will be much much worse on that one,” Cid said.

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Lavaboom Offers To Encrypt

A new webmail service named Lavaboom promises to provide easy-to-use email encryption without ever learning its users’ private encryption keys or message contents.

Lavaboom, based in Germany and founded by Felix MA1/4ller-Irion, is named after Lavabit, the now defunct encrypted email provider believed to have been used by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Lavabit decided to shut down its operations in August in response to a U.S. government request for its SSL private key that would have allowed the government to decrypt all user emails.

Lavaboom designed its system for end-to-end encryption, meaning that only users will be in possession of the secret keys needed to decrypt the messages they receive from others. The service will only act as a carrier for already encrypted emails.

Lavaboom calls this feature “zero-knowledge privacy” and implemented it in a way that allows emails to be encrypted and decrypted locally using JavaScript code inside users’ browsers instead of its own servers.

The goal of this implementation is to protect against upstream interception of email traffic as it travels over the Internet and to prevent Lavaboom to produce plain text emails or encryption keys if the government requests them. While this would protect against some passive data collection efforts by intelligence agencies like the NSA, it probably won’t protect against other attack techniques and exploits that such agencies have at their disposal to obtain data from computers and browsers after it was decrypted.

Security researchers have yet to weigh in on the strength of Lavaboom’s implementation. The service said on its website that it considers making parts of the code open source and that it has a small budget for security audits if any researchers are interested.

Those interested in trying out the service can request to be included in its beta testing period, scheduled to start in about two weeks.

Free Lavaboom accounts will come with 250MB of storage space and will use two-way authentication based on the public-private keypair and a password. A premium subscription will cost a!8 (around US$11) per month and will provide users with 1GB of storage space and a three-factor authentication option.

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MediaTek To Offer New LTE SoC

MediaTek has shown off one of its most interesting SoC designs to date at the China Electronic Information Expo. The MT6595 was announced a while ago, but this is apparently the first time MediaTek showcased it in action.

It is a big.LITTLE octa-core with integrated LTE support. It has four Cortex A17 cores backed by four Cortex A7 cores and it can hit 2.2GHz. The GPU of choice is the PowerVR G6200. It supports 2K4K video playback and recording, as well as H.265. It can deal with a 20-megapixel camera, too.

The really interesting bit is the modem. It can handle TD-LTE/FDD-LTE/WCDMA/TD-SCDMA/GSM networks, hence the company claims it is the first octa-core with on board LTE. Qualcomm has already announced an LTE-enabled octa-core, but it won’t be ready anytime soon. The MT6595 will – it is expected to show up in actual devices very soon.

Of course, MediaTek is going after a different market. Qualcomm is building the meanest possible chip with four 64-bit Cortex A57 cores and four A53 cores, while MediaTek is keeping the MT6595 somewhat simpler, with smaller 32-bit cores.

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Malware Targets Job-seekers

A new version of the Gameover computer Trojan is targeting job hunters and recruiters by attempting to steal log-in credentials for Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com accounts.

Gameover is one of several Trojan programs that are based on the infamous Zeus banking malware, whose source code was leaked on the Internet in 2011. Like Zeus, Gameover can steal log-in credentials and other sensitive information by injecting rogue Web forms into legitimate websites when accessed from infected computers.

The ability to inject content into browsing sessions in real time has traditionally been used by computer Trojans to steal online banking credentials and financial information. However, cybercriminals are increasingly using this technique to compromise other types of accounts as well.

For example, in February, researchers from security firm Adallom found a Zeus variant that stole Salesforce.com log-in credentials and scraped business data from the compromised accounts.

The latest development involves a new Gameover variant that contains a configuration file to target Monster.com accounts, one of the largest employment websites in the world, security researchers from antivirus firm F-Secure said.

“A computer infected with Gameover ZeuS will inject a new ‘Sign In’ button [into the Monster.com sign-in page], but the page looks otherwise identical,” they said.

After the victims authenticate through the rogue Web form the malware injects a second page that asks them to select and answer three security questions out of 18. The answers to these questions expose additional personal information and potentially enable attackers to bypass the identity verification process.

Targeting Monster.com is a new development, but the Gameover malware had already been targeting CareerBuilder.com, another large employment website, for some time.

Recruiters with accounts on employment websites should be wary of irregularities on log-in pages, especially if those accounts are tied to bank accounts and spending budgets, the F-Secure researchers said. “It wouldn’t be a bad idea for sites such as Monster to introduce two factor authentication beyond mere security questions.”

The authors of the Gameover Trojan program have been particularly active recently. In early February researchers from security firm Malcovery Security reported that a new variant of Gameover was being distributed as an encrypted .enc file in order to bypass network-level defenses. Later that month researchers from Sophos detected a Gameover variant with a kernel-level rootkit component that protected its files and processes, making it harder to remove.

Unlike most other Zeus spinoffs, Gameover is also using peer-to-peer technology for command-and-control instead of traditional hosted servers, which improves its resilience to takedown efforts by security researchers.

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Zeus Attached To Cancer Email Scam

Thousands of email users have been hit by a sick cancer email hoax that aims to infect the recipients’ computers with Zeus malware.

The email has already hit thousands of inboxes across the UK, and looks like it was sent by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE). It features the subject line “Important blood analysis result”.

However, NICE has warned that it did not send the malicious emails, and is urging users not to open them.

NICE chief executive Sir Andrew Dillon said, “A spam email purporting to come from NICE is being sent to members of the public regarding cancer test results.

“This email is likely to cause distress to recipients since it advises that ‘test results’ indicate they may have cancer. This malicious email is not from NICE and we are currently investigating its origin. We take this matter very seriously and have reported it to the police.”

The hoax message requests that users download an attachment that purportedly contains the results of the faux blood analysis.

Security analysis firm Appriver has since claimed that the scam email is carrying Zeus malware that if installed will attempt to steal users’ credentials and take over their PCs.

Appriver senior security specialist Fred Touchette warned, “If the attachment is unzipped and executed the user may see a quick error window pop up and then disappear on their screen.

“What they won’t see is the downloader then taking control of their PC. It immediately begins checking to see if it is being analysed, by making long sleep calls, and checking to see if it is running virtually or in a debugger.

“Next it begins to steal browser cookies and MS Outlook passwords from the system registry. The malware in turn posts this data to a server at 69.76.179.74 with the command /ppp/ta.php, and punches a hole in the firewall to listen for further commands on UDP ports 7263 and 4400.”

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Can MediaTek Challenge Qualcomm?

A top analyst has said that Qualcomm has nothing to fear from Media Tek’s announcement that it is gunning for the smartphone market.

Qualcomm rules North America and Europe while right now MediaTek is best known for being the leading player in the Chinese market. Now there are signs that MediaTek seems to have reached the maximum market share that they can achieve in China and will be looking to go after Qualcomm in other markets.

But Jefferies analyst Peter Misek views MediaTek’s cunning plan as more of a medium to long-term threat to Qualcomm versus a near-term threat.

He commented, “The high-end smartphone market is saturated and while we believe that pricing and subsidy pressure will become more severe globally, Qualcomm has significant opportunities through integration, iPhone 6, and royalty collections in China.”

Of course it is optimistic to think that the iPhone 6 will do well in China. Many analysts have lost their lunch money betting on Jobs’ Mob doing anything in China.

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