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Date: 03 May 2013
Click here for printable version
Greetings,
First up, after receiving a Google Glass device through a Google run competition on Twitter, security researcher Jay Freeman posted a lengthy blog on Tuesday detailing how he was able to gain root access on the device by using a security exploit in Android 4.0 that was disclosed last September. Freeman stated in his blog, "Sadly, due to the way Glass is currently designed, it is particularly susceptible to the kinds of security issues that tend to plague Android devices." Somewhat disturbing are the implications of an attacker being able to gain root access to Google Glass described by Freeman as having "...much more power than if they had access to your phone or even your computer: they have control over a camera and a microphone that are attached to your head. A bugged Glass doesn't just watch your every move: it watches everything you are looking at (intentionally or furtively) and hears everything you do." For more details, be sure to read his blog!
In other news, the Dutch government yesterday presented a draft bill which aims to give law enforcement wide reaching powers to hack into computer systems, not just at home, but also in foreign countries, for the purposes of researching, gathering and copying evidence or to block access to certain types of information. The draft bill was quick to draw criticism, for example Simone Halink of the Dutch digital rights organisation, 'Bits of Freedom' responded to the draft bill the same day stating that the "proposal is rushed" and that rather than increasing digital investigation powers, the Dutch government should increase police manpower. Additionally she stated that the legislation could potentially spark an escalating arms race between hacking governments.
In a report authored by Citizen Lab this week, researchers stated that they have detected command and control servers for the FinFisher spyware suite in eleven new countries - Hungary, Turkey, Romania, Panama, Lithuania, Macedonia, South Africa, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bulgaria and Austria. According to the researchers this brings the total number of countries with FinFisher C&C servers to thirty-six. The spyware suite, distributed by UK based Gamma International has been touted as being an "IT intrusion and remote monitoring solution" which is explicitly offered only to "law enforcement and intelligence agencies", however the researchers say that evidence of these C&C servers is not "necessarily indicative that the surveillance technology is being used by the government or authorities in those countries." [3]
This week's collection of particularly interesting/urgent bulletins (in no particular order):
1) ESB-2013.0599 - ALERT [FreeBSD] nfsserver: Root compromise - Remote/unauthenticated
Early this week, FreeBSD released an advisory regarding a serious root compromise vulnerability in NFS affecting all supported versions of FreeBSD. This advisory should be acted on as soon as possible.
2) ASB-2013.0062 - ALERT [Win][Virtual] McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator: Administrator compromise - Remote/unauthenticated
Two vulnerabilities were disclosed in McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator, one of which could potentially allow a remote attacker to execute code with SYSTEM privileges by registering a rogue Agent to the ePO server and sending a crafted request to it.
3) ESB-2013.0620 - [Appliance] BIG-IP: Denial of service - Remote/unauthenticated
F5 released a bulletin regarding a BIND denial of service vulnerability in its range of BIG-IP products and have released upgrades to correct this issue.
And finally, a little housekeeping -
Please be advised that on Saturday 11/05/2013, between 9am to 5pm (GMT+10) there will be a scheduled outage of the AusCERT Remote Monitoring service.
The following service will be affected:
* ARM will not be accessible via this page: https://arm.auscert.org.au/
* ARM will cease to monitor any systems you have configured in ARM and will not be able to send notification alarms to you for the duration of the outage.
All other services will remain available, including access to the AusCERT web site http://auscert.org.au/
We apologise for the inconvenience.
Have a great weekend!
Jonathan
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