After being on the market for a few months now, Microsoft started quite a large advertising campaign in Germany for its new Surface RT . We had a comprehensive look at the new tablet PC and here are a few thoughts and impressions:
Running a slightly reduced ARM version of Windows 8, I heard somebody calling it “Windows 8 Home”, which in comparison to older versions hits the spot, Microsoft offers an easily usable interface. Software is reduced to market apps (the minimal run level on a plain Windows is 0, any, and 8, Microsoft, on Windows RT), so you can’t just install your favourite app, or can you? Continue reading “Microsoft Surface RT, a quick insight”
Just a quick update here: Ivan (who gave the magnificent Virtual Firewalls talk at Troopers recently) blogged about this and some guy added some feedback from an environment with Cisco FEX and “one of the server guys start[ing] a Citrix Netscaler” ;-). See the second comment to his post.
This shows, once more, that the dependencies of various technologies (and what they are used for) must be well understood in cloud/virtualized environments. Complexity … but who do we tell. Y’ all know that, right?
The gritsforbreakfast blog post making the rounds on the Liberation Tech mailing list about security of Apple’s iMessaging service is gaining quite some attention. The post refers to a CNET article on how the iMessage service “stymied attempts by federal drug enforcement agents to eavesdrop” conversations due its end-to-end encryption and commends Apple for protecting the user’s privacy while pointing out that Gmail and Facebook Messaging don’t. However, I disagree on some points of the blog post and therefore want to discuss them here.
Last week Rapid7 posted an interesting analysis of the Amazon S3 storage system: Apparently roughly one out of six S3 buckets (a bucket is, simply said, a kind of folder) is accessible without any authentication mechanism. Accessing those files, the Rapid7 guys were able to download a wide range of data, also comprising confidential information such as source code or employee information, comparable to past research for other platforms (see also this presentation I gave on some of the biggest Cloud #Fails) Continue reading “Thoughts on Cloud Governance, Part 1”
As you may already be familiar with some of our previouswork which was mainly focused on isolation issues of hypervisors, we also want to present you an issue concerning availability in Cloud environments. This issue was already covered in some of our presentations, but will be explained in greater detail in this blog post. Continue reading “BPDU Guard: Bringing Down Infrastructures”
Recently we took a look on Ciscos XMPP client, called Cisco Jabber. The Client is used in combination with Ciscos Unified Communication Server (CUCM) and Ciscos Unified Presence Server (CUPS). Only the latter one is used for XMPP communication.
Mobile devices play an important role in the business world. Yet with increased emphasis on the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) model, defenses are not where they need to be to slow the loss of valuable intellectual property.
Corporate defenses have traditionally focused on the network, the endpoints, and not necessarily on the ecosystem of how these devices interact outside of network sockets. Smartphones bring unique network connectivity, an array of sensors, and can be overlooked by resources invested on IDS/IPS not being effectively leveraged.
Getting to the core of an exemplar attack, a Mobile Remote Administration Tool (RAT) is devastating. With access to the microphone, GPS/network location, camera, and an accelerometer, having control of a mobile device in a corporate setting is a dream for an attacker. We’ve improved an open source RAT and introduced a new feature, the ability to turn the mobile device into a virtual person sitting at the computer, able to type commands into the console.
Using a USB device to gain access to a computer is not new and the dangers of an unprotected port are extraordinary (see upcoming troopers talk, You wouldn’t share a syringe. Would you share a USB port? Bratus & Goodspeed). The takeaway from this particular talk is that the attack need not be performed from a specialized device (Teensy, Facedancer), like a thumb drive. The attack can be mounted from a common device that is routinely plugged into computers for charging or data transfer purposes… the Android mobile phone in your employee’s pocket!
Once again a vulnerability in Apples mobile operating system iOS was found by some guys of the Jailbreak Nation. The newest version of this operating system suffers from a weakness that makes it possible to unlock the lockscreen of all iPhones that use iOS version 6.1. In this case it does not matter whether a PIN or a password is used to unlock the phone. After successful exploitation an attacker is able to see and edit contact-information, to add new contacts to the phonebook, to view all pictures, to call the inbox or any of the contacts and to see and delete the list of recent calls or parts of it. Continue reading “Apple iOS and the history of a workin’ lockscreen… NOT”
Almost every higher class DSLR on the market today features multiple and complex access technologies. To name a few, canons new flagship features IP connectivity wired via 802.3 as well as wireless via 802.11. All the big vendors are pushing these features to the market and advertise them with real time image transfer to the cloud. We have taken a look at the layer 2 and 3 implementations in the CamOS and the services running upon those, so here is what we found while examine the EOS 1D X: