Cybersecurity Vigilance for a Historic Election
November 3rd is Election Day in the United States. Every election is important, but this election is particularly crucial. It is one of the most important elections in our lifetime—the 2020 election will determine the course of the United States for the next 10 years or more. With so much on the line, every vote counts—but the security and integrity of, and voter confidence in, the election itself are also at risk. The Senate Intelligence Committee determined that Russia influenced and interfered with the 2016 election, and US intelligence agencies…
Security Makes Cents: Perspectives on Security from a Finance Leader
Recently, it feels like the Internet is filled with stories of cyber-breaches and security breakdowns. As the world is more interconnected than ever, these stories are becoming all too familiar. In fact, there is a malicious web-based hacking event every 39 seconds, and 43% of them target small businesses. While a breach can occur in any area of a business, a corporate finance department is often uniquely positioned, with touch-points extending further outside the company than other groups. With touch-points up and down the supply chain,…
IOActive Labs Blog
Reclaiming Hallway Con We have several exciting things happening with our blog content. Like many, we’ve been working to replace the value lost with the loss of face-to-face gatherings at meetings, conventions, and informal get-togethers. Many veterans of the conference circuit will tell you that by far the most valuable part of a typical conference is the hallway con, which refers to the informal discussions, networking, and often serendipitous meetings that happen outside the formal conference agenda. IOActive is helping reclaim hallway con by making some of that valuable content…
Principles of the IOActive Guest Blog Series
IOActive has recently begun to post a series of guest blogs. Our first post was an excellent contribution from Urban Jonson, who leads the Heavy Vehicle Cyber Security (HVCS) working group at NMFTA, focusing on emerging threats in intermodal transportation. Our organization has embarked upon this series because we think it provides additional value to our readers. This is one more thing we’re doing to give back to the security community and help those starting out to gain a broader understanding of cybersecurity. We have…
IOActive Guest Blog | Urban Jonson, Heavy Vehicle Cyber Security Program, NMFTA
Hello, My name is Urban Jonson, and I’m the Chief Technology Officer and Program Manager, Heavy Vehicle Cyber Security Program, with the National Motor Freight Traffic Association, Inc. (NMFTA). I’m honored that IOActive has afforded me this guest blogging opportunity to connect with you. The research at IOActive is always innovative and they have done some really good work in transportation, including aviation, truck electronic logging devices, and even satellites. Being among such technical experts really raises the stakes of the conversation. Luckily, I can lean…
Warcodes: Attacking ICS through industrial barcode scanners
Several days ago I came across an interesting entry in the curious ‘ICS Future News’ blog run by Patrick Coyle. Before anyone becomes alarmed, the description of this blog is crystal clear about its contents: “News about control system security incidents that you might see in the not too distant future. Any similarity to real people, places or things is purely imaginary.” IOActive provides research-fueled security services, so when we analyze cutting-edge technologies the goal is to stay one step ahead of malicious actors…
File-Squatting Exploitation by Example
This will (hopefully) be a short story about a bug I found some time ago while auditing a .NET service from an OEM. It should be interesting as I have yet to find a description of how to exploit a similar condition. Our service was running as SYSTEM and needed to periodically execute some other utilities as part of its workflow. Before running these auxiliary tools, it would check if the executable was properly signed by the vendor. Something like this: public void CallAgent() { string ExeFile = “C:\\Program…
A Reverse Engineer’s Perspective on the Boeing 787 ‘51 days’ Airworthiness Directive
Several weeks ago, international regulators announced that they were ordering Boeing 787 operators to completely shut down the plane’s electrical power whenever it had been running for 51 days without interruption.1 The FAA published an airworthiness directive elaborating on the issue, and I was curious to see what kind of details were in this document. While I eventually discovered that there wasn’t much information in the FAA directive, there was just enough to put me on track to search for the root cause of the issue. This blog post will…
Mismatch? CVSS, Vulnerability Management, and Organizational Risk
I’ll never forget a meeting I attended where a security engineer demanded IT remediate each of the 30,000 vulnerabilities he had discovered. I know that he wasn’t just dumping an unvetted pile of vulnerabilities on IT; he’d done his best to weed out false-positive results, other errors, and misses before presenting the findings. These were real issues, ranked using the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS). There can be no doubt that in that huge (and overwhelming) pile were some serious threats to the organization and its digital assets. The reaction…
10 Laws of Disclosure
In my 20+ years working in cyber security, I’ve reported more than 1000 vulnerabilities to a wide variety of companies, most found by our team at IOActive as well as some found by me. In reporting these vulnerabilities to many different vendors, the response (or lack thereof) I got is also very different, depending on vendor security maturity. When I think that I have seen everything related to vulnerability disclosures, I’ll have new experiences – usually bad ones – but in general, I keep seeing the same problems over and…