Linux Security Week: July 29th, 2019

In this article, Dave Dittrich discusses the buildup to his discovery of DDoS attacks 20 years ago. I was inspired to start a series of articles on the early history of DDoS by a few recent events. Rik Farrow interviewed me for a forthcoming issue (Fall 2019 Vol. 44, No. 3) of Usenix ;login: magazine while I was also writing up a history of the early days of the Honeynet Project , which refreshed my memory on a number of events in 1999-2000. I also read this MIT Technology Review article on the 20th anniversary of the first DDoS attack on the University of Minnesota It took me a little while to remember that July 22 was not the first of the three days that the University of Minnesota spent off-line from persistent flooding. That happened almost a month later. Nor was July 22 even the start of the build up to that event. Now seemed like a good time to clarify this history.

Are you a Mozilla Firefox user? Did you know that Firefox browser could soon receive a Tor mode add-on that would significantly enhance privacy by connecting to the Tor network? While the final goal is to implement a fully-featured TOR mode in the browser natively, such a project takes time, and members of Mozilla and the Tor team discussed the challenges at a recent meeting. Their proposal was to develop a browser add-on that would enable this Tor mode in Firefox , as this approach could give the two organizations enough time to plan on the engineering work that is needed for this new feature.

A new study reveals that you can be easily re-identified from almost any database, even when your personal details have been stripped out. Keep reading to learn the details. The data trail we leave behind us grows all the time. Most of it isnt that interesting"the takeout meal you ordered, that shower head you bought online"but some of it is deeply personal: your medical diagnoses, your sexual orientation, or your tax records. The most common way public agencies protect our identities is anonymization. This involves stripping out obviously identifiable things such as names, phone numbers, email addresses, and so on. Data sets are also altered to be less precise, columns in spreadsheets are removed, and noise is introduced to the data. Privacy policies reassure us that this means theres no risk we could be tracked down in the database.

There has been a lot of confusion over the last few days after news spread of a supposed vulnerability in the media player VLC . Despite being labelled as "critical", VLC's developers, VideoLAN, denied there was a problem at all.

Have you heard that IBMs Center for Open-Source Data and AI Technologies ( CODAIT ) recently unveiled a pair of carefully curated databases designed to provide machine learning developers models and datasets for AI projects?

Have you heard that hackers have stolen a massive trove of sensitive data and defaced the website of SyTech , a major contractor working for Russian intelligence agency FSB (Federal Security Service)? BBC Russia , which reported the breach, said its possible that this is the largest data leak in the history of the work of Russian special services on the Internet. The documents included descriptions of dozens of internal projects the company was working on, including ones on de-anonymization of users of the Tor browser and researching the vulnerability of torrents.

Have you heard that the University of Texas at San Antonio has launched an open source user computer environment for Amazon Cloud called Galahad?

Have you heard that a serious vulnerability has been discovered in the latest release of the VLC media player and no patch is available? Non-profit VideoLAN's VLC player is popular software used to both play and convert a variety of audio and visual files. Available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Unix, iOS, and Android systems, the open-source media player has now become the focus of a recent security advisory released by the German Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-Bund). In the advisory , CERT-Bund warns that VLC media player version 3.0.7.1, the latest build available, contains a vulnerability which has been awarded a CVSS score of 9.8 out of 10.

Have you heard about the BlueKeep vulnerability that has been discovered in Windows RDP servers? Cybersecurity researchers have identified a new variant ofWatchBog, a Linux-based cryptocurrency mining malware botnet, which now also includes a module to scan the Internet for Windows RDP servers vulnerable to the Bluekeep flaw . BlueKeep is a highly-critical, wormable, remote code execution vulnerability in the Windows Remote Desktop Services that could allow an unauthenticated remote attacker to take full control over vulnerable systems just by sending specially crafted requests over RDP protocol.Though the patches for the BlueKeep vulnerability (CVE"2019-0708) was already released by Microsoft in May this year, more than 800,000 Windows machines accessible over the Internet are still vulnerable to the critical flaw.

Security experts and lawmakers say that creating a backdoor to unlock devices and messages would make those products vulnerable to hackers. What are your thoughts on this? During a speech at a cybersecurity conference on Tuesday, Attorney General William Barr spoke out against the tech industrys practice of using encryption tools that can only be unlocked by the end user, arguing that it endangers lives and makes it more difficult for law enforcement to do their jobs. Barr said that encryption can be a valuable tool when it comes to protecting information from cybercriminals. He objected, however, to tech companies refusal to create ways for law enforcement to access locked or encrypted devices when they are issued search warrants.

Do you used Firefox or Chrome as your web browser? Are you aware that browser plug-ins can be a threat to your privacy?

Interested in what the future has in store for VPNs? Virtual private networking is poised to become more automated and intelligent, especially as endpoints associated with cloud services and the IoT need protection. We'd love to hear your thoughts on this article. Market consolidation, transparent operation, greater intelligence: If this were Jeopardy, here's where you'd say, "What's the future of the VPN market look like?" Then you'd be on to Technology Forecasts for $500. What isn't in question is that virtual private networking technology will remain critical to protecting users, organizations, and their data. What is changing, according to industry experts, is the degree of automation and intelligence in VPN technology, not to mention the degree to which VPN functionality resides less in the hands of users (consistently cited as secure networking's weakest link) and more on the back end of the network. But continued growth of cloud services and the Internet of Things (Iot) means secure connectivity will still be needed.

This report comes as Senate Republicans move to block election security legislation, arguing that election officials have already fixed the security issues they experienced in 2016. What are your thought on this?

Are you aware that you could be signing over the keys to your identity when filling out medical forms that promise to anonymize your information?

Are you interested in learning about how zero trust and conditional access policies are reshaping cybersecurity? Get the details in this article.