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The group is a successor to BlackEnergy and a subset of the TeleBots gang--and its activity is potentially a prelude to a much more destructive attack.

Here's a video that explains the libssh "no password needed" bug - jargon-free and in plain English. Enjoy...

If you live in the EU, turning on a new Android device after 29 October 2018 could look quite different...

If you have European ancestry, there's a 60% chance that somebody vaguely related to you can be used to find out who you are.

LinuxSecurity.com: According to a media release from Onslow Water and Sewer Authority (ONWASA) issued on October 15, 2018, a critical water utility in North Carolina was targeted in a cyber-attack. Federal and state officials are now working with the water utility as part of the investigation into the attack on some of its computer systems.

LinuxSecurity.com: The US Department of Defense has suffered a major breach of employee's personal and financial information, according to reports.

LinuxSecurity.com: Europol and the European Banking Federation have launched a new campaign designed to raise public awareness of growing incidents of financial fraud and data theft, as part of European Cyber Security Month (ECMS).

Over 1m tweets show that we're suckers for funny/sarcastic/edgy, not so much for blah-blah-blah “news” spreaders.

Posted by Devon O’Brien, Ryan Sleevi, Emily Stark, Chrome security team

Update October 17, 2018: Chrome 70 has now been released to the Stable Channel, and users will start to see full screen interstitials on sites which still use certificates issues by the Legacy Symantec PKI. Initially this change will reach a small percentage of users, and then slowly scale up to 100% over the next several weeks.

Site Operators receiving problem reports from users are strongly encouraged to take corrective action by replacing their website certificates as soon as possible. Instructions on how to determine whether your site is affected as well as what corrective action is needed can be found below.


We previously announced plans to deprecate Chrome’s trust in the Symantec certificate authority (including Symantec-owned brands like Thawte, VeriSign, Equifax, GeoTrust, and RapidSSL). This post outlines how site operators can determine if they’re affected by this deprecation, and if so, what needs to be done and by when. Failure to replace these certificates will result in site breakage in upcoming versions of major browsers, including Chrome.

Chrome 66

If your site is using a SSL/TLS certificate from Symantec that was issued before June 1, 2016, it will stop functioning in Chrome 66, which could already be impacting your users.
If you are uncertain about whether your site is using such a certificate, you can preview these changes in Chrome Canary to see if your site is affected. If connecting to your site displays a certificate error or a warning in DevTools as shown below, you’ll need to replace your certificate. You can get a new certificate from any trusted CA, including Digicert, which recently acquired Symantec’s CA business.
An example of a certificate error that Chrome 66 users might see if you are using a Legacy Symantec SSL/TLS certificate that was issued before June 1, 2016. 

The DevTools message you will see if you need to replace your certificate before Chrome 66.Chrome 66 has already been released to the Canary and Dev channels, meaning affected sites are already impacting users of these Chrome channels. If affected sites do not replace their certificates by March 15, 2018, Chrome Beta users will begin experiencing the failures as well. You are strongly encouraged to replace your certificate as soon as possible if your site is currently showing an error in Chrome Canary.
Chrome 70
Starting in Chrome 70, all remaining Symantec SSL/TLS certificates will stop working, resulting in a certificate error like the one shown above. To check if your certificate will be affected, visit your site in Chrome today and open up DevTools. You’ll see a message in the console telling you if you need to replace your certificate.


The DevTools message you will see if you need to replace your certificate before Chrome 70.If you see this message in DevTools, you’ll want to replace your certificate as soon as possible. If the certificates are not replaced, users will begin seeing certificate errors on your site as early as July 20, 2018. The first Chrome 70 Beta release will be around September 13, 2018.
Expected Chrome Release Timeline
The table below shows the First Canary, First Beta and Stable Release for Chrome 66 and 70. The first impact from a given release will coincide with the First Canary, reaching a steadily widening audience as the release hits Beta and then ultimately Stable. Site operators are strongly encouraged to make the necessary changes to their sites before the First Canary release for Chrome 66 and 70, and no later than the corresponding Beta release dates.ReleaseFirst CanaryFirst BetaStable ReleaseChrome 66January 20, 2018~ March 15, 2018~ April 17, 2018Chrome 70~ July 20, 2018~ September 13, 2018~ October 16, 2018
For information about the release timeline for a particular version of Chrome, you can also refer to the Chromium Development Calendar which will be updated should release schedules change.
In order to address the needs of certain enterprise users, Chrome will also implement an Enterprise Policy that allows disabling the Legacy Symantec PKI distrust starting with Chrome 66. As of January 1, 2019, this policy will no longer be available and the Legacy Symantec PKI will be distrusted for all users. See this Enterprise Help Center article for more information.

Special Mention: Chrome 65
As noted in the previous announcement, SSL/TLS certificates from the Legacy Symantec PKI issued after December 1, 2017 are no longer trusted. This should not affect most site operators, as it requires entering in to special agreement with DigiCert to obtain such certificates. Accessing a site serving such a certificate will fail and the request will be blocked as of Chrome 65. To avoid such errors, ensure that such certificates are only served to legacy devices and not to browsers such as Chrome.

Posted by David Benjamin, Chrome networking

*Updated on October 17, 2018 with details about changes in other browsers

TLS (Transport Layer Security) is the protocol which secures HTTPS. It has a long history stretching back to the nearly twenty-year-old TLS 1.0 and its even older predecessor, SSL. Over that time, we have learned a lot about how to build secure protocols.

TLS 1.2 was published ten years ago to address weaknesses in TLS 1.0 and 1.1 and has enjoyed wide adoption since then. Today only 0.5% of HTTPS connections made by Chrome use TLS 1.0 or 1.1. These old versions of TLS rely on MD5 and SHA-1, both now broken, and contain other flaws. TLS 1.0 is no longer PCI-DSS compliant and the TLS working group has adopted a document to deprecate TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1.

In line with these industry standards, Google Chrome will deprecate TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 in Chrome 72. Sites using these versions will begin to see deprecation warnings in the DevTools console in that release. TLS 1.0 and 1.1 will be disabled altogether in Chrome 81. This will affect users on early release channels starting January 2020. Apple, Microsoft, and Mozilla have made similar announcements.

Site administrators should immediately enable TLS 1.2 or later. Depending on server software (such as Apache or nginx), this may be a configuration change or a software update. Additionally, we encourage all sites to revisit their TLS configuration. Chrome’s current criteria for modern TLS is the following:

• TLS 1.2 or later.
• An ECDHE- and AEAD-based cipher suite. AEAD-based cipher suites are those using AES-GCM or ChaCha20-Poly1305. ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256 is the recommended option for most sites.
• The server signature should use SHA-2. Note this is not the signature in the certificate, made by the CA. Rather, it is the signature made by the server itself, using its private key.

The older options—CBC-mode cipher suites, RSA-encryption key exchange, and SHA-1 online signatures—all have known cryptographic flaws. Each has been removed in the newly-published TLS 1.3, which is supported in Chrome 70. We retain them at prior versions for compatibility with legacy servers, but we will be evaluating them over time for eventual deprecation.

None of these changes require obtaining a new certificate. Additionally, they are backwards-compatible. Where necessary, servers may enable both modern and legacy options, to continue to support legacy clients. Note, however, such support may carry security risks. (For example, see the DROWN, FREAK, and ROBOT attacks.)

Over the coming Chrome releases, we will improve the DevTools Security Panel to point out deviations from these settings, and suggest improvements to the site’s configuration.

Enterprise deployments can preview the TLS 1.0 and 1.1 removal today by setting the SSLVersionMin policy to “tls1.2”. For enterprise deployments that need more time, this same policy can be used to re-enable TLS 1.0 or TLS 1.1 until January 2021.

The update includes one critical flaw in Oracle GoldenGate with a CVSS 3.0 score of 10.0.

Tumblr today published a report admitting the presence of a security vulnerability in its website that could have allowed hackers to steal login credentials and other private information for users' accounts. The affected information included users email addresses, protected (hashed and salted) account passwords, self-reported location (a feature no longer available), previously used email

Posted by Nagendra Modadugu and Bill Richardson, Google Device Security Group

[Cross-posted from the Android Developers Blog]

At the Made by Google event last week, we talked about the combination of AI + Software + Hardware to help organize your information. To better protect that information at a hardware level, our new Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL devices include a Titan M chip.We briefly introduced Titan M and some of its benefits on our Keyword Blog, and with this post we dive into some of its technical details.
Titan M is a second-generation, low-power security module designed and manufactured by Google, and is a part of the Titan family. As described in the Keyword Blog post, Titan M performs several security sensitive functions, including:

• Storing and enforcing the locks and rollback counters used by Android Verified Boot.
• Securely storing secrets and rate-limiting invalid attempts at retrieving them using the Weaver API.
• Providing backing for the Android Strongbox Keymaster module, including Trusted User Presence and Protected Confirmation. Titan M has direct electrical connections to the Pixel's side buttons, so a remote attacker can't fake button presses. These features are available to third-party apps, such as FIDO U2F Authentication.
• Enforcing factory-reset policies, so that lost or stolen phones can only be restored to operation by the authorized owner.
• Ensuring that even Google can't unlock a phone or install firmware updates without the owner's cooperation with Insider Attack Resistance.

Including Titan M in Pixel 3 devices substantially reduces the attack surface. Because Titan M is a separate chip, the physical isolation mitigates against entire classes of hardware-level exploits such as Rowhammer, Spectre, and Meltdown. Titan M's processor, caches, memory, and persistent storage are not shared with the rest of the phone's system, so side channel attacks like these—which rely on subtle, unplanned interactions between internal circuits of a single component—are nearly impossible. In addition to its physical isolation, the Titan M chip contains many defenses to protect against external attacks.
But Titan M is not just a hardened security microcontroller, but rather a full-lifecycle approach to security with Pixel devices in mind. Titan M's security takes into consideration all the features visible to Android down to the lowest level physical and electrical circuit design and extends beyond each physical device to our supply chain and manufacturing processes. At the physical level, we incorporated essential features optimized for the mobile experience: low power usage, low-latency, hardware crypto acceleration, tamper detection, and secure, timely firmware updates. We improved and invested in the supply chain for Titan M by creating a custom provisioning process, which provides us with transparency and control starting from the earliest silicon stages.
Finally, in the interest of transparency, the Titan M firmware source code will be publicly available soon. While Google holds the root keys necessary to sign Titan M firmware, it will be possible to reproduce binary builds based on the public source for the purpose of binary transparency.
A closer look at Titan MTitan (left) and Titan M (right)
Titan M's CPU is an ARM Cortex-M3 microprocessor specially hardened against side-channel attacks and augmented with defensive features to detect and respond to abnormal conditions. The Titan M CPU core also exposes several control registers, which can be used to taper access to chip configuration settings and peripherals. Once powered on, Titan M verifies the signature of its flash-based firmware using a public key built into the chip's silicon. If the signature is valid, the flash is locked so it can't be modified, and then the firmware begins executing.
Titan M also features several hardware accelerators: AES, SHA, and a programmable big number coprocessor for public key algorithms. These accelerators are flexible and can either be initialized with keys provided by firmware or with chip-specific and hardware-bound keys generated by the Key Manager module. Chip-specific keys are generated internally based on entropy derived from the True Random Number Generator (TRNG), and thus such keys are never externally available outside the chip over its entire lifetime.
While implementing Titan M firmware, we had to take many system constraints into consideration. For example, packing as many security features into Titan M's 64 Kbytes of RAM required all firmware to execute exclusively off the stack. And to reduce flash-wear, RAM contents can be preserved even during low-power mode when most hardware modules are turned off.
The diagram below provides a high-level view of the chip components described here.

Better security through transparency and innovationAt the heart of our implementation of Titan M are two broader trends: transparency and building a platform for future innovation.
Transparency around every step of the design process — from logic gates to boot code to the applications — gives us confidence in the defenses we're providing for our users. We know what's inside, how it got there, how it works, and who can make changes.
Custom hardware allows us to provide new features, capabilities, and performance not readily available in off-the-shelf components. These changes allow higher assurance use cases like two-factor authentication, medical device control, P2P payments, and others that we will help develop down the road.
As more of our lives are bound up in our phones, keeping those phones secure and trustworthy is increasingly important. Google takes that responsibility seriously. Titan M is just the latest step in our continuing efforts to improve the privacy and security of all our users.

Enlarge (credit: Helm)

There’s no doubt that Gmail has changed the way we consume email. It’s free, it gives most of us all the storage we’ll ever need, and it does a better job than most in weeding out spam and malware. But there’s a cost to all of this. Storing years' worth of messages in a corporate-owned place gives end users less control than many would like. They rightfully worry about Google either being hacked or legally compelled to turn over contents.

On Wednesday, a Seattle-based startup called Helm is launching a service designed to make it easy for people to securely take control of their email and other personal data. The company provides a small custom-built server that connects to a user's home or small-office network and sends, receives, and manages email, contacts, and calendars. Helm plans to offer photo storage and other services later.

With a 120GB solid-state drive, a three-minute setup, and the ability to store encrypted disk images that can only be decrypted by customers, Helm says its service provides the ease and reliability of Gmail and its tightly coupled contacts and calendar services. The startup is betting that people will be willing to pay $500 to purchase the box and use it for one year to host some of their most precious assets in their own home. The service will cost $100 per year after that. Included in the fee is the registration and automatic renewal of a unique domain selected by the customer and a corresponding TLS certificate from Let's Encrypt.

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The flaw affects thousands of servers; but GitHub, a major libssh user, is unaffected.

Were you one of the dozens of people who got a bizarre Twitter message yesterday? It's OK. It wasn't a disturbance in the Matrix.

What are utility and power companies, and federal agencies, doing to ready themselves for potential ransomware attacks? Threatpost discusses.

A serious bug in libssh could allow crooks to connect to your server - with no password requested or required. Here's what you need to know.

The vendor only plans to patch two of the eight impacted devices, according to a researcher.

A 21-year-old Kentucky man who previously pleaded guilty to developing, marketing, and selling an infamous remote access trojan (RAT) called LuminosityLink has now been sentenced to 30 months in prison. According to a press release published Monday by U.S. Attorney’s Office, Colton Grubbs, who used online moniker 'KFC Watermelon,' was pleaded guilty for three counts--unlawfully accessing