Tech News

Until now only when someone possessed a chemical, biological or nuclear weapon, it was considered to be a weapon of mass destruction in the eyes of the law. But we could have an interesting -- and equally controversial -- addition to this list soon. The Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), an agency of the United States Department of Commerce that deals with issues involving national security and high technology has proposed tighter export rules for computer security tools -- first brought up in the Wassenaar Arrangement (WA) at the Plenary meeting in December 2013. This proposal could potentially revise an international agreement aimed at controlling weapons technology as well as hinder the work of security researchers. At the meeting, a group of 41 like-minded states discussed ways to bring cybersecurity tools under the umbrella of law, just as any other global arms trade. This includes guidelines on export rules for licensing technology and software as it crosses an international border. Currently, these tools are controlled based on their cryptographic functionality. While BIS is yet to clarify things, the new proposed rule could disallow encryption license exceptions.

After Heartbleed, there is another major security issue in SSL that affects a millions of websites. The bug affects an algorithm called “Diffie–Hellman key exchange“, which allows two parties that have never met before to negotiate a shared key over an insecure channel. The vulnerability affects an estimated 8.4 percent of top one million websites, along with huge number of mail servers. A number of security researchers from different organisations and universities, have discovered a number of security issue in this algorithm, and published a report that explains about the flaw. The attacks allow man-in-the-middle (MITM) to downgrade HTTPS connections to 512-bit cryptography. You can check whether you browser is vulnerable or not through this site.At the time of writing this article this site shows that both Chrome and Firefox are vulnerable to this flaw, while Internet Explorer is safe from Logjam vulnerability. We recommend to this guide if you system admin of a server.

A few days ago we reported that Google had secretly been rolling out a Phantom algorithm that at the time the search engine giant kept under raps, yet thousands of webmasters noted as rankings and traffic fluctuated. And we finally have some confirmation that the Phantom (as the secretive update was named at the time) was indeed a Google update. The update was not a web spam focused change, but indeed a general tweaking of the core search quality algorithm. John Mueller, one of Google’s primary techies (Webmaster Trends Analyst to be precise), said that on the 1st of May there was a major update – which he confirmed in one of his regular Google+ Hangouts with webmasters yesterday. He said: “Essentially this is something where we are not… calling this anything specific. “This is essentially just a normal algorithm update that we make all the time, and sometimes that is something that affects more sites and sometimes that is something that affects fewer sites. “But essentially, we are working on trying to increase the relevance and the quality of the search results, and that is essentially just a normal update that was happening there. Nothing really specific. “So if you are seeing changes within your sites traffic, impressions that are coming from search, I think that is something where you can work on your website in general and for most cases it is not something where there is any technical issue that you need to focus on and you would see that in Webmaster Tools. “So if you’d like us to be more visible about these updates, focusing on your site and making it the best it can possible by is always a good strategy.” SPEEDING UP PANDA AND PENGUIN Mueller also confirmed that Google are working at speeding up both the Panda and Penguin algorithms, with webmasters citing their frustration that Panda in particular hasn’t been updated in months. “We are working on updates there,” Mueller said. “I know it’s frustrating, if you’ve worked a lot on your website already to clean up these issues (poor quality content). “The same applies to Penguin as well. Where maybe you cleaned up a lot of web spam issues and you are just waiting for things to kind of open up again – that is something we are definitely working on to… update that data again and make it a little bit faster.”

PayPal has formally indicated that its merchants may now begin accepting bitcoin as one of their integrated payment methods. In a filing at the Securities and Exchanges Commission (SEC) published today, the company details its future as a separate entity from eBay, a split which is due to occur by the end of 2015. In discussing its innovations, specifically Braintree, PayPal definitively mentions “digital currencies such as Bitcoin” as an official tool for merchants to use. The extract from the extensive filing reads: “A merchant can typically open a standard PayPal account and begin accepting payments through PayPal within a few minutes. Most online or mobile merchants can onboard quickly and are not required to invest in new or specialized hardware. Our Payments Platform supports growth with a variety of value-added services designed to help businesses of all sizes manage their cash flow, invoice clients, pay bills, and reduce the need for merchants to receive and store sensitive customer financial information. For our standard service, we do not charge merchants setup or recurring fees. A merchant can also integrate with Braintree to begin accepting payments with credit or debit cards, PayPal, Venmo, digital currencies such as Bitcoin, or other payment solutions with a single integration.” PayPal added that the tools such as Braintree, a mobile payments platform jointly partnered with Coinbase, BitPay and GoCoin, “are designed to help merchants increase the conversion rate of consumer purchases on their websites and mobile applications.” The official statement comes as little surprise in and of itself, with PayPal having hinted at Bitcoin integration in one or more forms since August 2014 when news of the Coinbase partnership broke. A private beta of the service was made available in January 2015 with Coinbase confirming on its blog: “After working closely with Braintree over the past few months, we are excited to announce that Braintree has opened up private beta access to accept bitcoin for all of its U.S.-based merchants. Braintree merchants can now accept bitcoin by creating a Coinbase account and adding a few lines of code to their existing Braintree v.zero integration.” Nonetheless, PayPal is yet to provide further details on the full extent of its plans for Bitcoin or the other cryptocurrencies supported by its partners, which in the case of GoCoin also include Dogecoin and Litecoin. EBay meanwhile has been supportive of the move, its president Devin Wenig stating that “Both eBay and PayPal are open to [Bitcoin]—PayPal is experimenting with it—and through our relationship we’re likely to do the same. I am very open to it.”

Dear reader. It seems that you are causing headaches in dark corners of the web. I pinpoint you specifically, as a reader of Naked Security, because I assume that if you are a regular to this site then you are more likely than most to care about whos watching you online. For the people trying to track you, profile you and sell to you, you are a problem. Historically, techniques for tracking peoples movements around the web have relied on HTTP cookies - small messages that tag your browser so it can be uniquely identified. Unfortunately for snoopers, profilers and marketers, cookie-based tracking leaves the final decision about whether you are followed or not in your hands because you can delete their cookies and disappear. It is no secret that some vendors have moved on from cookies - local storage, Flash cookies and ETags have all been used in-the-wild, either as cookie replacements or as backups from which cookies can be respawned. These techniques have been successful because they are obscure but they all have the same fundamental weakness as cookies - they rely on things that you can delete. The holy grail for tracking is to find a unique ID that you can not delete, something that identifies you uniquely based on who or what you are, not what you have.

On Friday, alleged Silk Road mastermind Ross Ulbrichts defense attorney Joshua Dratel condemned threats against Judge Katherine Forrest that appeared on the Dark Web earlier this week. The threats came in response to two recent rulings dismissing motions by the defense to drop charges and suppress evidence in the Silk Road trial. An editor on Hidden Wiki who goes by the name ServingJustice was the source of the threats, Arstechnica reported on Wednesday. ServingJustice allegedly posted: Katherine Bolan Forrest is the judge who is unfairly ruining Ross Ulbrichts life and chance for a fair trial, and then published what the anonymous editor claimed to be Forrests Social Security number, date of birth, and home address on the Dark Web. On Friday, Ulbrichts defense responded to the threats. I would prefer not to have to dignify these threats with a comment, but obviously, and as strongly as possible, we condemn them, Dratel wrote in a statement. They do not in any way have anything to do with Ross Ulbricht or anyone associated with him, or reflect his views or those of anyone associated with him.