Tech News
There has been much sniggering into sleeves after wags found they could upset iOS 6 iPhones and iPads, and Macs running OS X 10.8, by sending a simple rogue text message or email. A bug is triggered when the CoreText component in the vulnerable Apple operating systems tries to render on screen a particular sequence of Unicode characters: the kernel reacts by killing the running program, be it your web browser, message client, Twitter app or whatever tried to use CoreText to display the naughty string.
An unaddressed five-month-old flaw in Apple\'s Mac OS X gives hackers near unlimited access to files by altering clock and user timestamp settings. As reported by Ars Technica, a bug discovered five months ago has received renewed interest due to the creation of a new module in testing software Metasploit, which can life easier for hackers looking to exploit the Mac vulnerability. The bug revolves around a Unix component called sudo. The program is designed to require a password before \"super user\" privileges are granted to an account -- giving access to other user files -- and the flaw works around this authentication process by setting a Mac\'s clock back to Jan 1, 1970, the Unix epoch, a way to describe instances in time. By setting the clock back to 1-1-1970, the beginning of time for the machine -- as well as altering the sudo user timestamp, it is possible for hackers to gain root access without the need for a password.
No matter how much effort an ISP puts in or the government does, censorship always gets a backdoor. One of the biggest Controversial File Sharing site \"The Pirate Bay\" is censored in various capacities in some countries around the world, but Pirate Bay is celebrating its 10th birthday; in Stockholm sponsored by an energy drinks maker. On their 10th anniversary the site is releasing its Pirate Browse; a custom Firefox browser that skirts Internet censorship and lets you access the Pirate Bay from anywhere.However, Its founders recently served jail time for their activities, with one of the founders going back to prison in an unrelated Swedish hacking case. PirateBrowser is meant to focus more on unrestricted access to the Internet than it is about being able to download new episode of Breaking Bad without paying for them, but one tends to be a function of the other.
Won\'t be complicit in crimes against the American people. Lavabit, the security-conscious email provider that was the preferred email service of NSA leaker Edward Snowden, has closed its doors, citing US government interference. \"I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit,\" founder Ladar Levinson said in a statement posted to the company\'s homepage on Thursday. \"After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations.\" Prior to its closure, Lavabit was a dedicated email service that offered subscribers \"the freedom of running your own email server without the hassle or expense.\" In addition to a variety of flexible configuration options, the service boasted that all email stored on its servers was encrypted using asymmetric elliptical curve cryptography, in such a way that it was impossible to discern the contents of any email without knowing the user\'s password.
Need to end planet-wide-snooping leaks? That\'ll do the trick, thinks US spymaster The NSA has announced its brainwave to end further leaks about its secret operations by disaffected employees: it will simply sack 90 per cent of all its sysadmins. The US surveillance agency\'s spyboss General Keith Alexander told a computer security conference in New York that automating much of his organisation\'s work - such as snooping on anyone with an internet connection - will make it more secure. The inner workings of the NSA\'s massive PRISM and XKEYSCORE programmes were exposed to the world by Edward Snowden, an ex-CIA techie and NSA contractor who had access to highly classified material, along with about 1,000 other sysadmins. Gen Alexander said: \"What we\'re in the process of doing - not fast enough - is reducing our system administrators by about 90 percent.\"
Linux users have enjoyed a veritable lack of malware that targets the everyday user for quite a long time, yet those days are very slowly coming to an end, with more trojans and such that target the operating system showing up. One such bit of malicious software is called \"Hand of Thief,\" the brainchild of Russian cyber-criminals designed to nab banking details. This trojan targets the average Linux desktop, and is currently being sold on the black market for a hefty $2,000 USD. Such a price tag gets the buyer free updates for the software, and enables them to acquire information from Linux machines they infect. For now, the software is limited to opening backdoors and offering form grabbers, but security firm RSA says it is expected the trojan will become a full bank info-stealing bot in the future.