Nick Wingfield with The Wall Street Journal gets confirmation that a plan is in place for Apple to remotely kill certain iPhone / iPod touch applications if they are found to be malicious. Mr. Jobs confirmed such a capability exists, but argued that Apple needs it in case it inadvertently allows a malicious program — [...]
Read the rest of this entry »

Intego is reporting that Apple Remote Desktop (specifically ARDAgent) is vulnerable to a root exploit. This vulnerability takes advantage of the fact that ARDAgent, a part of the Remote Management component of Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5, has a setuid bit set. Any user running such an executable gains the privileges of the user [...]
Read the rest of this entry »

If you were to ask people if they felt vulnerable to phishing scams, they would most likely tell you, “No.” However, if phishing emails were not profitable to someone, our inboxes would not be filled with them. I get a lot of phishing emails, and for the most part they are for companies and services [...]
Read the rest of this entry »

The latest exploit affects both Macs and Windows machines. The vulnerability lies in the way FireWire handles Direct Memory Access (DMA). Theoretically, this exploit could be extended to other I/O that use DMA. This exploit is apparently not new, but is receiving more attention due to the recent memory attacks demoed by a few Princeton [...]
Read the rest of this entry »

A group of Princeton computer scientists has published a paper(pdf) demonstrating a method for accessing a computer’s memory to gain access to encryption keys. Contrary to popular belief, RAM contents are not immediately erased once a computer is shut down. It can take 2.5 to 35 seconds for the data to fade away. This time [...]
Read the rest of this entry »

This article on Digg caught my attention, but in the end turned out to be less interesting than I had expected. To cut to the chase — Don’t trust the information in your caller-ID. The interesting part came from a commenter: I was a victim of this caller id spoofing just last week. Bank of [...]
Read the rest of this entry »

When Computerworld says it’s a “brick”. Computerworld is reporting that an exploit has been found that affects HP and Compaq computers and results in the computer being “bricked”. According to the article, “the Software Update bugs let an attacker corrupt Windows’ kernel files, making the laptop unbootable, or with a little more effort, allow hacks [...]
Read the rest of this entry »

Heise Security is reporting that a vulnerability has been found in the load_threadstack function in mach_loader.c when processing Mach-O binaries, which can lead to a kernel panic. Single user systems should not be at risk as the bug can only be exploited by users logged onto a system. The bug does, however, represent a problem [...]
Read the rest of this entry »

Over the past week some Mac sites (four that I know of) were defaced by someone calling himself “malcor”. This, in turn, brought about some panic in the security and WordPress communities. A couple security firms blogged about the incident (Avert Labs, Blogvis.com) which only served to increase the awareness/panic. The so-called hacker named “malcor” [...]
Read the rest of this entry »

Secunia has issued a security advisory (SA27755) for a buffer overflow exploit in QuickTime and has labeled it as “extremely critical”. The vulnerability is caused due to a boundary error when processing RTSP replies and can be exploited to cause a stack-based buffer overflow via a specially crafted RTSP reply containing an overly long “Content-Type” [...]
Read the rest of this entry »