More than a quarter million homes protected by SimpliSafe wireless security systems are vulnerable to hackers who can deactivate the alarm anytime, according to IOActive, a Seattle-based security consulting firm. IOActive published a proof of concept report on Wednesday that outlines how it disarmed SimpliSafe’s wireless home security systems. The hack, according IOActive researcher Andrew Zonenberg,...

Not since Stagefright have we had a vulnerability with the scale and reach of the glibc flaw disclosed on Tuesday. “It’s pretty bad; you don’t get bugs of this magnitude too often,” said Dan Kaminsky, researcher, cofounder and chief scientist at White Ops. “The code path is widely exposed and available, and it yields remote...

As sales of IoT devices continue to see year-over-year double digit growth, security experts are urging the wearable industry to put security front and center when it comes to designing fitness tracker hardware, firmware and backend systems. In a report released Wednesday by the IEEE Center for Secure Design, researchers spotlighted six security red flags...

Mike Mimoso and Chris Brook recap last week’s Security Analyst Summit — including lots of IoT and critical infrastructure talk, how a researcher hacked his hospital, news on APTs like Metel and Poseidon, and more. Download: Reflecting_on_SAS_2016.mp3 Music by Chris Gonsalves

TENERFIE, Spain – Sergey Lozhkin knows malware. Medical devices? Admittedly, not so much. That, however, was not an impediment to the Kaspersky Lab researcher in cracking the digital walls of a Moscow hospital and finding a shocking array of open doors on the network and weaknesses in medical devices and applications crucial not only to...

TENERIFE, Spain –The rhetoric around hacking the power grid would have you believe it’s a relatively mundane practice. Policymakers, intelligence agencies and vendors, for example, spread the word gleefully, leaning on scenarios such as state-sponsored hackers shutting off the lights in the dead of winter as a scare tactic to glean budget and influence. One...

TENERIFE, Spain – Intelligence services may be the security industry’s boogeyman right now, but for a long time, IT security has done a good job of following the government’s lead when it comes to developing new approaches and strategies. At the Kaspersky Lab Security Analyst Summit, Inbar Raz of PerimeterX illustrated how security has been in lockstep...

TENERIFE, Spain— Many bank robbers long ago dropped the stick-up man persona in favor of a keyboard and a reliable password-stealing Trojan. Banking malware, however, may soon not be good enough for the bad guys. More and more are copycatting the techniques deployed by advanced hackers to steal millions of dollars from banks and other...

Socat is the latest open source tool to come under suspicion that it is backdoored. Socat is a versatile command line utility that builds bi-directional communication streams and moves data between channels, including files, network pipes, serial connected devices, sockets or a combination of any of these. A security advisory published Monday warned that the...

Successful attacks against firmware are rare but provide hackers with one thing they covet most: persistence. Advanced attack groups have already accelerated their capabilities in finding ways to burrow into the BIOS and EFI as noted by the Snowden leaks’ description of the NSA’s attempts to develop malware implants for the BIOS. Further, last year’s...