- wlug - University of Waikato Mail Lists

Australian Email Service FastMail Says It is Losing Customers and Facing Calls To Move Operations Outside of the Country Over Local Anti-Encryption Laws
by Peter Reutemann 25 Feb '19

25 Feb '19

'Email provider FastMail says it has lost customers and faces "regular" requests to shift its operations outside Australia following the passage of anti-encryption laws. The Victorian company, which offers ad-free email services to users in 150 countries, told a senate committee that the now-passed laws were starting to bite. "The way in which [the laws] were introduced, debated, and ultimately passed ... creates a perception that Australia has changed - that we are no longer a country which respects the right to privacy," FastMail CEO Bron Gondwana said. "We have already seen an impact on our business caused by this perception. Our particular service is not materially affected as we already respond to warrants under the Telecommunications Act." "Still, we have seen existing customers leave, and potential customers go elsewhere, citing this bill as the reason for their choice. We are [also] regularly being asked by customers if we plan to move.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/02/25/1329204 That's what the tech community had to say earlier about this bill: https://alp.fail/ Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Mozilla and Scroll Partner To Test Alternative Funding Models for the Web
by Peter Reutemann 25 Feb '19

25 Feb '19

'News subscription service Scroll, which is yet to launch to consumers but has received the backing of several top publishers, courted another major player today: Mozilla. The browser maker says it will work with Scroll to better understand how consumers react to ad-free experiences on the web and subscription-based funding models. As part of the deal, Mozilla said it would test features and product ideas provided by Scroll, which itself has been conducting internal tests with a number of outlets. Small groups of Firefox users will be invited at random to share feedback and also respond to surveys, Mozilla said.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/02/25/1819244 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Drupal 7 Will Reach End-of-Life in November of 2021
by Peter Reutemann 25 Feb '19

25 Feb '19

'Drupal 7, which was first released in January 2011, will reach end of life (EOL) in November of 2021, the Drupal Association said today. What this means for your Drupal 7 sites is, as of November 2021: 1. Drupal 7 will no longer be supported by the community at large. The community at large will no longer create new projects, fix bugs in existing projects, write documentation, etc. around Drupal 7. 2. There will be no more core commits to Drupal 7. 3. The Drupal Security Team will no longer provide support or Security Advisories for Drupal 7 core or contributed modules, themes, or other projects. Reports about Drupal 7 vulnerabilities might become public creating 0 day exploits. 4. All Drupal 7 releases on all project pages will be flagged as not supported. Maintainers can change that flag if they desire to. 5. On Drupal 7 sites with the update status module, Drupal Core will show up as unsupported. 6. After November 2021, using Drupal 7 may be flagged as insecure in 3rd party scans as it no longer gets support. 7. Best practice is to not use unsupported software, it would not be advisable to continue to build new Drupal 7 sites. 8. Now is the time to start planning your migration to Drupal' -- source: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/19/02/25/1953224 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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holding packages
by Peter Reutemann 25 Feb '19

25 Feb '19

Hi everyone If you want to keep a certain package at a fixed version, you can "hold" that package on a debian system like this: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PinningHowto#Introduction_to_Holding_Pack… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Experts Find Serious Problems With Switzerland's Online Voting System
by Peter Reutemann 22 Feb '19

22 Feb '19

'Switzerland made headlines this month for the transparency of its internet voting system when it launched a public penetration test and bug bounty program to test the resiliency of the system to attack. But after source code for the software and technical documentation describing its architecture were leaked online last week, critics are already expressing concern about the system's design and about the transparency around the public test. Cryptography experts who spent just a few hours examining the leaked code say the system is a poorly constructed and convoluted maze that makes it difficult to follow what's going on and effectively evaluate whether the cryptography and other security measures deployed in the system are done properly. "Most of the system is split across hundreds of different files, each configured at various levels," Sarah Jamie Lewis, a former security engineer for Amazon as well as a former computer scientist for England's GCHQ intelligence agency, told Motherboard. "I'm used to dealing with Java code that runs across different packages and different teams, and this code somewhat defeats even my understanding." She said the system uses cryptographic solutions that are fairly new to the field and that have to be implemented in very specific ways to make the system auditable, but the design the programmers chose thwarts this. "It is simply not the standard we would expect," she told Motherboard. [...] It isn't just outside attackers that are a concern; the system raises the possibility for an insider to intentionally misconfigure the system to make it easier to manipulate, while maintaining plausible deniability that the misconfiguration was unintentional. "Someone could wire the thing in the wrong place and suddenly the system is compromised," said Lewis, who is currently executive director of the Open Privacy Research Society, a Canadian nonprofit that develops secure and privacy-enhancing software for marginalized communities. "And when you're talking about code that is supposed to be protecting a national election, that is not a statement someone should be able to make." "You expect secure code to be defensively written that would prevent the implementers of the code from wiring it up incorrectly," Lewis told Motherboard. But instead of building a system that doesn't allow for this, the programmers simply added a comment to their source code telling anyone who compiles and implements it to take care to configure it properly, she said. The online voting system was developed by Swiss Post, the country's national postal service, and the Barcelona-based company Scytl. "Scytl claims the system uses end-to-end encryption that only the Swiss Electoral Board would be able to decrypt," reports Motherboard. "But there are reasons to be concerned about such claims."' -- source: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/19/02/21/2227234 At least they had a public test to figure that out, rather than an actual election... Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Millions of websites threatened by highly critical code-execution bug in Drupal
by Peter Reutemann 22 Feb '19

22 Feb '19

'Millions of sites that run the Drupal content management system run the risk of being hijacked until they're patched against a vulnerability that allows hackers to remotely execute malicious code, managers of the open source project warned Wednesday. CVE-2019-6340, as the flaw is tracked, stems from a failure to sufficiently validate user input, managers said in an advisory. Hackers who exploited the vulnerability could, in some cases, run code of their choice on vulnerable websites. The flaw is rated highly critical. "Some field types do not properly sanitize data from non-form sources," the advisory stated. "This can lead to arbitrary PHP code execution in some cases."' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/millions-of-websites… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Netflix..
by John 22 Feb '19

22 Feb '19

Does anyone know how to get Netflix to work in Firefox?? Cheers John..

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Severe Vulnerabilities Uncovered In Popular Password Managers
by Peter Reutemann 21 Feb '19

21 Feb '19

Not sure whether this also applies to the Linux/cross-platform versions... 'Independent Security Evaluators (ISE) published an assessment on Tuesday with the results of testing with several popular password managers, including LastPass and KeePass. The team said that each password management solution "failed to provide the security to safeguard a user's passwords as advertised" and "fundamental flaws" were found that "exposed the data they are designed to protect." The vulnerabilities were found in software operating on Windows 10 systems. In one example, the master password which users need to use to access their cache of credentials was stored in PC RAM in a plaintext, readable format. ISE was able to extract these passwords and other login credentials from memory while the password manager in question was locked. It may be possible that malicious programs downloaded to the same machine by threat actors could do the same. The report has summarized the main findings based on each password management solution. Here's what ISE had to say about LastPass and KeePass -- two of the most popular password managers available: "LastPass obfuscates the master password while users are typing in the entry, and when the password manager enters an unlocked state, database entries are only decrypted into memory when there is user interaction. However, ISE reported that these entries persist in memory after the software enters a locked state. It was also possible for the researchers to extract the master password and interacted-with password entries due to a memory leak." "KeePass scrubs the master password from memory and is not recoverable. However, errors in workflows permitted the researchers from extracting credential entries which have been interacted with. In the case of Windows APIs, sometimes, various memory buffers which contain decrypted entries may not be scrubbed correctly."' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/19/02/21/070204 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Oracle Claims a Fighter of Pirated Apps is a Front For Ad Fraud
by Peter Reutemann 21 Feb '19

21 Feb '19

'A company that claims to combat app piracy is a pirate itself, according to a report Oracle released this week. From a report: Oracle claims the company, Tapcore, has been perpetrating a massive ad fraud on Android devices by infecting apps with software that ring up fake ad impressions and drain people's data. Based in The Netherlands, Tapcore works with developers to identify when apps are pirated and then enables developers to make money from those bootleg copies by serving ads. Oracle says that Tapcore's anti-piracy code was a Trojan horse that was generating fake mobile websites to trick ad serving platforms into paying them for non-existent ad inventory. "The code is delivering a steady stream of invisible video ads and spoofing domains," Dan Fichter, VP of software development at Oracle Data Cloud, tells Ad Age. "On all those impressions it looked like the advertiser was running ads on legitimate mobile websites. Not only were they not on a website, they were on an invisible web browser." On its website, Tapcore says it works with more than 3,000 apps, serving 150 million ad impressions a day. The apps whose pirated versions it has worked with include titles like "Perfect 365," "Draw Clash of Clans," "Vertex" and "Solitaire: Season 4," according to Oracle's report.' -- source: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/19/02/21/1238254 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Google Researchers Say Software Alone Can't Mitigate Spectre Chip Flaws
by Peter Reutemann 21 Feb '19

21 Feb '19

'A group of researchers say that it will be difficult to avoid Spectre bugs in the future unless CPUs are dramatically overhauled. From a report: Google researchers say that software alone is not enough to prevent the exploitation of the Spectre flaws present in a variety of CPUs. The team of researchers -- including Ross McIlroy, Jaroslav Sevcik, Tobias Tebbi, Ben L Titzer and Toon Verwaest -- work on Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine. The researchers presented their findings in a paper distributed through ArXiv and came to the conclusion that all processors that perform speculative execution will always remain susceptible to various side-channel attacks, despite mitigations that may be discovered in future. ' -- source: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/19/02/21/1630210 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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