InfoSec Week 2, 2019

Personal information of many German politicans were published online. Since then, Police arrested 20 years old suspect.
https://www.thelocal.de/20190108/suspect-20-arrested-over-massive-german-politician-data-hack

Qualys has sent out a security advisory describing three stack-overrun vulnerabilities in systemd-journald. They have two working exploits already.
https://lwn.net/Articles/776404/

Samsung Phone Users Perturbed to Find They Can’t Delete Facebook.
According to a Hacker News comment (2nd link), it should be possible to delete application via cable using ADB. I didn’t try it.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-08/samsung-phone-users-get-a-shock-they-can-t-delete-facebook
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18864354

Australian government issued a warning regarding WhatsApp hoax that is promoting installation of a ‘gold’ version of the application. Installation leads to a malware infection.
https://cyber.gov.au/individual/news/whatsapp-gold-hoax/

After Motherboard’s article about US carriers selling customers location data, senators call on FCC to investigate T-Mobile, AT&T, and Sprint.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/j5z74d/senators-harris-warner-wyden-fcc-investigate-att-sprint-tmobile-bounty-hunters

Trial of a Mexican drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán started and it looks like his IT security guy gave encryption keys for a SIP communication service to investigators long time ago.
El Chapo also spyied on his wife and fiancées using Flexi-spy spyware which provider was subpoenaed by FBI.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/08/nyregion/el-chapo-trial.html
https://twitter.com/alanfeuer/status/1083033189956964353

Singapore’s ministry of communications and information published “Public Report of the Committee of Inquiry (COI) into the cyber attack on Singapore Health Services Private Limited Patient Database”.
If you are into incident response, this report is really great source.
https://www.mci.gov.sg/~/media/mcicorp/doc/report%20of%20the%20coi%20into%20the%20cyber%20attack%20on%20singhealth%2010%20jan%202019.pdf?la=en

Back in 2015, Facebook filed patent request describing how to track user relations using the dust on camera lens.
https://gizmodo.com/facebook-knows-how-to-track-you-using-the-dust-on-your-1821030620

If your computer rely on BitLocker in TPM mode (boot without PIN), it is possible to extract cryptographic material data out of your computer and decrypt the hard drive.
https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1080869868889501696

Zerodium platform wants to pay you $2,000,000 for remote iOS jailbreaks, $1,000,000 for WhatsApp / iMessage / SMS / MMS remote code execution exploit, and $500,000 for Chrome remote exploit.
https://twitter.com/Zerodium/status/1082259805224333312

Security engineer Chris Palmer published blog about the state of software security in 2019.
https://noncombatant.org/2019/01/06/state-of-security-2019/

The NSA has so far open-sourced 32 projects on Github, as part of its Technology Transfer Program.
https://github.com/nationalsecurityagency

Research paper on a new hardware-agnostic side-channel attack which is targeting the operating system page cache was published.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.01161

Interesting paper from the last October a long-term secure storage proposal:
“ELSA: Efficient Long-Term Secure Storage of Large Datasets”.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.11888