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Details on the Unlocking of the San Bernardino Terrorist’s iPhone

April 19, 2021 Ed Gardner 0

The Washington Post has published a long story on the unlocking of the San Bernardino Terrorist’s iPhone 5C in 2016. We all thought it was an Israeli company called Cellebrite. It was actually an Australian company called Azimuth Security.

Azimuth specialized in finding significant vulnerabilities. Dowd, a former IBM X-Force researcher whom one peer called “the Mozart of exploit design,” had found one in open-source code from Mozilla that Apple used to permit accessories to be plugged into an iPhone’s lightning port, according to the person…

Details on the Unlocking of the San Bernardino Terrorist’s iPhone

April 19, 2021 Ed Gardner 0

The Washington Post has published a long story on the unlocking of the San Bernardino Terrorist’s iPhone 5C in 2016. We all thought it was an Israeli company called Cellebrite. It was actually an Australian company called Azimuth Security.

Azimuth specialized in finding significant vulnerabilities. Dowd, a former IBM X-Force researcher whom one peer called “the Mozart of exploit design,” had found one in open-source code from Mozilla that Apple used to permit accessories to be plugged into an iPhone’s lightning port, according to the person…

Did Someone at the Commerce Dept. Find a SolarWinds Backdoor in Aug. 2020?

April 16, 2021 Ed Gardner 0

On Aug. 13, 2020, someone uploaded a suspected malicious file to VirusTotal, a service that scans submitted files against more than five dozen antivirus and security products. Last month, Microsoft and FireEye identified that file as a newly-discovered fourth malware backdoor used in the sprawling SolarWinds supply chain hack. An analysis of the malicious file and other submissions by the same VirusTotal user suggest the account that initially flagged the backdoor as suspicious belongs to IT personnel at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), a division of the U.S. Commerce Department that handles telecommunications and Internet policy.

DNI’s Annual Threat Assessment

April 15, 2021 Ed Gardner 0

The office of the Director of National Intelligence released its “Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community.” Cybersecurity is covered on pages 20-21. Nothing surprising:

  • Cyber threats from nation states and their surrogates will remain acute.
  • States’ increasing use of cyber operations as a tool of national power, including increasing use by militaries around the world, raises the prospect of more destructive and disruptive cyber activity.
  • Authoritarian and illiberal regimes around the world will increasingly exploit digital tools to surveil their citizens, control free expression, and censor and manipulate information to maintain control over their populations.
    …

The FBI Is Now Securing Networks Without Their Owners’ Permission

April 14, 2021 Ed Gardner 0

In January, we learned about a Chinese espionage campaign that exploited four zero-days in Microsoft Exchange. One of the characteristics of the campaign, in the later days when the Chinese probably realized that the vulnerabilities would soon be fixed, was to install a web shell in compromised networks that would give them subsequent remote access. Even if the vulnerabilities were patched, the shell would remain until the network operators removed it.

Now, months later, many of those shells are still in place. And they’re being used by criminal hackers as well…