TechBlog

ZDNet: Phandroid’s AndroidForums.com has been hacked. The database that powers the site was compromised and more than 1 million user account details were stolen. If you use the forum, make sure to change your password asap. Read the whole story at ZDNet: http://www.zdnet.com/android-forums-hacked-1-million-user-credentials-stolen-7000000817/

Übergizmo wrote: If you use Yahoo! Voice a lot – Yahoo’s VoIP service via its Yahoo! Messenger instant messaging application, then you will definitely need to hear this report. Earlier today, more than 453,000 user accounts from an unidentified service owned by Yahoo were posted on a hacker site. The hackers reportedly said that they infiltrated the subdomain by using a union-based SQL injection. But the group responsible for the security breach added that the data breach was intended to be a wake-up call for Yahoo. ...

Tomorrow, July 9th, the FBI will shutdown the DNS servers which allow the computers infected with this malware to use the Internet. If you want to make sure you will keep your internet working, act today and check your computer to see if it’s infected by DNS Changer or not, here is a very easy to use tool: Tool available for those affected by the DNS-Changer

Copied from LA-Times: A man who hacked the email accounts of celebrities should pay movie star Scarlett Johansson $66,179.46 in compensation, federal prosecutors said. The hacker also should serve 71 months in prison and pay a total of $150,000 in compensation to all his victims, prosecutors said in court papers filed this week. Christopher Chaney, 35, of Jacksonville, Fla., who pleaded guilty in Los Angeles federal court to nine counts of computer hacking, for two years hacked almost daily into email accounts of 50 people in the entertainment industry. ...

Version 3 of Personal Software Inspector (PSI), Secunia‘s free program updater, has been released with a much simplified user interface, enabling less technically astute users to keep their Windows applications up to date as well. According to Secunia, the automatic updater has also been enhanced. PSI is now able to keep programs from more than 3,000 companies up to date, though, as before, PSI only cares about updates which fix security vulnerabilities. Version 3 also includes additional translations, including German. The software checks the user’s computer for outdated program versions known to contain vulnerabilities and either installs updates or provides links to download them. ...

The WordPress developers have released version 3.4.1 of their popular open source publishing platform, fixing a number of bugs and closing security holes, one of which is rated as important. WordPress 3.4, which has already been downloaded 3 million times since being released two weeks ago, contains a important privilege escalation flaw that accidentally allowed all administrators and editors on multi-site installations to use unfiltered_html. This could have been exploited by users for cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks by, for example, publishing posts containing malicious code. ...

Google has closed a total of 23 vulnerabilities with the release of Chrome 20. Of those vulnerabilities, 14 are rated critical, enabling attackers to execute code in the browser’s sandbox, among other things. Integer overflow vulnerabilities in the code for processing PDF files and Matroska containers (.mkv) have also been fixed. Chrome 20 also includes the latest version of Adobe’s Flash Player on Linux, using the new cross-platform Pepper API. In testing at The H, it was confirmed that the Flash Player support also works on 64-bit Linux systems. ...

Microsoft has released an unscheduled, non-patch day update for Windows to update the Windows Update function itself. However, according to reports from readers, the Windows Update Agent update does not always run smoothly; The H’s associates at heise Security also ran into problems on their test systems. A staggered dissemination of the update has been taking place over the past three to four days. Users who run Windows Update are confronted with a message which says that an update for Windows Update needs to be installed before the system can check for other updates. ...

Adobe Reader X runs in a sandbox at a very restricted privilege level. Important system calls are supposed to be handled by a special broker process that will subject them to extensive testing. However, a small design flaw allows attackers to escape from this sandbox and execute arbitrary code – despite having both ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomisation) and DEP (Data Execution Prevention). As described by Guillaume Delugré, the broker process is at the heart of the exploit as it uses a memory page allocated via VirtualAllocEx to store the overwritten code of system calls which have been redirected to the broker. Despite having ASLR, however, the memory address returned by VirtualAllocEx is not randomised. This means that the Windows system function call will end up in a predictable, “nearly constant” location which the exploit can then access directly. ...

Adobe has released an updated version of its proprietary Flash Player 11.3 plugin to address a bug that caused Firefox 13 on Windows to crash for some users. The problem is believed to have been related to the recently introduced Protected Mode for the Windows version of Flash Player and the open source web browser; the new mode is designed to isolate the plugin from the rest of the system by running it in its own sandbox. ...