TechBlog

The H-Online: A new version of NVIDIA’s proprietary UNIX graphics drivers for Linux, Solaris and FreeBSD fixes a security vulnerability (CVE-2012-0946) that allowed attackers to read and write arbitrary system memory in order to, for example, obtain root privileges. To take advantage of the vulnerability, an attacker must have access permission for some device files – which, for systems with these drivers, is typically the case for users who can launch a graphical interface as 3D acceleration and some other features cannot be used otherwise. ...

The H-Online: The Tuesday after the Easter weekend, 10 April, is set to be a busy one for system administrators as Microsoft and Adobe have sent out notifications that they will both be issuing fixes for critical vulnerabilities in their products. Microsoft’s April notification says there will be four critical advisories concerning Microsoft Windows, Internet Explorer, .NET Framework, Office, SQL Server, Microsoft Server and Developer tools, which all lead to remote code execution. A fifth remote code execution vulnerability in Office is marked as important, as is a sixth information disclosure issue in Microsoft’s Forefront United Access Gateway. The critical bulletins will affect all versions of Windows, from Windows XP SP3 to Windows Server 2008R2. One critical bulletin for Internet Explorer covers IE 6, 7, 8 and 9 ...

The H-Online: A Russian AV company, Dr. Web, says it has conducted research to determine the spread of the Flashback trojan on systems running Mac OS X and says that 550,000 systems are infected, mostly in the US and Canada. A later update raised that number to 600,000 and claimed 274 infected systems in Cupertino, California. Dr. Web says it employed a sinkhole technique to intercept the bot installed by the newest Flashback trojan, and directed the bots to its own servers where it could analyse the traffic. Each bot includes a unique ID of the machine it has infected in the query string it sends to the command and control server; it is these unique IDs that Dr. Web has used to calculate the infection count. According to its estimates, of the original 550,000 estimate, 56.6% of the systems were in the United States, 19.8% in Canada, 12.8% in the United Kingdom and 6.1% in Australia. ...

The H-Online: Google has announced updates to the Stable and Beta channels of their Chrome browser, fixing several bugs and twelve security vulnerabilities. Seven of the twelve security fixes were classed as high-risk problems and Google paid a total of $6000 to the researchers who discovered the bugs. The update also includes a new version of the bundled Flash Player. Adobe have revised the Flash Player advisory from the end of March to include fixes for a Chrome/Flash only pair of memory corruption issues listed as CVE-2012-0724 and CVE-2012-0725. Given that these issues only affect Chrome and Chrome manages its own update, it is unlikely that Adobe will be reissuing or updating the advisory or patches for other browsers and platforms. ...

SophosLabs: Brian Krebs is reporting that MasterCard and Visa are warning member-banks of a payment processor breach that may impact more than 10,000,000 credit cards. It is important to note that MasterCard and Visa’s own networks were not involved in the attack, it appears to be related to payment processor Global Payments. Reuters is reporting that Global Payments stock was suspended for trading after falling more than 9% on the Nasdaq stock exchange. ...

The H-Security: Google has added new features to its OAuth 2.0 Playground, which it launched last November. Developers can now switch to using client-side flow, and the system has added support for APIs that use OAuth 2.0 drafts 10 to 25. Google has also added a feature that makes it easy to see all available API operations supported by the user’s current access token. To make it easier to use the Playground for an extended amount of time, developers now have the ability to refresh their access tokens automatically, and clicking HTTP response links will now populate the request URI field. ...

Cross posted from GFI, Sunbelt Blog: There’s not a day when we don’t see a new scam or hoax—yes, even the old ones—being proliferated on Facebook. I’ve seen both today. Let’s take a quick look at each one, shall we? First off, the scam: The screenshot above is a post generated by the “Sexappeal Meter” app that have spread within the social network. Clicking the “How much Sexappeal you have” link, or sometimes a bit.ly shortened URL, leads users to a page where it requests for permission just like any normal app. Allowing the app access to user profile, however, leads to two succeeding survey scam pages and, eventually, to a page where one can download a browser toolbar. ...

Symantec Connect: In recent years, scammers have flocked towards social networking sites as they have grown and made it easier to access a large number of potential eyeballs to convert into dollars. Brands have found value in leveraging social media to know what their customers are talking about, so, naturally, scammers are doing the exact same thing. Free iPads and iPhones Every time Apple unveils a new iPad or iPhone, you can bet there are scammers out there trying to leverage the announcement for financial gain. In the days leading up to and after the announcement of the new third-generation iPad, Twitter users who tweet about the new tablet most likely will receive some targeted Twitter replies from scammers offering the new device for free: ...

The H-Security: On Tuesday, a user who is known as “lawabidingcitizen” posted an unusual request to the Full Disclosure mailing list, a forum that is mainly used by the security community: “Please do not take down the Sality botnet.” The contributor says that he found a way of dramatically reducing the number of infected computers after analysing the botnet. He adds that the required actions are unlawful, however, but proceeds to describe the method in considerable detail and makes special tools for the task available. ...

SophosLabs: Adobe released Flash Player version 11.2.202.228 for Windows, OS X and Linux today. In my view this is a milestone release as it finally introduces an automatic, silent updating mechanism to help users stay current with the latest releases from here forward. Google Chrome users may consider themselves spoiled, as they have been enjoying the worry-free joy of automatic updating of both their browser and integrated plugins like Flash Player for quite some time. ...