 When the United Kingdom's National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) performs operational tasks, they may find vulnerabilities in software, hardware, websites, or critical infrastructure. When they find these vulnerabilities, they go through a review process called the "Equities Process" that determines if they are going to disclose the vulnerability so that it is fixed or if they will keep it to themselves for use during intelligence gathering. The NCSC explained this week that when they find a vulnerability, their starting position is to responsibly disclose it. They then review the vulnerabilities through a series of groups to weigh whether the vulnerability has more value being kept private so that they can be used to protect the United Kingdom and its allies or if it is more important to disclose the vulnerability so that it is fixed. "The Equities Process provides a mechanism through which decisions about disclosure are taken. Expert analysis, based on objective criteria, is undertaken to decide whether such vulnerabilities should be released to allow them to be mitigated or retained so that they can be used for intelligence purposes in the interests of the UK," explained the NCSC. "The starting position is always that disclosing a vulnerability will be in the national interest." Learn more by visiting OUR FORUM.  Dell announced today that they detected attackers in their systems on November 9th, 2018 who were attempting to extract customer information from the Dell.com, Premier, Global Portal, and support.dell.com sites. According to Dell's breach notification, they detected unauthorized users in their systems on November 9th, 2018. These attackers were trying to retrieve customers information from Dell.com accounts that included names, email addresses, and hashed passwords. "On November 9, 2018, Dell detected and disrupted unauthorized activity on our network that attempted to extract Dell.com customer information, limited to names, email addresses and hashed passwords," stated Dell's security disclosure. "Upon detection, we immediately implemented countermeasures and began an investigation. We also retained a digital forensics firm to conduct an independent investigation and engaged law enforcement." While their investigation did not reveal that any information was stolen, Dell decided to perform a mandatory reset on all Dell.com accounts. This password resets will occur when the user next logs in. You can find the security disclosure on OUR FORUM.  When users have been installing Sennheiser's HeadSetup software, little did they know that the software was also installing a root certificate into the Trusted Root CA Certificate store. To make matters worse, the software was also installing an encrypted version of the certificate's private key that was not as secure as the developers may have thought. Similar to the Lenovo SuperFish fiasco, this certificate and its associated private key, was the same for everyone who installed the particular software. Due to this, it could allow an attacker who was able to decrypt the private key to issue fraudulent certificates under other domain that they have no control over. This would allow them to perform man-in-the-middle attacks to sniff the traffic when a user visits these sites. While these certificate files are deleted when a user uninstalls the HeadSetup software, the trusted root certificate was not removed. This would allow an attacker who had the right private key to continue to perform attacks even when the software was no longer installed on the computer. According to a vulnerability disclosure issued today by security consulting firm Secorvo these certificates were discovered when doing a random check of a computer's Trusted Root Certificate CA store. Learn more from OUR FORUM. |
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