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October 20, 2017 Comments closed

Cyber Security News Roundup: I don’t like people playing on my phone

in Hashing Out Cyber Security

This week’s cyber security roundup includes a learned judge, a Google bounty and a phone prank gone awry.

Another crazy week in cyber security. If you don’t get the title it’s in reference to an old Dave Chapelle skit where “keeping it real goes wrong” for a woman that can’t handle her phone ringing for a wrong number. It ends with her jail, but the line “I don’t like people playing on my phone” is especially germane to one of our stories from this week.

Granted, it’s probably not a great reference if I have to explain it that much, but regardless, here are the most interesting stories from the week in cyber security:

The Judge who learned Java

Very interesting story over at The Verge about the judge who presided over the Oracle and Google trial back in 2012 and has prowess as a programmer. It turns out he has been coding as an amateur for years and knew enough to rebut one of Oracle’s key closing arguments. It’s a great piece, I highly recommend.

[Source: The Verge]

Google offering $1K Bug Bounty

It’s not uncommon for software developers to offer bounties to anyone that can find a flaw or vulnerability in their code. Count Google amongst the ranks of those offering one. Google will offer $1,000 to anyone that finds vulnerabilities in apps available in the Google Play marketplace.

[Source: Threat Post]

Arizona teenager given probation for 911 Prank

And Arizona teenager, Meetkumar Hiteshbhai Desai, was sentenced to three years probation for a prank that almost completely knocked 911 services off line in Maricopa County, Arizona. For a period of three days, Desai’s bug made hundreds of hang-up calls to four 911 call centers, including 100 in just a matter of minutes at one point. Officials were not impressed and now Desai’s computer activity will be monitored as one of the terms of his probation.

[Source: Naked Security]

Using Grand Theft Auto 5 to Mine Cryptocurrency

Mining cryptocurrency is, on some level, kind of a funny pursuit because it’s led to a bunch of sneaky hackers cordoning off portions of their victims’ computing power in secret mining operations. And that’s exactly what’s happened to gamers after downloading a recent modification for the game, Grand Theft Auto 5. GTA 5 allows third parties to modify parts of the game, those mods are sometimes made public. And in this case, one of those public mods was used to set up a bitcoin mining botnet.

[Source: Hack Read]

Massive IoT Botnet

Somewhere out in the wild is a massive botnet that his been built primarily of IoT devices. Based of the Mirai botnet – though not a direct descendant – this botnet may be as large as two-million devices. Currently the botnet is in the incipient stage where more and more computers are being added. When it’s ready to attack, watch out.

[Source: Bleeping Computer]

What we Hashed Out this week:

• Google adds a pair of new security features to Chrome
• The difference between encryption, hashing and salting
• Google Chrome Cleanup: A new feature for Windows users
• WiFi isn’t safe: WPA2 protocol broken

• #News Roundup