ETHICAL HACKING NET-185-001N Week 15

One of the interesting and concerning developments this week is the discovery of a Chinese hacker gang that has been targeting software development and software update mechanisms, seemingly for industrial espionage.  (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/05/a-mysterious-hacker-gang-is-on-a-supply-chain-hacking-spree/)  This once again recalls previous instances of industrial espionage engaged in by agents of the People's Republic of China government.  The software targeted included driver update utilities by ASUS, a company known for quality hardware and having been an Original Equipment Manufacturer for Apple in the past.

Something still related to security but also interesting for other reasons is how Google's data compression proxy works.  (https://developer.chrome.com/multidevice/data-compression).  It allows mobile devices using Chrome on Android or the desktop (which requires an extension, also usable with other Chromium-based browsers) to reduce the amount of data transferred by websites while still allowing the content to be viewed in high quality.  Since it tunnels the traffic, it can also help protect users from eavesdropping at public Wi-Fi hotspots.  It still lets website owners know the origin IP address of the user.

This week I learned more about hashing algorithms, including some more of the details of how they work.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

ETHICAL HACKING NET-185-001N Week 13

HP's new security controller ( https://www.anandtech.com/show/14225/hps-security-push-sure-sense-endpoint-security-controller ) sounds interesting, but it definitely needs to be sufficiently hardened to make it worthwhile.  The idea is to use AI to detect malware based on behavior, to protect against zero-day exploits and such. A disturbing development that I just read about is the 'Land Lordz' scam using other domains to get people to make cash deposits for listings on AirBNB that are not legitimate.  ( ‘Land Lordz’ Service Powers Airbnb Scams ) One of the stranger recent security occurrences was that a poorly documented security feature in Microsoft Edge breaks another security feature (marking a file as from the web) that causes a certain type of file, the MHT file, to be opened without a sandbox using Internet Explorer, since it is the default to open that type of file.  ( https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/04/unexpected-security-feature-in-micros...
Read more

ETHICAL HACKING NET-185-001N Week 14

This week, I've learned about a variety of things. I learned more about the QUIC protocol, which came from 'Quick UDP Internet Connections' (which is an accurate and concise description of it), although it is merely used as a name now.  It was created by Google, which has created a lot of innovative web technologies.  Ars Technica has an article on it a while back.  ' The next version of HTTP won't be using TCP | Ars Technica ' I also learned of Google Gruyere, which is named for a type of cheese from the Franco-Swiss border regions.   https://google-gruyere.appspot.com . It is a website designed to be used for learning about attacks on websites, including through manipulating the website in ways that wouldn't be legally allowed without permission. I was aware of traversing different parts of websites through manipulating the URLs ( http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail100.html  is a clever example of a joke, the real content is at  http://www.h...
Read more

ETHICAL HACKING NET-185-001N Week 9

This week, I learned more about social engineering.  I learned more about some of the ways that it occurs, and some techniques to guard against it. Some of the ways to avoid malware or phishing websites include Google Safe Browsing ( safebrowsing.google.com ), which is a service provided by Google and used by several browsers including the popular Google Chrome (naturally) Safari, and Firefox to block known phishing and malware web pages.  It is also used by Vivaldi, since it is based on Chromium (which consists of all the open-source parts of Chrome that are not separate projects) and GNOME Web.  A related project is stopbadware.org which is an organization campaigning against malware, and includes due process provisions so that legitimate sites are not blocked by mistake or due to bad faith actors.  As an additional precaution against phishing (besides a high quality spam filter, which Gmail has) is to use digital signatures for your own e-mail, such as with http...
Read more