BrakTooth bites major SoC vendors
The ASSET Research Group at the Singapore University of Technology and Design disclosed a series of vulnerabilities dubbed BrakTooth that impact commercial Bluetooth Classic stacks across a range of commodity hardware, from OEMs like Intel, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Infineon, and Silicon Labs. The vulnerabilities can be used to achieve denial-of-service to remote code execution, although they would be required to be in Bluetooth range for all of the attack. Some OEMs, including Intel, have confirmed they are investigating the findings or actively deploying patches. Texas Instruments said it does not plan to develop a patch unless there is “demand from customers”, while Qualcomm said it would only patch one of its impacted chips. ASSET created a proof-of-concept attack tool, and is only making it available to verified vendors.
The cost of ransomware to schools
Education has been one of the sectors increasingly targeted by ransomware, providing a tempting target with a large campus network with multiple vectors to infiltrate. Comparitech published a report looking into the scale of these attacks and how much it cost the education sector over the last year. In 2020, 77 ransomware attacks impacted over 1,740 schools and colleges, potentially reaching up to 1.36 million students. The cost of just downtime from the attacks was estimated at $6.62 billion. The report also found that the number of individual attacks decreased 20% in 2020, but the overall impacted number of schools was up 39%. This came as each individual attack targeted larger school systems. Texas and California saw the most number of ransomware attacks, although Nevada saw the most students impacted with over 328,000.
Posts surrounding January 6th disappear from Facebook data
NYU researcher Laura Edelson discovered that thousands of posts from roughly December 28, 2020 to January 11, 2021 disappeared from Facebook’s Crowdtangle dataset. Crowdtangle is a Facebook owned tool that allows researchers to track content on the platform. The data has been missing since at least May 2021, which was noticed when comparing archives of the datasets. Facebook said this was caused by a technical error which is now fixed, however researchers have not seen the data returned. The academics flagged the issue on August 3rd, however Edelson and other NYU researchers were subsequently suspended from Facebook for data collection on a separate project about political ads.
(Politico)
Twitter announces a Safety Mode
The social network began rolling out the auto-blocking feature, currently in beta testing with select English-speaking users on iOS, Android, and the web site. When the feature is turned on in settings, Twitter will assess the likelihood of a negative engagement by looking at a given tweet’s content and the relationship between its author and a replier. The system will autoblock accounts with a high probability of negative engagement for seven days, although these can be manually unblocked by the user. Twitter plans to expand the test in the coming months.
Thanks to our episode sponsor, Semperis
Intentional internet outages have become common
According to the Shutdown Tracker Optimization Project from the nonprofit Access Now, there have been nearly 850 government-initiated internet shutdowns recorded over the last decade. This may be significantly underreported, with the group saying it’s information prior to 2016 was “patchy,” with 768 shutdowns occurring in the last five years. The first major incident recorded by the group was a 2011 shutdown in Egypt, which blocked an estimated 93% of Egyptian networks for five days. The pretense of preventing the spread of “misinformation” is often used to invoke these shutdowns. The report notes that these shutdowns have significant economic impacts, with Myanmar’s recently shutdown resulting in a economic loss of 2.5% of the country’s GDP, around $2.1 billion.
States begin approving digital IDs
Apple announced Arizona and Georgia will support digital driver’s license and state IDs in Apple Wallet, a feature launching in iOS 15. Each US state has different rules for issuing IDs, which will likely mean a staggered and uneven rollout.The TSA was the first announced agency to begin accepting a digital license from an iPhone at several airports. Connecticut, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Oklahoma, and Utah are expected to follow, although no rollout timeline was announced.
UK investigates leaked gun owner map
Back in July, the gun-selling site Guntrader reported a data breach impacting over 100,000 customers. Now, an animal rights activist has reportedly published the data in a format easily allowing someone to create a map of home addresses of impacted users. The UK’s National Crime Agency has been investigating the breach, and is working with the South West Regional Cyber Crime Unit to investigate the leaked data.
(BBC)
Fired employee deletes customer data on the way out
A former New York credit union employee pleaded guilty to accessing the financial institution’s systems without authorization. Angry over a recent firing, the employee said she deleted over 21GB of data as an act of revenge, impacting mortgage loan applications and other sensitive information. The employee worked part-time remotely, but didn’t have her remote access credentials disabled by the credit union’s IT department for over two days. Logged on for forty minutes, she deleted 20,000 files and around 3,500 directories. Though the institution was able to restore most deleted files from backups, it estimated the recovery cost $10,000.