Sneakier and More Sophisticated Malware Is On the Loose

IEEE Spectrum  May 18, 2020 To understand how Android malware has evolved over time, an international team of researchers (US, USA – Boston University) analyzed over 1.2 million malware samples that belonged to 1.28K families over a period of eight years (from 2010 to 2017). The analysis framework relied on collective repositories and recent advances on the systematization of intelligence extracted from multiple anti-virus vendors using differential analysis to isolate software components that are irrelevant to the campaign and studied the behavior of malicious riders alone. They found that since its infancy in 2010, the Android malware ecosystem has changed […]

New technique uses power anomalies to ID malware in embedded systems

Eurekalert  April 25, 2019 Micro-Architectural attacks have recently come to prominence since they break all existing software-isolation based security by hammering memory rows to gain root privileges or by abusing speculative execution and shared hardware to leak secret data. Researchers at North Carolina State University use anomalies in an embedded system’s power trace to detect evasive micro-architectural attacks. To this end, they introduced power-mimicking micro-architectural attacks to study their evasiveness. They showed that rowhammer attacks cannot evade detection while covert channel and speculation-driven attacks can evade detection. The detector can be embedded into programmable batteries. They have shown that power-anomalies […]

The Fundamentals Behind Hacking: MIT Technology Review’s Martin Giles

MIT Technology Review  April 25, 2019 According to the MIT Technology Review widespread dangers of a cyber attack have become a guarantee for organizations in all sectors and regions. They describe how cyber attackers are most likely to penetrate a company’s defenses, including through cloud storage, cloud services and even hardware. They discuss some of the most striking trends in cyber security strategies, including the “death of the perimeter” —how the type of robust firewalls and strong anti-virus programs that were keeping companies safe, no longer work. They show how business leaders can focus on effective cyber hygiene and cyber […]

Security vulnerabilities in terahertz data links

Science Alert   October 15, 2018 Unlike microwaves, which propagate in wide-angle broadcasts, terahertz waves travel in narrow, very directional beams with a cone angle of less than 2 degrees. A team of researchers in the US (Brown University, Rice University, SUNY Buffalo) set up a direct line-of-site terahertz data link between a transmitter and receiver and experimented with devices capable of intercepting signal. They were able show several strategies that could steal signal without being detected by using a flat piece of metal that could redirect a portion of the beam to a secondary receiver operated by an attacker…read more. […]

CyberWar Map visualizes global threats

Government Computer News  August 31, 2018 Researchers at George Washington University have developed a new CyberWar Map that offers an initial screen that displays what looks like the missile-tracking screens in the movie War Games. The map serves as a visual index and access point to the National Security Archives’ extensive collection of Cyber Vault documents. The CyberWar Map is a living research aid: documents and nodes will be added on a regular basis… read more.