How to stop your Gmail account being hacked

As has been widely reported, high profile users of Gmail – including US government officials, reporters and political activists – have had their email accounts hacked.

This wasn’t a sophisticated attack against Google’s systems, but rather a cleverly-crafted HTML email which pointed to a Gmail phishing page. Victims would believe that they had been sent an attachment, click on the link, and be greeted by what appeared to be Gmail’s login screen. Before you knew it, your Gmail username and password could be in the hands of unauthorised parties.

Source:
http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/06/02/how-to-stop-your-gmail-account-being-hacked/

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NSA’s Guide to Securing Your PC

NSA has developed and distributed configuration guidance for operating systems. These guides are currently being used throughout the government and by numerous entities as a security baseline for their systems.

Source:
http://www.nsa.gov/ia/guidance/security_configuration_guides/operating_systems.shtml

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Security Group Claims to Have Subverted Google Chrome’s Sandbox

A French security research firm boasted today that it has discovered a two-step process for defeating Google Chrome‘s sandbox, the security technology designed to protect the browser from being compromised by previously unknown security flaws. Experts say the discovery, if true, marks the first time hackers have figured out a way around the vaunted security layer, and almost certainly will encourage attackers to devise similar methods of subverting this technology in Chrome and other widely used software.

Source:
http://krebsonsecurity.com/2011/05/security-group-claims-to-have-subverted-google-chromes-sandbox/

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LastPass Security Notification

We take a close look at our logs and try to explain every anomaly we see. Tuesday morning we saw a network traffic anomaly for a few minutes from one of our non-critical machines. These happen occasionally, and we typically identify them as an employee or an automated script.

In this case, we couldn’t find that root cause. After delving into the anomaly we found a similar but smaller matching traffic anomaly from one of our databases in the opposite direction (more traffic was sent from the database compared to what was received on the server). Because we can’t account for this anomaly either, we’re going to be paranoid and assume the worst: that the data we stored in the database was somehow accessed. We know roughly the amount of data transfered and that it’s big enough to have transfered people’s email addresses, the server salt and their salted password hashes from the database. We also know that the amount of data taken isn’t remotely enough to have pulled many users encrypted data blobs.

If you have a strong, non-dictionary based password or pass phrase, this shouldn’t impact you – the potential threat here is brute forcing your master password using dictionary words, then going to LastPass with that password to get your data. Unfortunately not everyone picks a master password that’s immune to brute forcing.

Source:
http://blog.lastpass.com/2011/05/lastpass-security-notification.html

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Secret Storage Hides Encrypted Data In Plain Sight

A new data storage technique provides security, as well as plausible deniability. Whereas encrypted data can be easily spotted–if not necessarily decrypted, without obtaining the decryption keys from the device owner–the new technique disguises stored data as random disk fragmentation. When implemented correctly, a digital forensic investigator might not even know that secret information was stored on the drive.

The new technique was first detailed in “Designing a cluster-based covert channel to evade disk investigation and forensics,” a recent paper written by researchers from the University of Southern California at Los Angeles and the National University of Science and Technology (NUST) in Islamabad, Pakistan.

“There could be a number of potential uses for this technology, but the main strength of our technique lies in its ability to conceal information in cases where encryption cannot be used–e.g., where the presence of encrypted data would appear suspicious and may be deemed an unacceptable risk to the communicating parties,” said report co-author Fauzan Mirza, a communication systems engineering professor at NUST, in an email interview. “The obvious application of these techniques would be among people or organizations that need to protect information against powerful–well-resourced–adversaries, such as spies, terrorists, whistleblowers, political groups, etc.”

This type of covert channel could also have enterprise security applications, such as creating a covert password safe. Likewise, “it could also be used to implement a software copy protection mechanism or information tracking/watermarking mechanism,” or even as part of a data leakage protection mechanism, said Mirza. “We did not go into these applications, since–as academics–we wanted to bring to light the simplicity and novelty of the idea, rather than dwell on the applications. We left that part to the readers.”

Source:
http://www.informationweek.com/news/storage/security/229402386

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