Category Archives: Security News
Cisco patches critical authentication flaw in conferencing servers
Hackers could exploit the issue to masquerade as legitimate users.
Credit: Stephen Lawson
Cisco Systems has patched a critical vulnerability that could allow hackers to gain access to Cisco Meeting and Acano servers that are used in enterprise environments for video and audio conferencing.
The flaw allows an unauthenticated attacker to masquerade as a legitimate user because the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) service incorrectly processes a deprecated authentication scheme, Cisco said in an advisory.
Encrypted communications could have an undetectable backdoor
Researchers warn about the use of standardized or hard-coded primes in existing cryptosystems
Credit: IDGNS
Researchers warn that many 1024-bit keys used to secure communications on the internet today might be based on prime numbers that have been intentionally backdoored in an undetectable way.
Many public-key cryptography algorithms that are used to secure web, email, VPN, SSH and other types of connections on the internet derive their strength from the mathematical complexity of discrete logarithms — computing discrete logarithms for groups of large prime numbers cannot be efficiently done using classical methods. This is what makes cracking strong encryption computationally impractical.
Spotify ads slipped malware onto PCs and Macs
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Q&A: The myths and realities of hacking an election
CSO Online asked several experts for their thoughts on the realities of election hacking
3 nightmare election hack scenarios
Hackers could target e-voting machines’ software update systems or simply try to delegitimatize the election
The good news is a hack that changes the outcome of a U.S. presidential election would be difficult, although not impossible. First of all, there are technology challenges — more than 20 voting technologies are used across the country, including a half dozen electronic voting machine models and several optical scanners, in addition to hand-counted paper ballots.
