Cybersecurity Expert

A roundup of UK focused cyber and information security news stories, blog posts, reports and threat intelligence from the previous calendar month, January 2020. After years of dither and delay the UK government finally nailed its colours to the mast, no not Brexit but Huawei, permitting 'limited use' of the Chinese Telecoms giant's network appliances within the UK's new 5G infrastructure . Whether this is a good decision depends more on individual political persuasion than national security interest, so just like Brexit the general view on the decision is binary, either its a clever compromise or a complete sell out of UK national security. I personally believe the decision is more about national economics than national security, as I previously blogged in ' The UK Government Huawei Dilemma and the Brexit Factor' . The UK government is playing a delicate balancing to safeguard potentially massive trade deals with both of the world's largest economic superp...

Researchers at the University of  Birmingham have identified a weakness in Intel’s processors: by 'undervolting' the CPU, Intel’s secure enclave technology becomes vulnerable to attack. A little bit of undervolting can cause a lot of problems Modern processors are being pushed to perform faster than ever before – and with this comes increases in heat and power consumption. To manage this, many chip manufacturers allow frequency and voltage to be adjusted as and when needed – known as ‘undervolting’ or ‘overvolting’. This is done through privileged software interfaces, such as a “model-specific register” in Intel Core processors. An international team of researchers from the University of Birmingham’s School of Computer Science along with researchers from imec-DistriNet (KU Leuven) and Graz University of Technology has been investigating how these interfaces can be exploited in Intel Core processors to undermine the system’s security in a project called Plundervolt. ...

In the last couple of days, Google announced it will be putting restrictions on Huawei’s access to its Android operating system , massively threatening Huawei's smartphone market. Meanwhile,  UK based chip designer ARM has told its staff to suspend all business activities with Huawei , over fears it may impact ARM's trade within the United States.  Fuelling these company actions is the United States government's decision to ban US firms with working with Huawei over cybersecurity fears. The headlines this week further ramps up the pressure on the UK government to follow suit, by implementing a similar ban on the use of Huawei smartphones and network devices within the UK, a step  beyond their initial 5G critical infrastructure ban announced last month. But is this really about a foreign nation-state security threat? Or is it more about it geo-economics and international politicking? Huawei: A Security Threat or an Economic Threat? Huawei Backdoors It’s no ...

Quickly applying software updates (patching) to mitigate security vulnerabilities is a cornerstone of both a home and business security strategy. So it was interesting to see how the mainstream news media reported the disclosure of three separate ‘major’ security vulnerabilities this week, within WhatsApp, Microsoft Windows and Intel Processors. WhatsApp The WhatsApp security flaw by far received the most the attention of the media and was very much the leading frontpage news story for a day. The WhatsApp vulnerability ( CVE-2019-3568 ) impacts both iPhone and Android versions of the mobile messaging app, allowing an attacker to install surveillance software, namely,  spyware called Pegasus , which access can the smartphone's call logs, text messages, and can covertly enable and record the camera and microphone. From a technical perspective, the vulnerability ( CVE-2019-3568 ) can be exploited with a buffer overflow attack against WhatsApp's VOIP stack, this makes remote cod...

A brand new processor hardware vulnerability affecting modern Intel CPUs has been uncovered by Bitdefender researchers  Coined "ZombieLoad side-channel processor", the vulnerability defeats the architectural safeguards of the processor and allows unprivileged user-mode applications to steal kernel-mode memory information processed on the affected computer. https://www.bitdefender.com/files/News/CaseStudies/study/257/Bitdefender-Whitepaper-YAM-en-EN.pdf A Concerning Impact on Cloud Services The new vulnerability can b e exploited by attackers to leak privileged information data from an area of the processor's memory meant to be strictly off-limits. This flaw could be used in highly targeted attacks that would normally require system-wide privileges or deep subversion of the operating system. The flaw has an extremely large impact on cloud service providers and within multi-tenant environments, as potentially a 'bad neighbour' could leverage this flaw to ...

2018 started with a big security alert bang after Google Security Researchers disclosed serious security vulnerabilities in just about every computer processor in use on the planet.  Named 'Meltdown' and 'Spectre ’, when exploited by a hacker or malware, these vulnerabilities disclose confidential data. As a result, a whole raft of critical security updates was hastily released for computer and smartphone operating systems, web browsers, and processor drivers. While processor manufacturers have been rather lethargic in reacting and producing  patches for the problem, software vendors such as Microsoft, Google and Apple have reacted quickly, releasing security updates to protect their customers from the vulnerable processors, kudos to them. The UK Information Commission's Office (ICO) heavily criticised the Carphone Warehouse for security inadequacies and fined the company £400K following their 2015 data breach , when the personal data, includin...

The New Year has started with a big security bang after new dangerous security vulnerabilities were discovered within Intel, AMD and ARM processors, placing just about every Server, PC, Cloud Service, IoT device, Smartphone and Tablet on the planet at risk.  Google Security Researchers, aka Project Zero, discovered the new computer processor flaws, which they have named ' Meltdown' and ' Spectre ' when  breaking the bad news on 3rd January 2018. Both Meltdown and Spectre allo w an attacker or malware to access privileged information from within what should be a protected area of ( kernel ) memory. Meaning the potential disclosure of passwords, encryption keys, and confidential data from within virtual environments i.e. where multiple virtual machines are hosted on a single hardware platform. Meltdown The Meltdown vulnerability is present on all Intel processors manufactured after 1995 and is the easiest of the two flaws to exploit. This vulnerability exploitati...