Telspace Systems would like to congratulate and welcome Andries Burger. Andries beat some stiff competition and he has come on board the infosec team as a Junior Security Analyst. We wish you a warm welcome!
For our clients this new addition to our dedicated team brings some new knowledge and better service delivery to our clients.
Telspace Systems is always looking out for new talent and we are currently in the process of hiring even more analysts, if you think you make the cut please contact us.
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
1995 all over again.
Last night an exploit was released affecting all Windows7 and Vista(Fully patched) servers. We have also confirmed in our lab that this exploit also works against windows server 2008.
The exploit allows for remote denial of service attacks against any of these server.
The bug lies in the SMB2.0. ( http://securityreason.com/exploitalert/7138 )
Microsoft has recommended that that the SMB port(445) be blocked until Microsoft releases a patch.
More can be read here: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/975497.mspx
The exploit allows for remote denial of service attacks against any of these server.
The bug lies in the SMB2.0. ( http://securityreason.com/exploitalert/7138 )
Microsoft has recommended that that the SMB port(445) be blocked until Microsoft releases a patch.
More can be read here: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/975497.mspx
Friday, July 24, 2009
Telspace to present at Itex - Botswana
Telspace CEO Dino Covotsos and Senior Security Analyst Charlton Smith will be keynote speakers at this premier IT conference in Botswana which takes place between the 30th of July and 1st of August 2009.
About Itex
The new-world economy is based on globally networked information systems. Information today is the currency for a knowledge economy geared towards development.The Information Technology Exhibition (ITEX) is prudently crafted for exhibitors to showcase the latest technologies in the areas of Business Solutions, Telecommunication, Communication and Consumer Electronics. It also avails an opportunity for descision makers to learn about current technologies.
Monday, June 15, 2009
Green Dam hackers.
The Chinese government has mandated that all computers in the country must have the screening software installed.
This obviously bring about many security issues, such as - if the applications installed are not secure? This could leave the whole of China exposed to being compromised.
Security doesn't seem to phase the government too much. We have already seen an exploit released for one of the applications to be installed(released 2009-06-12) Green Dam.
The Green Dam software filters content by blocking URLs and Web site images and by monitoring text in other applications.
From Exploit:
"Green Dam is a software used for monitoring and anti-pornography, popularizing by Chinese goverment. After July 1st, it will be forced to install on all new Chinese PCs. Now it already has 50 million copies in China.
In order to monitor the URL that user is exploring, Green Dam injected the browser process. When Green Dam is trying to handle a long URL, a stack overflow will occur in the browser process.
This exploit can be used for exploitation on IE, on those computers installed Green Dam. I used the .net binary to deploy shellcode, for it`s more stable than Heap Spray, and able to bypass DEP and ASLR on Vista."
*sigh*
In other News Dino and I will be going through to Botswana next month, to keynote at a conference. We will provide you with more information soon.
Take care.
This obviously bring about many security issues, such as - if the applications installed are not secure? This could leave the whole of China exposed to being compromised.
Security doesn't seem to phase the government too much. We have already seen an exploit released for one of the applications to be installed(released 2009-06-12) Green Dam.
The Green Dam software filters content by blocking URLs and Web site images and by monitoring text in other applications.
From Exploit:
"Green Dam is a software used for monitoring and anti-pornography, popularizing by Chinese goverment. After July 1st, it will be forced to install on all new Chinese PCs. Now it already has 50 million copies in China.
In order to monitor the URL that user is exploring, Green Dam injected the browser process. When Green Dam is trying to handle a long URL, a stack overflow will occur in the browser process.
This exploit can be used for exploitation on IE, on those computers installed Green Dam. I used the .net binary to deploy shellcode, for it`s more stable than Heap Spray, and able to bypass DEP and ASLR on Vista."
*sigh*
In other News Dino and I will be going through to Botswana next month, to keynote at a conference. We will provide you with more information soon.
Take care.
Monday, May 18, 2009
About time!
First off, apologies for not updating the blog in a while. Things have been rather hectic here :)
Dino Covotsos and Daniella Kafouris recently presented at Crawford college. They presented on various social networking issues. The talk was aimed at making parents more aware as to what threats their children are faced with when using social networks. From Mxit to Facebook. The presentation was well received by Crawford college. Telspace Systems will also be presenting on Clickjacking at the Security Summit 2009 on day 2, so if you are going to the summit try catch our talk.
On the security side, quite a few exploits have been released this month, the more dangerous ones being 'Linux Kernel 2.6.x ptrace_attach Local Privilege Escalation Exploit' and 'Microsoft IIS 6.0 WebDAV Remote Authentication Bypass Vulnerability' so please apply the relevant patches and updates as soon as possible.
Till the next post be safe and take care.
Dino Covotsos and Daniella Kafouris recently presented at Crawford college. They presented on various social networking issues. The talk was aimed at making parents more aware as to what threats their children are faced with when using social networks. From Mxit to Facebook. The presentation was well received by Crawford college. Telspace Systems will also be presenting on Clickjacking at the Security Summit 2009 on day 2, so if you are going to the summit try catch our talk.
On the security side, quite a few exploits have been released this month, the more dangerous ones being 'Linux Kernel 2.6.x ptrace_attach Local Privilege Escalation Exploit' and 'Microsoft IIS 6.0 WebDAV Remote Authentication Bypass Vulnerability' so please apply the relevant patches and updates as soon as possible.
Till the next post be safe and take care.
Friday, February 13, 2009
Twitters falls victim to ClickJack attack
Twitter put an end to a clickjacking attack yesterday that got users to click on a link labelled “Don’t Click”.
In an attempt to satisfy their curiosity (or simply do what they were told not to do) thousands of users clicked on the link.
Whether they clicked on the link or not, a link would appear on their Twitter page with the same link and message as they originally received.
"We patched the "don't click" clickjacking attack 10 minutes ago. Problem should be gone," John Adams, aka Netik, an operations engineer at Twitter, tweeted around 11 am PST.
Although annoying, the clickjacking seems to be harmless and just propagated itself.
More on this attack can be found here.
In an attempt to satisfy their curiosity (or simply do what they were told not to do) thousands of users clicked on the link.
Whether they clicked on the link or not, a link would appear on their Twitter page with the same link and message as they originally received.
"We patched the "don't click" clickjacking attack 10 minutes ago. Problem should be gone," John Adams, aka Netik, an operations engineer at Twitter, tweeted around 11 am PST.
Although annoying, the clickjacking seems to be harmless and just propagated itself.
More on this attack can be found here.
Friday, February 6, 2009
ISG meeting - 5 Feb 2009
The Information Security Group of Africa convened at the Standard Bank building on Grayston Street yesterday to share and learn about pertinent industry issues.
The meeting kicked off with an overview of an exciting project entitled “The Pubcast”. This initiative is meant to provide a platform to bring information security professionals together to discuss information security and to bridge the gap between infosec and social networking. The most recent “Pubcast” podcast was a live interview with Karel Rode and Craig Rosewarne – Acting Chairman and Chairman of the ISG, which was recorded by ITWeb at the meeting yesterday.
More information can be found at www.discussit.co.za.
Gareth Watt spoke about the new EMV (Chip & Pin) cards that are being issued locally. Watt discussed the evolution from magstripe that originated in the 1960s, to the EMV cards in use today. Although these new cards have many benefits, he said, it is still possible for them to be skimmed.
Charles Dick was there too and spoke about the Post Office’s Trust Centre. “SAPO does not see itself as a digital certificate seller,” he said. “Rather an organisation that creates a PKI environment for products and services.”
The trust centre will be launched in approximately 8 weeks time.
The meeting kicked off with an overview of an exciting project entitled “The Pubcast”. This initiative is meant to provide a platform to bring information security professionals together to discuss information security and to bridge the gap between infosec and social networking. The most recent “Pubcast” podcast was a live interview with Karel Rode and Craig Rosewarne – Acting Chairman and Chairman of the ISG, which was recorded by ITWeb at the meeting yesterday.
More information can be found at www.discussit.co.za.
Gareth Watt spoke about the new EMV (Chip & Pin) cards that are being issued locally. Watt discussed the evolution from magstripe that originated in the 1960s, to the EMV cards in use today. Although these new cards have many benefits, he said, it is still possible for them to be skimmed.
Charles Dick was there too and spoke about the Post Office’s Trust Centre. “SAPO does not see itself as a digital certificate seller,” he said. “Rather an organisation that creates a PKI environment for products and services.”
The trust centre will be launched in approximately 8 weeks time.
Friday, January 30, 2009
Catch Telspace Systems on Classic fM TONIGHT
Catch Dino on Reuben Goldberg's ''The Internet Economy' tonight at 7pm where he will discuss security trends for 2009 as well as social networking threats.
This is the second time Dino has been asked to be on Classic fM and we hope it will become a regular thing.
Have an awesome weekend, guys!
This is the second time Dino has been asked to be on Classic fM and we hope it will become a regular thing.
Have an awesome weekend, guys!
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Telspace Systems training dates for 2009
Hey security peeps!
If any of you are interested in expanding your already vast intellectual scope, you can sign up to one of our training courses this year. Whether you can use it in your business, or simply want something to brag to your pals about, have a look at our dates and let me know if you would like to learn some practical, hands-on hacking lore.
Bluetooth & Wireless Hacking 101 (Jhb) dates:
Feb 25 & 26
June 24 & 25
Sep 16 & 17
Web Application Hacking 101 (Jhb) dates:
Mar 11 & 12
July 22 & 23
Oct 14 & 15
If this sounds like something you would be interested in, you can email me at ilva@telspace.co.za. It's gonna rock!
If any of you are interested in expanding your already vast intellectual scope, you can sign up to one of our training courses this year. Whether you can use it in your business, or simply want something to brag to your pals about, have a look at our dates and let me know if you would like to learn some practical, hands-on hacking lore.
Bluetooth & Wireless Hacking 101 (Jhb) dates:
Feb 25 & 26
June 24 & 25
Sep 16 & 17
Web Application Hacking 101 (Jhb) dates:
Mar 11 & 12
July 22 & 23
Oct 14 & 15
If this sounds like something you would be interested in, you can email me at ilva@telspace.co.za. It's gonna rock!
Monday, January 12, 2009
Happy New Year – but watch your back
Happy New Year all! Hope everyone had a well-rested holiday, and not too upset at the notion of another year of full-scale grind.
Hackers had a field day while the rest of us rested - last week saw Twitter accounts, specifically those belonging to celebrities, being compromised by a hacker. This happened after the weekend’s spate of phishing scams that tried to harvest login and password details from users.
Britney Spears had a certain part of her anatomy insulted, while Barack Obama, Facebook’s Twitter account and Fox News’ also got compromised. This was the first time that Twitter was assaulted, and the fact that it was not only compromised by a hacker, but our fiendish phishers as well, shows that it has officially come under the radar.
Furthermore, this year saw Nokia rendered speechless due to an obscure SMS bug that halted all incoming SMSes arriving after a specially formulated and very malicious text message. Many Nokia users simply felt they had been forgotten over the festive season…
A recent study conducted by the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) showed that 35 million data records were exposed last year in the US, in 656 incidents, which is a 47% increase from 2007.
The increase in hacker activity and data breaches remains a growing concern all over the world. Those of your who subjected yourselves to the news in the December, The Saturday Star and IOL Online both ran stories about the local government’s loss to cybercrime – as much as R400 million was reported as stolen as a a result of keyloggers and other dubious means.
This year, make it your priority to be as secure as you can be. Cliché or no, the proof is in the numbers.
Have a good one.
Hackers had a field day while the rest of us rested - last week saw Twitter accounts, specifically those belonging to celebrities, being compromised by a hacker. This happened after the weekend’s spate of phishing scams that tried to harvest login and password details from users.
Britney Spears had a certain part of her anatomy insulted, while Barack Obama, Facebook’s Twitter account and Fox News’ also got compromised. This was the first time that Twitter was assaulted, and the fact that it was not only compromised by a hacker, but our fiendish phishers as well, shows that it has officially come under the radar.
Furthermore, this year saw Nokia rendered speechless due to an obscure SMS bug that halted all incoming SMSes arriving after a specially formulated and very malicious text message. Many Nokia users simply felt they had been forgotten over the festive season…
A recent study conducted by the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) showed that 35 million data records were exposed last year in the US, in 656 incidents, which is a 47% increase from 2007.
The increase in hacker activity and data breaches remains a growing concern all over the world. Those of your who subjected yourselves to the news in the December, The Saturday Star and IOL Online both ran stories about the local government’s loss to cybercrime – as much as R400 million was reported as stolen as a a result of keyloggers and other dubious means.
This year, make it your priority to be as secure as you can be. Cliché or no, the proof is in the numbers.
Have a good one.
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