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Security: Windows Ransomware, Cortana Holes, Google Play Protect and More

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Thursday 14th of June 2018 12:03:05 PM Filed under

Security

The worst types of ransomware attacks
Patched Cortana Bug Let Hackers Change Your Password From the Lock Screen
What is Google Play Protect and How Does it Keep Android Secure?
Another day, another Intel CPU security hole: Lazy State

Once upon a time, when we worried about security, we worried about our software. These days, it's our hardware, our CPUs, with problems like Meltdown and Spectre, which are out to get us. The latest Intel revelation, Lazy FP state restore, can theoretically pull data from your programs, including encryption software, from your computer regardless of your operating system.

Like its forebears, this is a speculative execution vulnerability. In an interview, Red Hat Computer Architect Jon Masters explained: "It affects Intel designs similar to variant 3-a of the previous stuff, but it's NOT Meltdown." Still, "It allows the floating point registers to be leaked from another process, but alas that means the same registers as used for crypto, etc." Lazy State does not affect AMD processors.
Eric S. Raymond on Keeping the Bazaar Secure and Functional
Purple testing and chaos engineering in security experimentation

The way we use technology to construct products and services is constantly evolving, at a rate that is difficult to comprehend. Regrettably, the predominant approach used to secure design methodology is preventative, which means we are designing stateful security in a stateless world. The way we design, implement, and instrument security has not kept pace with modern product engineering techniques such as continuous delivery and complex distributed systems. We typically design security controls for Day Zero of a production release, failing to evolve the state of our controls from Day 1 to Day (N).

This problem is also rooted in the lack of feedback loops between modern software-based architectures and security controls. Iterative build practices constantly push product updates, creating immutable environments and applying complex blue-green deployments and dependencies on ever-changing third-party microservices. As a result, modern products and services are changing every day, even as security drifts into the unknown.

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