Time to change your facebook password?

Published: 2011-05-10
Last Updated: 2011-05-10 22:50:45 UTC
by Swa Frantzen (Version: 1)
2 comment(s)

Facebook and privacy, they seem contradictory at times, yet it's used by about 500 million users for stuff that they might want to keep a bit private in the end.

According to Symantec and El Reg, there is a problem that allowed apps to leak access tokens that remain valid. Apparently there are 100,000 apps that leak these tokens and they might sit in log files of e.g. advertisers waiting to be abused.

The good news is that we can do something to invalidate the access tokens: change our password!

So for those not knowing where to change the facebook password: it's in the upper right the "account" menu: choose "Account Settings" and then the 4th change is for the password.

Facebook, to their credit seems to have reacted as well and is going to move away from the older access tokens.

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Swa Frantzen -- Section 66

Keywords: facebook privacy
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Changing MO in scamming our users ?

Published: 2011-05-10
Last Updated: 2011-05-10 22:07:30 UTC
by Swa Frantzen (Version: 1)
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Today we were contacted with 2 different scams that used -for em at least- novel approaches to the social engineering part.

  • Melvin wrote in about an email in Portuguese, that after translation was accusing the recipient to have committed some traffic violations and was lining to "notifications" that were malware with minimal detection on virustotal. We didn't get the samples.
     
  • Roland wrote in with a story about an IM message that went something like:

  can you pleasee help me out really quick
  and take an IQ quiz for a major final
  project im doing? I need to see how many
  people out of my friends get over a 105

  just go to http://iqtesting<4 digits>.com/?invitecode=<random looking string>
  and take that test. if u do I will
  owe you big time

He also noted that recent there were a number of registrations for iqtestingXXXX.com domain.

Seems it might be a very good time to sharpen the awareness of our users to not click all that easy on links, and if they did anyway, to be very suspicious of what they download.

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Swa Frantzen -- Section 66

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Backtrack 5 released

Published: 2011-05-10
Last Updated: 2011-05-10 18:38:01 UTC
by Swa Frantzen (Version: 1)
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Backtrack 5, codenamed revolution was released earlier today and is available for download.

Let us know what you're using it for.

Thanks to Jeff for the heads-up!

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Swa Frantzen -- Section 66

Keywords: backtrack release
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May 2011 Microsoft Black Tuesday Overview

Published: 2011-05-10
Last Updated: 2011-05-10 16:58:08 UTC
by Swa Frantzen (Version: 1)
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Overview of the May 2011 Microsoft patches and their status.

# Affected Contra Indications Known Exploits Microsoft rating ISC rating(*)
clients servers
MS11-035 An input validation vulnerability in WINS allow arbitrary code execution with the rights of the WINS system.
Note: WINS is not installed by default.
Replaces MS09-039.
WINS

CVE-2011-1248
KB 2524426 No known exploits Severity:Critical
Exploitability:2
N/A Critical
MS11-036 Memory corruption and buffer overflow vulnerabilities allow for arbitrary code execution with the rights of the logged on user.
Note: Microsoft confirms in the bulletin that Office for Mac versions 2004 and 2008 of Powerpoint are vulnerable, but no patch is available at this point in time, nor is there an indication of a time commitment.
Note: Windows Office 2010 and Office for Mac 2011 are not affected.
Replaces MS11-022.
Powerpoint

CVE-2011-1269
CVE-2011-1270
KB 2545814 No known exploits Severity:Important
Exploitability:1,3
Critical Important
We will update issues on this page for about a week or so as they evolve.
We appreciate updates
US based customers can call Microsoft for free patch related support on 1-866-PCSAFETY
(*): ISC rating
  • We use 4 levels:
    • PATCH NOW: Typically used where we see immediate danger of exploitation. Typical environments will want to deploy these patches ASAP. Workarounds are typically not accepted by users or are not possible. This rating is often used when typical deployments make it vulnerable and exploits are being used or easy to obtain or make.
    • Critical: Anything that needs little to become "interesting" for the dark side. Best approach is to test and deploy ASAP. Workarounds can give more time to test.
    • Important: Things where more testing and other measures can help.
    • Less Urgent: Typically we expect the impact if left unpatched to be not that big a deal in the short term. Do not forget them however.
  • The difference between the client and server rating is based on how you use the affected machine. We take into account the typical client and server deployment in the usage of the machine and the common measures people typically have in place already. Measures we presume are simple best practices for servers such as not using outlook, MSIE, word etc. to do traditional office or leisure work.
  • The rating is not a risk analysis as such. It is a rating of importance of the vulnerability and the perceived or even predicted threat for affected systems. The rating does not account for the number of affected systems there are. It is for an affected system in a typical worst-case role.
  • Only the organization itself is in a position to do a full risk analysis involving the presence (or lack of) affected systems, the actually implemented measures, the impact on their operation and the value of the assets involved.
  • All patches released by a vendor are important enough to have a close look if you use the affected systems. There is little incentive for vendors to publicize patches that do not have some form of risk to them.

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Swa Frantzen -- Section 66

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