Category Archive: News

May 17

France Dreams of Free Software Digital Age

France has so much respect for its cultural industry, including the ones produced in this digital age. In order to further improve and preserve the works of its artists, the government has made various steps as forms of protecting their culture. One proposal that is receiving so much attention is Mission Lescure, a study commissioned by the government and led by Pierre Lescure, the former CEO of the French broadcast group Canal+. This study aims to fight commercial counterfeiting and protect French cultural works, including music. It also suggests CSA as the new watchdog that will replace Hadopi. Its task will be to enforce antipiracy regulations and serve as vanguard for all “cultural and audiovisual media, linear as well as non-linear.”

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May 12

Authorities need Apple to decrypt iPhone data

Authorities seize digital devices and they want to use the data inside them to find evidence. Some times they can’t decrypt the data and in case of iPhone they ask Apple to decrypt the data for them. In fact, the number of those cases is so big that Apple has a waiting list for them. I don’t think even Apple can decrypt the data as the algorithms used in such devices are not that easy to crack but they don’t have to either. If someone, and in this case Apple, bypass the security lock can gain access to all your unencrypted data. It is believed that Apple built a backdoor to its OS to gain access to any device for whatever reason. Apple then sends the unencrypted data back to the police and they use it to catch bad guys or put them into jail. Some times it is scary how easy it is to unlock a phone, even if it is the company who created its operating system.

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Apr 27

Japan authorities try to block Tor

Japan authorities ask from internet service providers to block access to Tor network. Tor is a web service that help users to surf the internet anonymously without the fear that prying eyes are watching them and police use their internet activity against them. It is a way to make internet users to feel some kind of freedom and of course police is not happy about it and they started making efforts to block it. You might think that it is Japan and it doesn’t affect you but this is not true. If Japan authorities block Tor then other countries will do the same, this is happening always.

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Apr 26

Flaw in Viber allows full access to smart phones

About 50 million android smart phones have Viber installed and a critical flaw in that app make all those devices vulnerable. It is as easy as sending two messages through Viber and attacker can gain full control to your device. It is scary how easy it is and I would expect a fix and ultra fast by the Viber app creators. You can watch the video to see exactly how it can be done and you can try it with a friend. It is the easiest and fastest exploit that I learned so far for android smart phones.

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Mar 21

Disable lockscreen on Samsung devices

I wrote several posts on Apple security holes and how to bypass lockscreen. Security researches found also similar flaw on Samsung devices. Even though this doesn’t work on all Samsung devices but it works and it is a serious issue on those devices. I can’t explain it in words and you need to be patient and fast but in order for bad men to gain access to your smartphone few minutes is nothing. You can try it and if it happens to your device you can contact Samsung to help you protect your device and your personal data.

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Mar 18

Far Cry 3 cheats: GodMode and Unlimited Ammo without trainer

I liked Far Cry very much, the story is very good and it is not only about shooting and killing. It has similar features with Assassin’s Creed like liberating outposts and killing animals to get their skin and use it to craft other objects. In order for you to read this it means that you already played it so I will get to the point. Follow the following simple instructions and you will have God mode and/or unlimited ammo (for PC).

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Mar 16

The Biggest cracking dictionary

Before cracking a password using brute force attack, that meas try every possible combination of characters, programs use a dictionary with common words. So, if the password, which in many cases do, is just a simple word it will be cracked in few seconds. Crackstation took this to another level, they created a wordlist with 1.5 billion of passwords (1,493,677,782). The file is 4.2 GiB compressed and 15 GiB uncompressed. That is a lot of words but it cracks about 30% of all the hashes given to the Crackstation hash cracker. The file contains every word in any language that Wikipedia database had in 2010, every leaked database, every dictionary and every wordlist on the internet the creators of this wordlist could find

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Mar 15

Another Facebook OAuth vulnerability

Not even a month ago I posted about Facebook OAuth flaw that was allowing to an attacker to gain access to any account. Facebook have fixed that specific flaw with minor changes but those changes are not enough and hackers can gain control to any account. This new vulnerability was found by the same white hat hacker that found also the previous one. Don’t worry just yet about this one because it is already fixed but Facebook is not very serious about security. To fix the previous bug they just put a basic regular expression validation that could be easily bypassed. I am sure they just modified their regular expression for the new flaw.

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Mar 10

An HTML5 browser exploit can fill you disk with junk

An HTML5 browser exploit was found recently and it can fill your hard drive with junk data. Usually browsers allow websites to store small files like cookies but in case of HTML5 they allow bigger files around 10MB. This can be exploited and flood a hard drive with such files. In a demonstration, a 22-year-old web developer was able to fill 1GB of hard drive space every 16 seconds. I will let you stop and calculate how long it would take to fill your entire hard disk. I was happy to learn that every browser is vulnerable to this exploit except of my favorite Firefox.

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Mar 09

Free Anti-Virus Suite by Baidu

Baidu for those who don’t know is a Chinese search engine, it is called as the Google of Asia. Baidu recently released a free anti-virus suite that will help you to protect your computer by any kind of malware such as viruses, spyware and adware. For a Chinese company we would expect a software in Chinese first and then add support for other languages. The big surprise here is that the anti-virus suite comes only in English. They say it is very fast and light but others are suspicious because it is a product made in China. I don’t believe such company would harm its reputation to release a bad product.

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