Security News for the Week Ending March 4, 2022

Apple Scrambles to Try and Figure Out How to Stop Stalkers From Using AirTags

Their newest idea is, when you initialize a new AirTag, it will tell you that Stalking may be illegal in your country. I really, really, doubt that will have any effect. They are also shortening the time window for notifying you that you are being stalked. Users of newer Apple devices will be able to find out how far away Apple thinks that rogue AirTag is. They are trying, but there is no simple fix. Credit: Yahoo

China Outs NSA Hacking Tool

Just like the U.S. outs foreign hacking tools when it suits our purposes, China is now doing the same thing. Likely this is for internal consumption, but it does give us a little bit of insight into their thinking and for sure, that certain hacking tools are no longer secret. Credit: Vice

Anonymous Hacks High Profile Russian Leaning Websites

First Anonymous hacks the Russian Ministry of Defense and posted the stolen data online for free. The data includes officials passwords, phone numbers and emails (Credit: Cyber News) and then they claim to have broken into Belarusian weapons maker Tetraedr and stole a couple hundred gigabytes. The data stolen included emails and they even, conveniently indexed all of them and handed the data to DDoS Secrets. They call this Operation Cyber Bully Putin. (Credit: Cyber News). It sounds like there will be more web sites hacked. Stay tuned.

Apple Responds to Russian Invasion of Ukraine

Each company is doing its own thing. In Apple’s case, they have paused all product sales in Russia. Apple pay and other services have been limited. Apple maps have stopped live update and Russian propaganda apps have been taken off the Apple store (why were they there in the first place?). Credit ZDNet

FCC to Review Border Gateway Protocol Security

In 1989 an engineer from Cisco and one from IBM wrote down an idea on two napkins (that have been preserved). That was the basis of Border Gateway Protocol or BGP. Needless to say, they did not think about security. BGP has been hacked by China and North Korea, among many others, so many times that we have all lost count. But BGP is a critical part of the Internet’s routing system. Finally, twenty five years too late, the FCC is “looking into” BGP security. We shall see what happens. Change on the Internet goes slowly. IPv6 was approved 10 years ago and still, it is the minority of traffic on the Internet (it is used a LOT on the backbone, just not at the edge). Credit: Data Breach Today

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