Mozilla Fathom – framework for classifying the web semantically

Fathom is a JavaScript framework for extracting meaning from web pages, identifying parts like Previous/Next buttons, address forms, and the main textual content—or classifying a page as a whole. Essentially, it scores DOM nodes and extracts them based on conditions you specify. A Prolog-inspired system of types and annotations expresses dependencies between scoring steps and keeps state under control. It also provides the freedom to extend existing sets of scoring rules without editing them directly, so multiple third-party refinements can be mixed together.

Mozilla’s github

I like the semantic web idea, but it never really picked up. Maybe this will work.

FuturePets.com database of thousands of credit cards was left exposed for months

A US online pet store has exposed the details of more than 110,400 credit cards used to make purchases through its website, researchers have found.

In a stunning show of poor security, the Austin, Texas-based company FuturePets.com exposed its entire customer database, including names, postal and email addresses, phone numbers, credit card information, and plain-text passwords
[…]
The database was exposed because of the company’s own insecure server and use of “rsync,” a common protocol used for synchronizing copies of files between two different computers, which wasn’t protected with a password.

Source: A database of thousands of credit cards was left exposed for months

Oh dear, clear text passwords and non-protected rsync transfers 🙁

Yes, your whatsapp messages can be read by the London police

Bruce66423 brings word that a terrorist’s WhatsApp message has been decrypted “using techniques that ‘cannot be disclosed for security reasons’, though ‘sources said they now have the technical expertise to repeat the process in future.'” The Economic Times reports:
U.K. security services have managed to decode the last message sent out by Khalid Masood before he rammed his high-speed car into pedestrians on Westminster Bridge and stabbed to death a police officer at the gates of Parliament on March 22. The access to Masood’s message was achieved by what has been described by security sources as a use of “human and technical intelligence”…

Slasdot

Russian-controlled telecom hijacks financial services’ Internet traffic

On Wednesday, large chunks of network traffic belonging to MasterCard, Visa, and more than two dozen other financial services companies were briefly routed through a Russian government-controlled telecom under unexplained circumstances that renew lingering questions about the trust and reliability of some of the most sensitive Internet communications.

Anomalies in the border gateway protocol—which routes large-scale amounts of traffic among Internet backbones, ISPs, and other large networks—are common and usually the result of human error. While it’s possible Wednesday’s five- to seven-minute hijack of 36 large network blocks may also have been inadvertent, the high concentration of technology and financial services companies affected made the incident “curious” to engineers at network monitoring service BGPmon. What’s more, the way some of the affected networks were redirected indicated their underlying prefixes had been manually inserted into BGP tables, most likely by someone at Rostelecom, the Russian government-controlled telecom that improperly announced ownership of the blocks.
“Quite suspicious”

“I would classify this as quite suspicious,” Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis at network management firm Dyn, told Ars. “Typically accidental leaks appear more voluminous and indiscriminate. This would appear to be targeted to financial institutions. A typical cause of these errors [is] in some sort of internal traffic engineering, but it would seem strange that someone would limit their traffic engineering to mostly financial networks.”

Source: Russian-controlled telecom hijacks financial services’ Internet traffic

Jenkins admin? Get buzzy patching, says Cloudbees

The bug, CVE-2017-1000353, exists in how Jenkins implements HTTP upload/download requests.

The bug lets an attacker exploit a serialised object in the preamble of commands sent to the CLI. As described by Securiteam, “since Jenkins does not validate the serialised object, any serialise[d] object can be sent.”

The attacker can use the channel to send SignedObject to the CLI. Jenkins deserialises it using a new ObjectInputStream, which the company says bypasses its blacklist-based protection mechanism.

To block it, Cloudbees has added SignedObject to its blacklist.

To test the vulnerability for yourself, the bug report suggests the following:

Create a serialised object whose payload is a command executed by running the payload.jar script;
Change the Python script jenkins_poc1.py to adjust the target target URL, and open your payload file.

Source: Jenkins admin? Get buzzy patching, says Cloudbees

Remote security exploit in all 2008+ Intel platforms – SemiAccurate

The short version is that every Intel platform with AMT, ISM, and SBT from Nehalem in 2008 to Kaby Lake in 2017 has a remotely exploitable security hole in the ME (Management Engine) not CPU firmware. If this isn’t scary enough news, even if your machine doesn’t have SMT, ISM, or SBT provisioned, it is still vulnerable, just not over the network. For the moment. From what SemiAccurate gathers, there is literally no Intel box made in the last 9+ years that isn’t at risk. This is somewhere between nightmarish and apocalyptic.

First a little bit of background. SemiAccurate has known about this vulnerability for literally years now, it came up in research we were doing on hardware backdoors over five years ago. What we found was scary on a level that literally kept us up at night. For obvious reasons we couldn’t publish what we found out but we took every opportunity to beg anyone who could even tangentially influence the right people to do something about this security problem. SemiAccurate explained the problem to literally dozens of “right people” to seemingly no avail. We also strongly hinted that it existed at every chance we had.

Various Intel representatives over the years took my words seriously, told me I was crazy, denied that the problem could exist, and even gave SemiAccurate rather farcical technical reasons why their position wasn’t wrong. Or dangerous. In return we smiled politely, argued technically, and sometimes, usually actually, were not so polite about our viewpoint. Unfortunately it all seems to have been for naught.

The problem is quite simple, the ME controls the network ports and has DMA access to the system. It can arbitrarily read and write to any memory or storage on the system, can bypass disk encryption once it is unlocked (and possibly if it has not, SemiAccurate hasn’t been able to 100% verify this capability yet), read and write to the screen, and do all of this completely unlogged. Due to the network access abilities, it can also send whatever it finds out to wherever it wants, encrypted or not.

Source: Remote security exploit in all 2008+ Intel platforms – SemiAccurate

Oh shit.

You can download a detector here from Intel

This Artificially Intelligent Speech Generator Can Fake Anyone’s Voice

“We train our models on a huge dataset with thousands of speakers,” Jose Sotelo, a team member at Lyrebird and a speech synthesis expert, told Gizmodo. “Then, for a new speaker we compress their information in a small key that contains their voice DNA. We use this key to say new sentences.”

The end result is far from perfect—the samples still exhibit digital artifacts, clarity problems, and other weirdness—but there’s little doubt who is being imitated by the speech generator. Changes in intonation are also discernible. Unlike other systems, Lyrebird’s solution requires less data per speaker to produce a new voice, and it works in real time. The company plans to offer its tool to companies in need of speech synthesis solutions.
[…]
“We take seriously the potential malicious applications of our technology,” Sotelo told Gizmodo. “We want this technology to be used for good purposes: giving back the voice to people who lost it to sickness, being able to record yourself at different stages in your life and hearing your voice later on, etc. Since this technology could be developed by other groups with malicious purposes, we believe that the right thing to do is to make it public and well-known so we stop relying on audio recordings [as evidence].”

Source: This Artificially Intelligent Speech Generator Can Fake Anyone’s Voice