--Originally published at Security – Carlos Rueda Blog

Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics firm is under fire for the ilegal mining of user data from Facebook profiles between 2014-2015. The company was revealed to journalists working for the Observer to have used personal information taken without authorization in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters. The purpose of this was to target Facebook users with personalized political ads.

Facebook itself confirmed the harvesting of information on an enourmous scale. However, at the time it failed to alert users and took only limited steps to recover and secure the private information of more than 50 million individuals.”

Cambridge Analytica themselves had contracted another company to obtain user data, this company being Global Science Research. Analytica says that once they found out that GSR had not obtained the user data in line with Facebook’s terms of service, they deleted all the information that was provided by GSR. The statement went onto say that “No data from GSR was used by Cambridge Analytica as part of the services it provided to the Donald Trump 2016 presidential campaign.”

Facebook updated this statement on the March 17, adding: “The claim that this is a data breach is completely false. Aleksandr Kogan requested and gained access to information from users who chose to sign up for his app, and everyone involved gave their consent. People knowingly provided their information, no systems were infiltrated, and no passwords or sensitive pieces of information were stolen or hacked.”

Cambridge Analytica was created in 2013 by american multi-millionare Robert Mercer, one of Trump’s main supporters. It is claimed that with the deceive of using the database for academic purposes, through russian-american psychologist Aleksandr Kogan, the company obtained permission to ask for user data through an application that claimed to be a Continue reading "Cambridge Analytica Data Mining on Facebook, supporting Trump Campaign" →

--Originally published at Security – Carlos Rueda Blog

Mirai (Japanese for “the future”, 未来) is a malware that turns networked devices running Linux into remotely controlled “bots” that can be used as part of a botnet in large-scale network attacks. It primarily targets online consumer devices such as IP cameras and home routers.

First let’s define some terms:

Malware, short for malicious software, is an umbrella term used to refer to a variety of forms of harmful or intrusive software, including computer viruses, worms, Trojan horses, ransomware, spyware, and other malicious programs. It can take the form of executable code, scripts, active content, and other software. Malware is defined by its malicious intent, acting against the requirements of the computer user — and so does not include software that causes unintentional harm due to some deficiency.

A botnet is a number of Internet-connected devices, each of which is running one or more bots. Botnets can be used to perform distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack), steal data, send spam, and allows the attacker to access the device and its connection. The owner can control the botnet using command and control (C&C) software. The word “botnet” is a combination of the words “robot” and “network”.

Mirai was first discovered in 2016 by MalwareMustDie, a white hat security research group and according to leaked chat logs of the creator ‘Anna-senpai’, the malware is named after the anime series ‘Mirai Nikki’ (Future Diary in english). The malware’s source-code is published in a GitHub repository here. The malware is written in C for the agent infecting each device  and Go for the master controller of all the devices.

Mirai Nikki

This botnet malware was used to attack Brian Kreb’s website Krebs on Security, making the site reach 620 Gbit/s of traffic, there were also reports of attacks to French web services providers reaching 1Tbit/s of traffic to their website. Other attacks include in DNS services of DNS service provider Dyn occurred using Mirai malware installed on a large number of IoT Continue reading "Mirai – IoT Botnet Malware" →

--Originally published at Security – Carlos Rueda Blog

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