Printer pwnage, phone poppage, and apparently US Homeland Security needs security help

Here is your friendly summary of recent news from the front lines of information security beyond everything else we've already reported. Our vultures have also spent the past week or so flying around Las Vegas, keeping a close eye on what is essentially hacker comic con. Follow these links for our Black Hat, DEF CON, and …

[IceC0ld]

ESET says that "Varenyky", a spam and spyware combo that infects French-language systems

so, can we assume the "Varenyky" is a French wanker then ?

enquiring minds and all that :oP

[Pascal Monett]

"make sure public access is severely restricted"

What I will never understand is how someone can set up an AWS account and not think of locking it down from public access.

You're putting data on the Internet, don't you realize that ? It doesn't matter what kind of data it is, lock it down tighter than a gnat's arse. If somebody with actual authority complains, you can always relax it a little in his favor.

Better safe than sorry, right ?

[Alister]

Re: "make sure public access is severely restricted"

It's worse than that though: By default, AWS E3 and so on ARE locked down and don't allow public access, so any that are open to the internet have been deliberately made that way by clueless users.

[Tom Paine]

Printers and the like

It's not just botnets that enjoy the great taste of unpatched embedded systems on the internal network... see

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/08/microsoft-catches-russian-state-hackers-using-iot-devices-to-breach-networks/

[adam payne]

Xerox printers are rife with security bugs that can put the rest of the network at risk.

I wouldn't have thought it was just Xerox with security bugs, I can imagine most of the printer manufacturers having them.