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 Business

At first glance, the Dune universe seems IT-deficient. Humanity may be building spaceships, but it relies on the human mind to calculate flight paths. Humans send troops to alien planets but exchange messages through couriers. They colonize other worlds yet live in a feudal society. What information security is there   show more ...  

to talk about? Quite a bit, in fact. It plays a vital role in Frank Herbert’s universe. Why the state of technology is so poor in the first book Almost all of the tech oddities in the Dune universe boil down to its blanket prohibition: At some point in its history, humanity encountered a global cyberthreat and took radical action, abandoning the information technologies so familiar to us and banning artificial intelligence and computers. The first installment in the Dune series briefly touches on the reasons behind the prohibition, and the sequels contain conflicting versions of the story, but the key point is that humans rebelled against and destroyed the machines. With prohibition, possession of a “thinking machine” became a capital offense. The main scripture (the Orange Catholic Bible) states categorically: Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind. Needing to replace the usual information technologies, humans developed their minds in amazing ways. All sorts of teachings, schools, sects, and orders sprang up, as did humans’ ability to perform complex mental calculations, guide spaceships through folded space, analyze the world, and even influence the minds of others. What’s more, to manage a civilization scattered throughout different star systems, the leaders of humanity reintroduced monarchical rule, feudalism, and the caste system. Despite the disappearance of computers, however, information — and information security — has maintained its central role in people’s lives. Mentat as security officer A Mentat is a human trained to function as a computer, capable of processing huge amounts of information in the mind. For example, in addition to developing military strategy, Dune‘s Thufir Hawat of House Atreides is responsible for: Finding backdoors and vulnerabilities in the castle’s security system; Employee background checks; Risk assessment. In other words, he performs the role of chief information security officer (CISO). At the same time, being  essentially an organic computer, Hawat also functions as a living security engine, analyzing all threat signs and issuing verdicts (being paranoid, he also throws up the occasional false positive). Interestingly, judging by the First Law of Mentat, as quoted by Paul Atreides, he works on behavioral analysis algorithms: “A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.” Information exchange tools In the absence of computers, radio communication and old-fashioned dispatches have become the primary means of information exchange. Neither method is particularly secure; the book describes several techniques characters use to protect their communication channels. It additionally mentions a number of secure information exchange methods for face-to-face meetings in the presence of potential adversaries. Radio communication Today, encryption can make radio exchanges relatively secure (if someone eavesdrops, they will not understand a word), but in the world of Dune, without “thinking machines,” information has to be encrypted manually. In particular, the Atreides have a “battle language” — a system of verbal messages known to the Duke’s soldiers. It’s not entirely reliable. After all, the more widely a secret language is used, the more likely an enemy is to crack it — especially given House Harkonnen’s executioners’ widespread use of outmoded cryptanalysis. Physical media Exchanging dispatches is a method whose weaknesses have been known since ancient times — a courier can get turned or captured, or simply fail to arrive — but even its vulnerabilities can become an advantage. The Harkonnens, for example, periodically arrange for their messengers to get caught and supply enemies with misinformation. The book makes at least one mention of a dispatch self-destruct system that uses a capsule to corrode the material of a message’s carrier. The Bene Gesserit Organization also has a secret language of dots that doesn’t even look like information to the uninitiated. Information security for in-person meetings Dune describes two means of securing in-person encounters. First, the Atreides use a system of secret signs for exchanging fairly large amounts of information right under the enemy’s nose. Second, a “cone of silence” is installed in the palace of Baron Harkonnen. It distorts human voices, letting people speak without fear of outside ears. How this technology works, the author does not divulge. The human factor Because “information technologies” in Dune have migrated into the heads of the Mentats, the Navigators, the Bene Gesserit sisters, and other strange beings, the human factor is even more critical than it is in the real world, today. After all, Dune has abandoned the algorithms that could potentially detect human error or malicious insider intentions. Here, Herbert’s predictions are nothing if not pessimistic: Individuals and entire factions scheme, betray, and sell out; they infiltrate spy groups and extract information by torture. Moreover, the Bene Gesserit sisters possess the power of Voice, a method of verbal manipulation that can force people to act against their will. Imperial Conditioning, a Hippocratic Oath–type development of the Suk Medical School, offered some hope by preventing, at least in theory, Suk doctors from harming their patients. But the Harkonnens found a way to break this conditioning through psychological pressure caused by having a loved one taken hostage. We’re eager to see how Denis Villeneuve conveys all that on screen. It’s quite possible that his version of Frank Herbert’s world won’t be too bad as far as infosec goes. David Lynch’s 1984 effort saw fit to play pretty fast and loose with the original source, and the creators of the new film may have followed suit.

 Identity Theft, Fraud, Scams

An attacker was apparently able to breach the site for famed street artist Banksy and sell a fake NFT of the artist’s work for more than $336,000. The fraudster has since returned the ill-gotten cash.

 Innovation and Research

It has been engineered to overcome a major issue with operating systems — that if not configured correctly, they will trust all USBs regardless of what might be installed on them.

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Clam AntiVirus is an anti-virus toolkit for Unix. The main purpose of this software is the integration with mail servers (attachment scanning). The package provides a flexible and scalable multi-threaded daemon, a command-line scanner, and a tool for automatic updating via Internet. The programs are based on a shared library distributed with the Clam AntiVirus package, which you can use in your own software.

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sqlmap is an open source command-line automatic SQL injection tool. Its goal is to detect and take advantage of SQL injection vulnerabilities in web applications. Once it detects one or more SQL injections on the target host, the user can choose among a variety of options to perform an extensive back-end database   show more ...  

management system fingerprint, retrieve DBMS session user and database, enumerate users, password hashes, privileges, databases, dump entire or user's specified DBMS tables/columns, run his own SQL statement, read or write either text or binary files on the file system, execute arbitrary commands on the operating system, establish an out-of-band stateful connection between the attacker box and the database server via Metasploit payload stager, database stored procedure buffer overflow exploitation or SMB relay attack and more.

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nfstream is a Python package providing fast, flexible, and expressive data structures designed to make working with online or offline network data both easy and intuitive. It aims to be the fundamental high-level building block for doing practical, real world network data analysis in Python. Additionally, it has the   show more ...  

broader goal of becoming a common network data processing framework for researchers providing data reproducibility across experiments.

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This whitepaper discusses BRAKTOOTH, a family of new security vulnerabilities in commercial BT stacks that range from denial of service (DoS) via firmware crashes and deadlocks in commodity hardware to arbitrary code execution (ACE) in certain IoTs.

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Cisco has patched a critical security vulnerability impacting its Enterprise Network Function Virtualization Infrastructure Software (NFVIS) that could be exploited by an attacker to take control of an affected system. Tracked as CVE-2021-34746, the weakness has been rated 9.8 out of a maximum of 10 on the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) and could allow a remote attacker to circumvent

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A recent wave of spear-phishing campaigns leveraged weaponized Windows 11 Alpha-themed Word documents with Visual Basic macros to drop malicious payloads, including a JavaScript implant, against a point-of-sale (PoS) service provider located in the U.S. The attacks, which are believed to have taken place between late June to late July 2021, have been attributed with "moderate confidence" to a

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Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details about a new malware family that relies on the Common Log File System (CLFS) to hide a second-stage payload in registry transaction files in an attempt to evade detection mechanisms. FireEye's Mandiant Advanced Practices team, which made the discovery, dubbed the malware PRIVATELOG, and its installer, STASHLOG. Specifics about the identities of the

2021-09
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