Hello again and welcome to my little Security Now digest. I’m going to try and assemble a short, actionable digest to help you get the most out of Steve and Leo’s tips.
Security Now #510 can be found at twit.tv. The show notes are over at grc.com. Here are the most important security news for this week:
- iOS’s iMessage has a “UTF-8 encryption/encoding/viewing error” (as worded by user johnkphotos on Reddit). The bug can be triggered by sending a specially crafted message and will turn of the victim’s device. iPhone users up to iPhone 4 are the only not affected since the bug was introduced after iOS v7.1.2. Apple will probably fix this soon, so keep your phones up to date!
- Since we started talking Apple, let’s continue on topic. A bug has been found in the Mac UEFI that allows the firmware to be rewritten. Usually, the UEFI is protected against this kind of attack, but there was a bug in the firmware that allows an attacker to overwrite the bios after a suspend-resume cycle. Newer Macs are not affected, but older Macs still don’t have a fix. For now, you can avoid performing suspends or buy a new computer =/
And that’s it! In other noteworthy news, your Windows 7 or 8 installation might be bugging you with a suspicious looking traybar notification about Windows 10. That’s not a virus, only Microsoft trying to push the newest, yet-to-be-released Windows version. If that annoys you, read this article on iDigitalTimes on how to remove the icon.
Now on to fun stuff:
- Project Vault is a Google ATAP project to deliver a Hardware Security Module that can encrypt and decrypt streams of data.
- Project Soli is a Google ATAP radar that Steve and Leo agree has to potential to completely change the way we interact with our devices. As Project Vault, Soli was introduced during the latest Google I/O, held on May 28 and 29.
A thus ends our digest. What did you think about it? Please send your comments, questions and suggestions to rberaldo at cabaladada dot org. I’ll be happy to hear from you.
See you next week!