Protect against encryption Malware
Protect against encryption Malware ZeroLocker is a encryption ransomware which will encrypt all your data once clicked on, it can be spread a number of ways, by e-Mail Attachments, Hacked...

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Protect against encryption Malware - Video

encryption and authentication passwords for all reasons jeffrey goldberg
These are the videos from Passwordscon 2014: http://www.irongeek.com/i.php?page=videos/passwordscon2014/mainlist.

By: Adrian Crenshaw

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encryption and authentication passwords for all reasons jeffrey goldberg - Video

MOUNTAIN VIEW, calif. One of the world's most powerful Internet companies is using its leverage to prod other websites into adopting a key safeguard against malicious hackers who try to steal Internet users' passwords or eavesdrop on their online activity.

Google said its popular Internet search engine will start assigning a higher priority to websites that use a kind of encryption known as HTTPS, in a move that was welcomed by experts who say it's a significant step toward increasing security and privacy on the Web.

"I don't expect the Internet to change overnight, but over the next few months and years, more and more websites will see this as something they must do," said Kevin Mahaffey, chief technology officer at Lookout, which makes security programs for mobile devices.

The move comes just days after a disturbing report that a Russian hacker gang has amassed a stockpile of 1.2 billion Web users' names and passwords from around the world. Experts say HTTPS encryption might not have blocked the methods used by that group, but it can foil other common techniques that hackers use to gather sensitive personal and financial information.

Anyone who uses an unsecure Wi-Fi hot spot in a coffee shop, shopping mall or other public place can be vulnerable to malicious snooping, said Dwayne Melancon, chief technology officer for the computer security company Tripwire. But outsiders generally can't read information that a person sends or receives from a website that's encrypted, as indicated by an Internet address that starts with the letters HTTPS.

Google has spent tens of millions of dollars to beef up its own online services in recent years. It's also pushed for broader use of encryption, industrywide, both to guard against tech-savvy criminals and, after last year's revelations about controversial National Security Agency spying, to curtail snooping by government agencies.

In a blog post last week, the company said it hopes to encourage HTTPS encryption by using it as a "ranking signal," or one of many factors the company uses in deciding which websites to show more prominently when it displays search results.

"For now, it's only a very lightweight signal," the company added. "But over time, we may decide to strengthen it."

Strengthening the signal, or giving more weight to sites that use encryption, means those sites may appear higher in Google's search results. That can make a huge difference in how many people visit a site, as many Web operators and online businesses have learned over the years.

"It will tend to drive people to sites that are being more responsible in how they interact with users," said Melancon. "I think it's a great idea."

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Google giving higher search value to websites that use encryption

The first large-scale analysis of a fundamental type of software known as firmware has revealed poor security practices that could present opportunities for hackers probing the Internet of Things.

Firmware is a type of software that manages interactions between higher-level software and the underlying hardware, though it can sometimes be the only software on a device. Its found on all kinds of computer hardware, though the study focused on embedded systems such as printers, routers and security cameras.

Researchers with Eurecom, a technology-focused graduate school in France, developed a web crawler that plucked more than 30,000 firmware images from the websites of manufacturers including Siemens, Xerox, Bosch, Philips, D-Link, Samsung, LG and Belkin.

They found a variety of security issues, including poorly-protected encryption mechanisms and backdoors that could allow access to devices. More than 123 products contained some of the 38 vulnerabilities they found, which they reported privately to vendors.

Theyre due to present their research next week at the 23rd Usenix Security Symposium in San Diego.

Most of the firmware they analyzed is in consumer devices, a competitive arena where companies often release products quickly to stay ahead of rivals, said Aurlien Francillon[cq], a coauthor of the study and an assistant professor in the networking and security department at Eurecom.

You have to be first and cheap, Francillon said in a phone interview. All of those things are what you should not do if you want a secure device.

Firmware security practices lag far behind those of the PC software market, where vendors like Microsoft learned the hard way that they need to patch software automatically on a regular, frequent schedule.

Thats often not the case with firmware, which may not be designed to patch itself periodically and also relies heavily on third-party software that may not be current. In one instance, the researchers found a Linux kernel that was 10 years out of date bundled in a recently released firmware image.

On these devices, its a real nightmare, Francillon said.

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Study finds firmware plagued by poor encryption and backdoors

Yahoo's Chief Information Security Officer Alex Stamos told Black Hat attendees last week that the company would be rolling out end-to-end encryption for email some time in 2015. The search company is taking a similar approach to Google to tackle enhanced security issues for communications, even down to the details of using OpenPGP.

The news was tweeted from the conference by Yan Zhu, a former employee of the Electronic Frontier Foundation known for working on Privacy Badger, who was one of the first hires by Yahoo for its privacy engineering team. The Yahoo encryption appears not only to be similar to what Google is planning with its Chrome extension, but a fork of the project.

It appears that Yahoo will be requesting the aid of the community to help improve the service later on, as Stamos stated that the code will be released in the fall. The goal is to have security minded users help improve the experience as well as locate bugs. A Yahoo spokeswoman told CNet that the no other providers were on board so far, but because of the open nature Yahoo hopes others will adopt it.

Yahoo announced last year that it would be it encrypting all transmissions through data center links as a way to prevent information from being accessed by outside parties, including government agencies like the National Security Agency. The company also stated that it would put 2048-bit SSL encryption into place for Yahoo Mail users by January this year, but later added it would extend to all Yahoo products.

By adding Yahoo to the likes of Google, the movement for the use of encryption for everyday users could gain more traction. For many, end-to-end encryption through Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) can be considered too complex to use. However, the complications come from ease of use, as well as proper education. In a time where some companies are struggling to implement any form of mail encryption in transit, the move is a welcome one by Yahoo.

By Electronista Staff

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Yahoo to implement end-to-end email encryption some time in 2015

Sean Gallagher

LAS VEGASPhil Zimmermann, the creator of Pretty Good Privacy public-key encryption, has some experience when it comes to the politics of crypto. During the crypto wars of the 1990s, Zimmermann fought to convince the US government to stop classifying PGP as a munition and shut down the Clipper Chip programan effort to create a government-mandated encryption processor that would have given the NSA a back door into all encrypted electronic communication. Now Zimmermann and the company he co-founded are working to convince telecommunications companiesmostly overseasthat its time to end their nearly century-long cozy relationship with governments.

Zimmermann compared telephone companies thinking with the long-held belief that tomatoes were toxic until it was demonstrated they werent. For a long time, for a hundred years, phone companies around the world have created a culture around themselves that is very cooperative with governments in invading peoples privacy. And these phone companies tend to think that theres no other waythat they cant break from this culture, that the tomatoes are poisonous," he said.

Back in 2005, Zimmermann, Alan Johnston, and Jon Callas began work on an encryption protocol for voice over IP (VoIP) phone calls, dubbed ZRTP, as part of his Zfone project. In 2011, ZRTP became an Internet Engineering Task Force RFC, and it has been published as open source under a BSD license. Its also the basis of the voice service for Silent Circle, the end-to-end encrypted voice service Zimmermann co-founded with former Navy SEAL Mark Janke. Silent Circle, which Ars tested on the Blackphone in June, is a ZRTP-based voice and ephemeral messaging service that generates session-specific keys between users to encrypt from end to end. The call is tunneled over a Transport Layer Security-encrypted connection through Silent Circles servers in Canada and Switzerland. ZRTP and the Silent Circle calls dont rely on PGP or any other public key infrastructure, so theres no keys to hand over under a FISA order or law enforcement warrant.

Now, thanks largely to the revelations of NSA and GCHQ monitoring of telecommunications triggered by documents leaked by Edward Snowden, theres a growing market demand for call privacy and telecom companies, especially in Europe, have become more receptive to the idea of giving customers the power to protect their privacy. In February, Dutch telecommunications carrier KPN signed a deal to be the exclusive provider of Silent Circles encrypted voice call service in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany. The company started offering Silent Circle services to customers this summer.

That move was driven, Zimmermann said, by KPNs chief information security officer, Jaya Baloo. She decided she wanted to break ranks from the rest of the phone companies and get KPN to offer their customers privacy, Zimmermann said. So for the first time, you see a phone company offer real privacy. My hope is that other phone companies will find the tomatoes are not poisonous.

Thanks in part to Jankes connections, the service has been adopted by the Navy SEALSnot just for calling home, but for operational communications, as well as Canadian, British, and Australian special operations forces, members of the US Congress and US law enforcement. About a year ago we had a visit from the FBI in our office, Zimmermann said. Mike Janke called and told, The FBI was in our office today, and I said, Oh no, its started already. And he said, No, no, they were just here to ask about pricing.

All of this plays into Zimmermanns strategy to keep government agencies from pressing for backdoors into Silent Circle's service. I thought what we need is, we needed to create the conditions where nobody was going to lean on us for backdoors because they need it themselves. If Navy SEALs are using this, if our own government develops a dependency on it, then theyll recognize that it would be counter-productive for them to get a backdoor in our product. Now maybe it was an overabundance of caution, because they never asked for a backdoor in PGP, but that took years to get that propagated into government customers. We saw government customers take this up almost as soon as the product was readyin fact before the product was ready they were asking about it. So weve created a situation where its difficult for them to even bring up the suggestion of a backdoor.

Thats not to say that everything has gone smoothly. Zimmermanns company had to abandon its secure email service in the wake of the shutdown of LavaBit. We wiped out our entire secure email servicebackups, and everything, Zimmermann told the Def Con audience. Some of our customers were pissed off, but for the most part they understood we were protecting their privacy.

Doing business with US government customers generally requires the use of National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) standards for encryption. But by default, Zimmermann said, Silent Circle uses an alternative set of encryption tools.

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Father of PGP encryption: Telcos need to get out of bed with governments