Security

Level, Chamberlain, Moen, Aqara, and Lutron are just some of the manufacturers the publication reports lack a dedicated way for security researchers to flag vulnerabilities — meaning a malicious hacker could potentially take advantage of a flaw before the company knows about it.

Check out the full report to see who’s on the naughty list — and who made the nice list.

This was mandated for all federal agencies back in March, so expect more of these kinds of announcements.

CISA’s general ambit means this hire is a tad bit more significant than the average Chief AI Officer — the agency deals with foreign influence operations and election cybersecurity, for instance. (In 2020, the agency’s head was yeeted by Trump for saying that the election had in fact been safe and secure.)

Along with CrowdStrike’s post incident review, this has Microsoft telemetry data and some explanations (performance, tamper resistance) for the kernel driver architecture that crashed millions of Windows systems.

Microsoft has called for locking down that access, and this post again brings up alternate options:

...security vendors can use minimal sensors that run in kernel mode for data collection and enforcement limiting exposure to availability issues. The remainder of the key product functionality includes managing updates, parsing content, and other operations can occur isolated within user mode where recoverability is possible.

Microsoft made Secure Boot a requirement for Windows 11, and has been pushing to use the technology to secure against BIOS rootkits for years. Now, researchers have found that Secure Boot has been compromised on more than 200 device models from Acer, Dell, Gigabyte, Intel, and more. Ars Technica reports that an important cryptographic key was published on GitHub in 2022, by “someone working for multiple US-based device manufacturers.”

“However, we understand our work is not yet complete, and we remain committed to restoring every impacted system.,” CEO George Kurtz continued in his post on LinkedIn.

Yesterday, CrowdStrike released a detailed report on the software update that crashed 8.5 million Windows machines, along with some of the changes it plans to avoid similar issues in the future.

As reported by TechCrunch and in some social media posts, even if it seems a little light for a global outage affecting millions of systems (and codes that in some cases, didn’t work). In a statement sent to The Verge, spokesperson Kevin Benacci said:

CrowdStrike did not send gift cards to customers or clients. We did send these to our teammates and partners who have been helping customers through this situation. Uber flagged it as fraud because of high usage rates.

That’s according to an update made last night to CrowdStrike’s statement on yesterday’s global outage,

Similar to the above-referenced query, a Dashboard is now available that displays Impacted channels and CIDs and Impacted Sensors. Depending on your subscriptions, it’s available in the Console menu at either:

• Next-GEN SIEM > Dashboard or;

• Investigate > Dashboards

• Named as: hosts_possibly_impacted_by_windows_crashes

In a tweet and blog post, George Kurtz says:

As this incident is resolved, you have my commitment to provide full transparency on how this occurred and the steps we’re taking to prevent anything like this from happening again.

We are working on a technical update and root cause analysis that we will share with everyone as well.

Other updates from CrowdStrike about Friday’s global IT misadventure warn about threat actors impersonating it in phishing attempts and other attacks or advise automated methods (PDF) to track down systems that have been affected.

Hospital systems from New York to Massachusetts to Pennsylvania impacted by the CrowdStrike outage say they’re canceling appointments and shifting to pen and paper. Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in NYC had said it would “pause the start of any procedure that requires anesthesia,” according to NBC News, though it’s site now says most of its systems are back online.

A bad time to get hit with the Blue Screen of Death is probably when you’re preparing for a practice session ahead of the Hungarian GP, especially when the problem has been caused by a team sponsor. But the Mercedes F1 team’s trackside engineering director, Andrew Shovlin, told reporters they were back up after updating affected PCs.

The impact in FP1 was minimal, if not nil. So, it created a bit of work, but we’re back where we need to be now.

This timelapse of Delta, American Airlines, and United air traffic says it all.

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz apologized to customers on the Today show and said that the company “knows what the issue is” that caused the global IT outage early Friday morning.

Thousands of flights have been grounded so far in the massive outage. Some businesses are trying to reboot and bring their systems back themselves.

According to a new Bloomberg report, the FBI’s initial attempts to break into the phone belonging to Thomas Matthew Crooks were unsuccessful.

But that changed once Cellebrite provided the agency with an unreleased, still-in-development update to its software. From there, it took just 40 minutes to access Crooks’ phone, which is described as “a newer Samsung model.”

The new Proton Scribe writing tool runs locally on the device and is available to all privacy conscious Proton Mail business customers as an add-on:

Proton Scribe helps users improve their productivity by composing emails based on a prompt, redrafting to better convey a message, and proofreading content. No user data or information is used to train Proton Scribe, and no data is shared with third parties.

Proton says it’s rolling out to web and desktop apps.

The Russian cybersecurity company confirmed the move in a statement to Zero Day, saying business opportunities in the US “are no longer viable” and that it’s laying off less than 50 workers.

Last month, the US government announced a ban on Kaspersky’s antivirus software over concerns about national security.