CVE-2015-3904

Multiple cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities in roomcloud.php in the Roomcloud plugin before 1.3 for WordPress allow remote attackers to inject arbitrary web script or HTML via the (1) pin, (2) start_day, (3) start_month, (4) start_year, (5) end_day, (6) end_month, (7) end_year, (8) lang, (9) adults, or (10) children parameter.

Popular Free VPN Hola Sells Users Bandwidth for Botnets

Sounds good, right? Especially in times when you just want to access Netflix U.S. for this one show but can’t because of licensing restrictions; or when everyone might be spying on you. Yes, now is the perfect time for a VPN (Virtual Private Network). Normally you have to pay for the service though. And that’s where Hola comes into play. Hola is a free Chome browser plugin and according to the ratings left on its’ Chrome page VERY popular.

So how come a service like this can afford to stay free? It’s pretty simple really: they sell your bandwidth. “When a user installs Hola, he becomes a VPN endpoint, and other users of the Hola network may exit through his internet connection and take on his IP. This is what makes it free: Hola does not pay for the bandwidth that its VPN uses at all, and there is no user opt out for this,” says Fredrick Brennan, the operator of 8chan in a note on his site.  He continues:  “Hola has gotten greedy. They recently (late 2014) realized that they basically have a 9 million IP strong botnet on their hands, and they began selling access to this botnet (right now, for HTTP requests only) at https://luminati.io. […] An attacker used the Luminati network to send thousands of legitimate-looking POST requests to 8chan’s post.php in 30 seconds, representing a 100x spike over peak traffic and crashing PHP-FPM.”

This is definitely not cool, but what does it mean for you? Well, if you are using Hola your connection will be used by other users to access pages in your country that are blocked for their IP but are available with yours. This is perhaps annoying, but not all that bad. But what of you IP might be one of those that get abused by people to perform illegal acts online?

Now is probably the best time to rethink using this specific free service.

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PeopleSoft Vulnerabilities Elevate ERP Security Issues

A dozen vulnerabilities, including three critical architectural issues, in PeopleSoft implementations were discussed this week at Hack in the Box, putting ERP security in the spotlight.

Do Millennials Suck When It Comes To Security?

Millennials (or Generation Y) are those who were born from the early 1980s to the early 2000s. A study now looked at the impact which generational attitudes have toward security issues and compared Millennials Generation X/Gen X (those born between 1965 and 1980) and the “baby boomers” (born between 1946 and 1964).

You would normally think that the Millennials know what they are doing when it comes to technology, considering that most of them grew up with it. But while it is a big plus when it comes to handling devices and navigating around the net, the sense of well-being also seems to be their Achilles heel and leads them to being more careless with privacy concerns and a few other security aspects. The study backs this up with some key findings:

  • “Millennials have the worst password reuse habits of all demographics: 85 percent admit to re-using credentials across sites and services.
  • Risky behavior can be found across demographics: 16 percent of millennials and 14 percent of Gen-Xers accept social media invites from strangers “most of the time.”
  • Millennials are most likely to find security workarounds: A combined 56 percent admit they would “very” or “moderately likely” evade restrictive workplace controls. “

On the other hand, the paper also shows that the other included generations show risky behavior as well (though not in the same areas: Baby Boomers for example may pose a rather big BYOD risk; 48% use personal devices to access work related content).

Nonetheless it would seem that Millennials are easy prey for hackers: Reusing passwords and being too trusting on social media (which may or may not lead you to fall victim to social engineering) can lead to unwelcome results.

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