Florida skips gun background checks for a year after employee forgets login

By Lisa Vaas

In Florida, the site of recent mass shootings such as at the Stoneman Douglas High School and the Pulse nightclub, more than a year went by in which the state approved applications without carrying out background checks. This meant the state was unaware if there was a cause to refuse a license to allow somebody to carry a hidden gun – for example, mental illness or drug addiction.

The reason is dismayingly banal: an employee couldn’t remember her login.

The login is for the FBI’s background check database, or National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS).

The database was created in 1993 by the FBI and the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. States and firearm retailers can use it to check on the criminal and mental health history of those who want to buy a firearm, including their histories in other states. The database flags applicants who’ve served more than one year in prison, have been convicted of drug use in the past year, are undocumented immigrants, were involuntarily committed or deemed to have a “mental defect” by a court, or who were dishonorably discharged from the military.

As the Tampa Bay Times reported on Friday, a previously unreported investigation from the Office of Inspector General (OIG) found that the employee in charge of the background checks was rubberstamping applications without checking applicants’ backgrounds.

The investigation found that the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services stopped using the FBI’s crime database in February 2016 when the employee, Lisa Wilde, couldn’t log in. She was the only one who regularly used the database, with the exception of a mailroom supervisor who was “barely trained” on the system.

It only came to light in late March 2017, when an OIG staffer noticed that she wasn’t receiving concealed weapon license (CWL) applications from anybody who’d been turned down – a situation that was “unusual,” she said. When interviewed, Wilde said that she’d had a login issue with the database but hadn’t followed up to resolve the problem.

Read more at https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2018/06/12/florida-skips-gun-background-checks-for-a-year-after-employee-forgets-login/

Bitcoin value tumbles as hacker’s loot CoinRail cryptocurrency exchange

By Lisa Vaas

Over the weekend, the small South Korean cryptocurrency exchange CoinRail confirmed via Tweet that it had been hacked. On its site, CoinRail explained that 70% of coins/token reserves were moved offline to safe storage in a cold wallet.

Of the 30% of coins that were leaked, CoinRail said that some 80% had been “frozen/withdrawn/redeemed or equivalent”, with the rest under investigation with law enforcement, related exchanges and coin developers.

On Sunday, the price of Bitcoin tumbled 10% to a two-month low, to under $6,700.

By Monday, media outlets including Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and the Guardian, put two and two together and came up with a loss of up to $42 million as the Bitcoin drop dragged down the value of other cryptocurrencies.

Here’s Bloomberg’s chart of the sudden drop that coincided with the CoinRail news.

Read more at https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2018/06/12/bitcoin-value-tumbles-as-hackers-loot-coinrail-cryptocurrency-exchange/

The Google Pixelbook power button is now a 2FA token

By John E Dunn

If you own a Google Pixelbook, intriguing news –  it appears the power button can now double as an alternative to using U2F (Universal 2nd Factor) tokens for two-factor authentication (2FA).

As the name implies, U2F tokens such as the YubiKey are hardware tokens that plug into a USB port to authenticate users who enter a username and password on supported websites.

The U2F protocol (co-developed by Google and others) improves security because an attacker has to have the token in their possession to access an account. Just having the password and username aren’t enough.

It resists phishing too because the token’s private key is cryptographically tied to the website(s) it will be used on, e.g. Gmail. Anyone tricked into visiting the wrong site will find that the token won’t work.

Now, it seems the same – or something approximating it – can be achieved simply with a short press of the power button on a Pixelbook.

Given that the Pixelbook only has two USB-C ports, it’s not hard to see why Google might want to enable the feature for users who begrudge having to use one for a token.

It sounds alien but it seems the feature has been in the works since around the time of the Pixelbook’s launch last September but nobody beyond the developer community noticed.

Enabling the feature involves loading May’s Chrome OS 66.0.3359.203 or later from the stable channel, putting it into developer mode, opening the Chrome OS developer shell and executing the correct command.

The feature must also be enabled as an additional security key via the Google 2-step verification (2SV) account settings, repeating this process for third-party sites that support U2F authentication.

Before we move on to the caveats, this remains an experimental feature, and we don’t recommend enabling it if you’re not experienced at using developer mode and its shell.

Read more at https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2018/06/12/the-google-pixelbook-power-button-is-now-a-2fa-token/

Check your router – list of routers affected by VPNFilter just got bigger

By John E Dunn

The VPNFilter router malware, a giant-sized IoT botnet revealed two weeks ago, just went from bad to somewhat worse.

Originally thought to affect 15-20 mostly home/Soho routers and NAS devices made by Linksys, MikroTik, Netgear, TP-Link, and QNAP, this has now been expanded to include at least another 56 from Asus, D-Link, Huawei, Ubiquiti, UPVEL, and ZTE.

Talos gets this information by trying to determine the models on which VPNFilter has been detected but given the size of that job (affected devices number at least 500,000, probably more) the list is unlikely to be complete.

The updated alert confirms that VPNFilter has the ability to carry out man-in-the-middle interception of HTTP/S web traffic (something that SophosLabs own investigation of the malware concluded was highly likely), which means that it is not only able to monitor traffic and capture credentials but potentially deliver exploits to network devices too.

Home routers have become a big target but malware able to infect so many of them is relatively rare. The last home router scare of this multi-vendor magnitude was probably DNSChanger which took years for anyone to notice, having first emerged in 2007.

As VPNFilter is more potent – there doesn’t seem to be a simple way to detect it for a start – the safest assumption is that owners of any home router from one of the affected vendors should take immediate precautions.

Read more at https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2018/06/11/check-your-router-list-of-routers-affected-by-vpnfilter-just-got-bigger/