Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

August 24, 2015

Your Fridge Joined Ashley Madison?

Filed under: Cybersecurity,Security — Patrick Durusau @ 4:30 pm

Samsung smart fridge leaves Gmail logins open to attack by John Leyden.

From the post:

Security researchers have discovered a potential way to steal users’ Gmail credentials from a Samsung smart fridge.

Pen Test Partners discovered the MiTM (man-in-the-middle) vulnerability that facilitated the exploit during an IoT hacking challenge run by Samsung at the recent DEF CON hacking conference.

The hack was pulled off against the RF28HMELBSR smart fridge, part of Samsung’s line-up of Smart Home appliances which can be controlled via their Smart Home app. While the fridge implements SSL, it fails to validate SSL certificates, thereby enabling man-in-the-middle attacks against most connections.

The internet-connected device is designed to download Gmail Calendar information to an on-screen display. Security shortcomings mean that hackers who manage to jump on to the same network can potentially steal Google login credentials from their neighbours.

The certainty of online transactions diminishes with the spread of the internet-of-things (IoT).

Think about it. My email, packets with my router address, etc. may appear in massive NSA data vacuum bags. What defense to I have other than “I didn’t send, receive, etc.?” I’m not logging or at least not preserving logs of every bit of every keystroke on my computer.

Are you?

And if you did, how would you authenticate it to the NSA?

Of course, the authenticity, or subject identity in topic map terms, of an email in Ashley Madison data, should depend on a number of related factors to establish identity. From the user profile associated with an email for example. Are sexual profiles as unique as fingerprints?

Authenticity hasn’t been raised in the NSA phone surveillance debate but if you think “phone call tracking is connecting dots,” it isn’t likely to come up.

I used to call the time-of-day service after every client call. It wasn’t a secretive messaging technique, it was to clear the last called buffer on the phone. Sometimes a lack of a pattern is just that, lack of a pattern.

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