Quite strange that only Bruce Schneier has picked up on this so far but researches have developed a proof of concept of how to exploit HID (Human Interface Device) USB dongles for wireless mice and keyboards to accept keystrokes from rouge third party transmitters.
Continue reading MouseJack Vulnerability – Have You Already Patched Your Mouse?
Eduroam is a great Wi-Fi login system for students and researches that works with certificates for secure access of on-campus Wi-Fi networks and has the added benefit that Eduroam users can attach to any other Eduroam network around the globe without changing their Wi-Fi configuration. That’s the theory and paper is patient. So when I recently was at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands I tested if the theory holds up with an Eduroam setup of the University of Vienna.
Theoretical Internet speeds in fixed line and mobile networks keep rising, which is a nice thing. Unfortunately, round trip delay times are not decreasing at the same rate, mostly due to physical limits these days which at some point will limit the maximum throughput of a single TCP stream no matter how fat the pipe is and how fast a server can deliver data. So where is this limit?
Today I came across this great article by Robert Penz in which he describes measures how companies can reduce the risk of Ransomware encrypting their files on network shares and other devices in the local network. Also, he describes how a company can prepare itself in case it still happens to reduce their downtime as much as possible. I found one of his suggestions of particular interest: Snapshots of network shares.
Continue reading Good Advice To Block, Detect and Mitigate Ransomware Damage In Companies
When it comes to investigative reporting in the telecommunication domain, German telecoms news website Teltarif certainly is at the forefront. Recently they noticed that the public network coverage maps of one of the network operators in Germany now show that in many cities, they have deployed LTE in three different frequency bands.
Continue reading One German LTE Network Operator Now On-Air with 50 MHz
I’ve been using SSDs for many years now and I’m more than happy as the speed difference on a notebook compared to hard disks is just like day and night. Unfortunately I use a one terabyte Samsung 840 Evo in my notebook that has now bitten me for the second time.
Recently I read this very interesting post that analyzed how many users can be connected to an LTE eNodeB simultaneously. As the author says in the article there is no single answer to this as many factors are playing into the game. From a pure uplink signaling point of view there can be well over 1000 users simultaneously in RRC-Connected state. In practice I wouldn’t be surprised if networks set that number way lower as that number is far too high to give anyone a halfway decent speed experience. So how many might there be connected simultaneously to a base station today? Let’s play with some numbers.
Continue reading LTE And The Number Of Simultaneously Connected Users
When I first heard about the news of a serious security vulnerability in glibc I thought that I would soon see a lot of programs of my Linux distributions being updated. That’s because I faintly remember that I once read somewhere that in Linux, libraries are often compiled into the application instead of dynamically linked at runtime. But I guess that was not quite true, at least not for glibc anyway. So far I’ve only seen an update of the glibc library itself. Since then no other programs have been updated due to statically linking that library. So if that holds true we might have been luckier than I thought. Would be nice for a change!
Wifi 802.11ac with 80 MHz channels (Wave 1) have been on the market for some time now and high end notebooks and smartphones have started supporting the new standards. I’m still stuck with 802.11n on 5 GHz with 40 MHz channels but I do have an 802.11ac capable access point. So while I can’t use the functionality for the moment with my notebook I decided I could at least have a look at the Access Point’s 802.11ac capabilities by doing a Layer 2 Trace and capturing a Beacon Frame.
When I recently wanted to do a quick Wi-Fi Layer 2 trace on a machine running Ubuntu 15.10 I couldn’t get it working anymore. I was quite surprised because I’ve used this machine many times before for the purpose. Grudgingly I started to investigate…
Continue reading Ubuntu Has Lost It’s Wifi Tracing Capabilities