AUSCERT Week in Review for 7th July 2017

AUSCERT Week in Review for 7th July 2017

As Friday 7th July comes to a close, there have been numerous security related news items this week. Here’s a summary (including excerpts) of some of the more interesting stories we’ve seen this week:

Title: Westpac joins Swift blockchain test
Date Published: 06/07/2017
URL: https://www.itnews.com.au/news/westpac-joins-swift-blockchain-test-467746
Author: Staff Writers
Excerpt: “Second Aussie bank after ANZ to take part.
Westpac has become the second Australian bank to join a proof-of-concept by payment messaging service Swift that aims to test blockchain for facilitating cross-border payments.
It is one of 22 global banks to join the PoC today, adding to the six foundational banking participants, one of which is ANZ Bank.”

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Title: Microsoft to cut ‘thousands’ of jobs
Date Published: 07/07/2016
URL: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-40523172
Author: BBC
Excerpt: “Microsoft is to cut “thousands” of jobs worldwide as it attempts to beef up its presence in the cloud computing sector.
The technology giant wants to strengthen its cloud computing division but is facing intense competition from rivals such as Amazon and Google.”

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Title: Australia stuck with higher cost of deploying FttP: NBN Co
Date Published: 06/07/2017
URL: https://www.itwire.com/telecoms-and-nbn/78880-australia-stuck-with-higher-cost-of-deploying-fttp-nbn-co.html
Author: Peter Dinham
Excerpt: “NBN Co, the builder of the national broadband network, has moved to defend the higher costs of deploying fibre-to-the-premises in Australia and “set the record straight” on recent media claims about the local cost of FttP compared to other operators around the world.”

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Title: Ukrainian police seize computers that spread global NotPetya attack
Date Published: 05/07/2017
URL: http://www.itworld.com/article/3205810/malware/ukrainian-police-seize-computers-that-spread-global-notpetya-attack.html
Author: Peter Sayer
Excerpt: “Ukraine’s Cyber Police have intervened to prevent further cyberattacks in the wake of last week’s global attack, initially considered to be ransomware and called by various names including NotPetya.”

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Title: Govt blames Medicare card breach on ‘traditional’ crims
Date Published: 04/07/2017
URL: https://www.itnews.com.au/news/govt-blames-medicare-card-breach-on-traditional-crims-467502
Author: Allie Coyne
Excerpt: “Not wide-scale, and no IT breach, says minister. The federal government says there has been no breach of the Department of Human Services’ IT systems and the Medicare card data currently on sale likely affects only a small number of people.”

Here are this week’s noteworthy security bulletins:

1) ESB-2017.1655 – [SUSE] Xen: Multiple vulnerabilities 2017-06-30
https://portal.auscert.org.au/bulletins/49486
Quite a few Xen Vulnerabilities, if you are running Xen it is time to check for updates.

2) ESB-2017.1659 – [Debian] libgcrypt20: Unauthorised access – Existing account 2017-07-03
https://portal.auscert.org.au/bulletins/49510
Side channel attacks are getting rather popular.

3) ESB-2017.1676 – [SUSE] sudo: Root compromise – Existing account 2017-07-05
https://portal.auscert.org.au/bulletins/49570
Regression fix for CVE-2017-1000368, this has been repeated in a few products.

4) ESB-2017.1682 – [Win][UNIX/Linux] samba: Denial of service – Remote/unauthenticated 2017-07-06
https://portal.auscert.org.au/bulletins/49594
Remote Samba denial of service, that has to be able to affect a lot of people.

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Stay safe, stay patched and have a good weekend!

Peter