TrendLabs: Post-Tax Season Spam Campaign Delivers URSNIF to North American Taxpayers

Figure 1: Location of the IP addresses targeted in the campaign. Most of the targets are users located in Canada. However, around half are US IPs because US providers hosted them

REF: https://blog.trendmicro.com/trendlabs-security-intelligence/post-tax-season-spam-campaign-delivers-ursnif-to-north-american-taxpayers/

New BSD Issue is Out! LLVM and Sanitizers in BSD!

Table of Contents

In Brief
Ewa & The BSD Team
This column presents the latest coverage of breaking news, events, product releases, and trending topics from the BSD sector.

Practical ZFS On FreeBSD
Abdorrahman Homaei
ZFS is an advanced file system that was originally developed by Sun. It combines the roles of volume manager and file system to realize unique advantages. ZFS is aware of the underlying structure of the disks. It can detect low-level interrupt and provide RAID mechanism. ZFS is also capable of sharing its volume separately. ZFS’s awareness of the physical layout of the disks lets you grow your storage without any hassle. Additionally, it has different properties that can be applied to each file system, giving many advantages of creating a number of different file systems and datasets rather than a single monolithic file system.

LLVM and Sanitizers in BSD
David Carlier
LLVM and clang frontend is available on various BSD as the main compiler for FreeBSD x86, ppc, and arm since the 10.x ( was fully optional in the previous 9.x branch), OpenBSD x86 and arm since 6.2, NetBSD x86, arm, ppc, and sparc64. LLVM provides the frontends and various tools, and there are different types of sanitizers to help with debugging applications.

C Programming, UNIX and Main Data Structures
Rafael Santiago de Souza Netto
Nowadays, UNIX stands more as a model for an operating system to follow than as an operating system implementation. In the beginning, UNIX as a software was originally written at Bell Labs by two famous developers, Kenneth Thompson and Dennis Ritchie.

Monitoring OpenBSD using CollectD, InfluxDB, and Grafana
Joel Carnat
www.tumfatig.net
In a “get pretty graphs” mood, I’m looking at what can be done regarding OpenBSD monitoring using the CollectD collector and Grafana dashboard renderer. OpenBSD 6.2-current provides InfluxDB and Grafana packages, a great stack for pretty reportings.

Expert Speak by E.G. Nadhan
From Unconscious Bias to Unbiased Consciousness
E.G. Nadhan
A member of the audience attending a panel session on Unconscious Bias accidentally referred to the topic as Unbiased Consciousness. Perhaps, it was no accident and was a sublime message instead about the world to come – a world where we are consciously unbiased rather than being unconsciously biased. However, this utopian world can become real only if proactive actions are taken to combat such mindsets that may not be in our control.

With Facebook attempting to slam the privacy stable door well after the horse has bolted, the corporate giant has suspended over 200 applications which snarfed large amounts of profile data. What does the future hold for this global platform?
Rob Somerville
I have a certain degree of sympathy for Mark Zuckerberg after being hauled before Congress in light of the Cambridge Analytica fiasco. Inevitably, any cutting-edge technology will eventually feel the hot breath of the establishment breathing down on it, be it via indirect legislation or as in the case of Mark Zuckerberg, in a personal appearance before “the powers that be” to give account.

REF: https://bsdmag.org/download/debugging-applications/

TrendLabs: Identifying Top Vulnerabilities in Networks: Old Vulnerabilities, IoT Botnets, Wireless Connection Exploits

Figure 1. Top 10 vulnerabilities in connected devices

REF: https://blog.trendmicro.com/trendlabs-security-intelligence/identifying-top-vulnerabilities-in-networks-old-vulnerabilities-iot-botnets-wireless-connection-exploits/

Linux Magazine Tutorials – Minetest

Figure 1: You can model the worlds of Minetest in more ways than one.
REF: http://www.linux-magazine.com/Issues/2018/212/Tutorials-Minetest

TrendLabs: Emerging 5G Technology Could Compromise SIM Card-Dependent IoT Devices on Massive Scale

Figure 1. SIM-OTA SMS communication (adapted from “Smart Card Handbook” by Wolfgang Rankl and Wolfgang Effing)

REF: https://blog.trendmicro.com/trendlabs-security-intelligence/emerging-5g-technology-could-compromise-sim-card-dependent-iot-devices/

FSF: Zerocat Chipflasher "board-edition-1" now FSF-certified to Respect Your Freedom

From May 14

The FSF has awarded Respects Your Freedom (RYF) certification to the Zerocat Chipflasher board-edition-1. The RYF certification mark means that the product meets the FSF's standards in regard to users' freedom, control over the product, and privacy. The Chipflasher enables users to flash devices such as laptops, allowing them to replace proprietary software with free software like Libreboot. While users are able to purchase RYF-certified laptops that already come with Libreboot pre-loaded, for the first time ever they are capable of freeing their own laptops using an RYF-certified device.

These first ten limited edition boards are signed by Kai Mertens, chief developer of The Zerocat Label, and will help to fund additional production and future development of RYF-certified devices.

REF: https://www.fsf.org/free-software-supporter/2018/june

Introducing Asylo: an open-source framework for confidential computing

Asylo is an open source framework for confidential computing

REF: https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2018/05/Introducing-Asylo-an-open-source-framework-for-confidential-computing.html