Category Archives: Vie privée

You receive spam by SMS (or via email) in Belgium, you can report it online to the authorities!

A while ago I posted an article stating that there was no way to report SMS spam online in Belgium. Guess what, I was wrong!

First, I was wondering if it was really illegal to send unsollicited commercial message by SMS in Belgium. I found this really nice flyer from the federal public service of economy (http://economie.fgov.be/fr/binaries/spamming_brochure_fr_tcm326-31741.pdf) explaining that the global definition of spam applies also to SMS or chat systems.

In the flyer, there was a link to a page to report such kind of behaviour to the authorities. The document being a bit old (2005), the link was outdated but our friend Google found me the new one: https://pointdecontact.belgique.be/meldpunt/en/welcome

On this official website, you can report SMS Spam (or other similar illegal activities) using the “New complain” button and the  “SPAM from unidentified party” type of report.

I’m not sure it will be quite efficient to stop rapidly the Spam SMS from coming (most smartphone allow you to block senders for a while) but it will be the start of it. And if more and more people stat to report such behaviour, it will likely have an impact.

Notice you can also report spam or harassement coming from outside the country.

The scope is quite clear from the 1st page:

“Are you the victim of misleading practices, fraud or swindle? Or have your rights as a consumer or enterprise not been respected?
Then choose the scenario that matches your problem and follow the various steps to report your problem to the competent services.
You will always receive a reply in which we will try to provide an answer to your questions.
The competent services will analyse your report and may carry out an investigation. They do not take any action in your individual dispute, nor do they provide any information concerning the investigation. For your individual problem, we exclusively refer to the reply that will be sent to you”

Now you know what to do.

With the US judge ruling against Google, will GDPR force European companies to leave the cloud?

You may have heard that the US federal Judge Thomas Rueter has ruled against Google in their refusal to seize personal emails of one of their customer to the FBI based on the fact that these data were stored in an European Data Center.

While in 2016, in a case against Microsoft, a federal judge ruled that US investigators could not force the company to hand over emails stored on a server in Europe (Dublin in that specific case).

Of course, there is much more at stake here than just access to one customer’s email. There is billions of dollars at stake here. Most companies and individuals in Europe are moving their data to the cloud. The biggest cloud services suppliers in the world are American based companies (Amazon, IBM, Google and Microsoft representing together around 50% of the market) and a large number of European companies are outsourcing their services to these vendors. However, the GDPR (the European General Data Protection Regulation, see also Wikipedia for an overview) requires a strong protection of our personal data (including our emails). As US and EU aren’t totally aligned on this matter, most European companies requires their cloud providers to store and process their data in European Data Centers in order to guarantee the European regulation will be enforced.

And now, this new ruling might jeopardize all that (or at least be the start of it). If the sole fact of having an American based company as a supplier can allow US to bypass the GDPR, would European companies still be allowed to use them to store personal data? Would we see European companies and individuals leaving Gmail, Google apps, AWS, Outlook and other related US based services for European based and owned companies? It would be a big mess… and maybe a huge opportunity for some European challengers.

TO BE CONTINUED…

 

 

Will IoT kill us someday?

herzschrittmacher_auf_roentgenbildWhen you’re working in the security industry, being paranoid is kind of natural (or is it the other way around?). So, when you see how easy people, processes and technologies can be hacked, you become rapidly suspicious of anything. We all know bad things can happen and most of the time we try to mitigate the risks (without even thinking too much about it). Business as usual, so to speak. However, while I have a good idea of the risks our future is bringing to us (what makes me even less worried about my business’ future), it seems that most people don’t imagine how much danger Internet will bring to them. So here are some clues.

The new buzzword that has a lot of attention in the media lately is probably IoT: The Internet of things. According to the media, it’s IoT who allowed hackers to put websites like Amazon and Netflix on their knee for a few hours on October 21st. But that’s a mistake. Although IoT has led to some specific new technologies like Bluetooth 4.1 or ZigBee to accommodate the low consumption and the low cost requirement necessary to embed technologies in nearly all objects, it is probably a mistake to see IoT like something new or something different. As Bruce Schneier said recently in front of the US congress, we should not see this has objects with computers in it (and an Internet connection) but rather see it as computer that do things. A Tesla is a computer with wheels (and when you see how Tesla manage its updates and is manufacturing process, it is closer to the Software industry than to the car industry way of working), a smartphone is a computer with a microphone and a 4G connection, a connected fridge is a computer with an extra cooling system, and so on.

Bottom line, these connected objects are all computers and we must treat them like it. So, like for all computers when it comes to managing security, we should think about patch management, access control, hardening, change management, release management, network segregation, encryption, key management, user awareness and training and all these processes and best practices. Unfortunately, the issue is that most connected object manufacturers didn’t spend enough time and money in designing secure objects, easily upgradable, with strong and secure communication protocols. Consequently, the future is now… and we are not ready for it.

But what is our future? Let’s get a glimpse at it. In the tenth episode of the second season of “Homeland”, Nicholas Brody help terrorists to kill a political figure by giving them his pacemaker serial number, allowing them to hack it and induce a heart attack.

In another TV show, “Blacklist”, a computer genius triggers remotely the airbag of a car while driving, causing the car to crash and the death of its driver.

Is this Science-Fiction? Unfortunately, not anymore! Exploits on “smart” cars become more and more frequent. More recently, a British and a Belgian researcher have devised a wireless wounding attack on pacemakers (1). While the latter exploit need specific and rather costly hardware (3 to 4.000€), we are just one step away of having a ZigBee or BT 4.2 interface. Do you wanna kill someone with your smartphone? Don’t worry, you won’t have to wait too long.

At the same time, as other device with less deadly capabilities are spreading over the world, they provide a potential army of unsecure devices that can be used for Distributed Deny of Service attacks, like it was seen recently, but, why not, to perform parallel tasking, helping to brute force passwords, crack cryptographic keys or hide communication sources by bouncing thousand of times on these little soldiers that we provide to these hackers. Nice isn’t it? We purchase the devices that will be used against us in the near future. To be honest, for most people, including for a lot of security specialist, it is not easy to make the difference between a secure IP camera and an insecure one, simply because we don’t have time to test everything and there is no useful and relevant certification for that. So think about the number of “computers” you have at home: Your internet router, you tablet, your PC or your Mac, your smartphones, your videosurveillance camera, your printer, your TV box, your Bluray player, your “smart” TV, your alarm, your new “connected” fridge, your smart thermostat, the PSP of your kids, the IP doorbell and so on… Think about it, in your home alone, you may have more than 10 little future soldiers for the next hacker’s army. Android, iOS or IP cameras, they nearly all have exploitable vulnerabilities.

So, we have an army and we have soon legion of potential targets for the new kind of attack: DoL attacks (Denial of Life). Imagine ransomware targetting your pacemaker, large scale attack on cars to cause traffic jams or worse, new hitmans (version 3.0) changing the medication of patients in hospital, overdosing people. Just watch any episode of “Person of Interest”, they were just a few inches away from the actual reality… and we are getting there.

It sounds crazy, isn’t it? As bruce Scheneier said, Internet is not that fun anymore. It’s not a game anymore. Things are getting serious and we should act accordingly. Not only at government level but also in industries and in the civilian world. We should ask our suppliers, our manufacturers to secure their devices, to make them safe AND easy to control.

To be continued…

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