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bluetooth vulnerability | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

New Unpatched Bluetooth Flaw Lets Hackers Easily Target Nearby Devices

New Unpatched Bluetooth Flaw Lets Hackers Easily Target Nearby Devices

Sep 10, 2020
Bluetooth SIG—an organization that oversees the development of Bluetooth standards—today issued a statement informing users and vendors of a newly reported unpatched vulnerability that potentially affects hundreds of millions of devices worldwide. Discovered independently by two separate teams of academic researchers, the flaw resides in the Cross-Transport Key Derivation (CTKD) of devices supporting both — Basic Rate/Enhanced Data Rate (BR/EDR) and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) standard. Cross-Transport Key Derivation (CTKD) is a Bluetooth component responsible for negotiating the authenticate keys when pairing two Bluetooth devices together, also known as "dual-mode" devices. Dubbed 'BLURtooth' and tracked as CVE-2020-15802 , the flaw exposes devices powered with Bluetooth 4.0 or 5.0 technology, allowing attackers to unauthorizedly connect to a targeted nearby device by overwriting the authenticated key or reducing the encryption key strength. "Dual-mod
New Bluetooth Vulnerability Exposes Billions of Devices to Hackers

New Bluetooth Vulnerability Exposes Billions of Devices to Hackers

May 19, 2020
Academics from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) disclosed a security vulnerability in Bluetooth that could potentially allow an attacker to spoof a remotely paired device, exposing over a billion of modern devices to hackers. The attacks, dubbed Bluetooth Impersonation AttackS or BIAS, concern Bluetooth Classic, which supports Basic Rate (BR) and Enhanced Data Rate (EDR) for wireless data transfer between devices. "The Bluetooth specification contains vulnerabilities enabling to perform impersonation attacks during secure connection establishment," the researchers outlined in the paper. "Such vulnerabilities include the lack of mandatory mutual authentication, overly permissive role switching, and an authentication procedure downgrade." Given the widespread impact of the vulnerability, the researchers said they responsibly disclosed the findings to the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG), the organization that oversees the development o
Making Sense of Operational Technology Attacks: The Past, Present, and Future

Making Sense of Operational Technology Attacks: The Past, Present, and Future

Mar 21, 2024Operational Technology / SCADA Security
When you read reports about cyber-attacks affecting operational technology (OT), it's easy to get caught up in the hype and assume every single one is sophisticated. But are OT environments all over the world really besieged by a constant barrage of complex cyber-attacks? Answering that would require breaking down the different types of OT cyber-attacks and then looking back on all the historical attacks to see how those types compare.  The Types of OT Cyber-Attacks Over the past few decades, there has been a growing awareness of the need for improved cybersecurity practices in IT's lesser-known counterpart, OT. In fact, the lines of what constitutes a cyber-attack on OT have never been well defined, and if anything, they have further blurred over time. Therefore, we'd like to begin this post with a discussion around the ways in which cyber-attacks can either target or just simply impact OT, and why it might be important for us to make the distinction going forward. Figure 1 The Pu
New Bluetooth Vulnerability Lets Attackers Spy On Encrypted Connections

New Bluetooth Vulnerability Lets Attackers Spy On Encrypted Connections

Aug 14, 2019
Over a billion Bluetooth-enabled devices, including smartphones, laptops, smart IoT devices, and industrial devices, have been found vulnerable to a high severity vulnerability that could allow attackers to spy on data transmitted between the two devices. The vulnerability, assigned as CVE-2019-9506 , resides in the way 'encryption key negotiation protocol' lets two Bluetooth BR/EDR devices choose an entropy value for encryption keys while pairing to secure their connection. Referred to as the Key Negotiation of Bluetooth ( KNOB ) attack, the vulnerability could allow remote attackers in close proximity to targeted devices to intercept, monitor, or manipulate encrypted Bluetooth traffic between two paired devices. The Bluetooth BR/EDR (Basic Rate/Enhanced Data Rate, also known as "Bluetooth Classic") is a wireless technology standard that has typically been designed for relatively short-range, continuous wireless connection such as streaming audio to headsets
cyber security

Automated remediation solutions are crucial for security

websiteWing SecurityShadow IT / SaaS Security
Especially when it comes to securing employees' SaaS usage, don't settle for a longer to-do list. Auto-remediation is key to achieving SaaS security.
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