Month: September 2018

SCADA, also known as Supervisory control and data acquisition is unfortunately used with critical infrastructure, like power grids. So, how do you shut down a power grid?

We will give you one horribly insecure example where a country connected their electric grid to the internet. Their admin backend where you can shutdown the power of different sections of the country, was exposed through Google cache, which let anyone have the ability  to shutdown their power.

 

Now why didn’t researchers of this country discover this? Because they threaten to kill anyone who they deem to have hacked their site that lives in their country, however their threat model did not account in that the rest of the world may discover their electric grid issues.

In our mind  this is so insecure it isn’t a hack, because if Google can access it and you access it on Google’s property, then you’re accessing it on Google’s servers, rather than hacking the companies servers.

 

How do you avoid this highly insecure setup?

Well, first if you have anything sensitive, do not connect it to the internet. Secondly, do not have SCADA online, for crying out loud. If you want to be hacked, then sure by all means go ahead, but this was so insecure you should never do this.

This is one very simple, glaring issue of how a system used for critical infrastructure can be used the way it was designed to shut it down, yet they didn’t consider they were designing it for others to use when they made it.

 

We will be writing more on SCADA in the near future.

 

 

 

The WordPress Plugin WP-doctor contains a trojan,  in the malware.txt file. A user  made this public over a year ago, yet nothing happened. So, we  reviewed it and they were right, so we contacted WordPress.

 

WordPress agreed that the trojan was in the software, however they could not find a point in the software where the trojan was being used. y  So, in other words the software was shipped with malicous code, but they weren’t using the malicious code, or rather no one has  yet to identify where that malicious code would work.

The WordPress team shut down the plugin while they talk to the team behind WP-Doctor to see if this was left over as part of an attempt in detecting malware, or if there is any legitimate reason for this WordPress Plugin to contain freaking malware.

Vulnerabilites are common in WordPress, malware shouldn’t be on WordPress or on any site as a useful program, yet this program at least has the trojan code in it. If it ever did anything is another question. At this point in time, we would advise you remove WP-doctor.

 

10 marketing tips for local businesses that will help you out every time are listed below.

• Figure out who your target demographic is. Are you selling to dentists, or are you selling to a candy company? Two different markets, but it’s up to you to make sure you’re targeting the right one.
• You’re a local business. Examine your competitors. What are they doing online? How do they advertise in person? Legally take what they do that is good and incorporate it to the extent you are allowed to into your marketing.
• Instagram, google, facebook, what are you supposed to focus on? Instagram is a great and powerful site which most  competitors  overlook. Facebook is over saturated with your competitors, but you can cross-post from instagram to Facebook. Google is a must as are other search engines, like duck duck go.
• Make sure you are easy to find and that your customers have an easy time understanding what you are selling.
• Be visible in the community as a local business. Go to events, buy booths, so people can see you online and offline.
• Have multiple ways your clients can contact you, including Google hangouts or facetime, along with phone calls, and in person. The more ways they can contact you, the more ways you can conduct your business.
• Is there a niche in your community that isn’t being filled that takes a slight tweak to your company? Tweak away!
• The customer doesn’t know what they are looking for until they see what they aren’t looking for. Make sure to profit from this with contracts.

 

White Fir Design   the parent of company of the site  plugin vulnerabilites has in some form been compromised. We were doing a search on who owned another corporation and they popped up. When we clicked in we noticed they appeared to be hacked as xss started popping up on our screen.

We ran it through sucuri to see what they know and surprisingly white fir design is already on 9 blacklists and sucuri considers it to be a critical security risk. We agree with the sucuri automated assessment and would steer clear of this corporation as they are unable to keep their security in check, yet they have attacked more corporations than can be named in one blog post who help protect people against security issues. In the name of full disclosure, they have also attacked our company, however we look at it this way:   If a site that our source says is ran by one person that attacks tons of security companies, then you’re doing something right.