NEWS - September 06, 2012

As the issue of the leaked million of Apple device IDs by the AntiSec hacker group and the alleged existence of a list of over 12 million of those and other personal information belonging to the users gets bigger by the day, the question is will we ever definitely know from where that list was stolen?

The FBI has vehemently denied AntiSec's claim that it was extracted from on of its laptops and that they ever had the information in question in their hands.

Apple has also issued a statement on Wednesday, saying that the agency has never requested this information from Apple, nor did Apple provided it to them or to any other organization.

"Additionally, with iOS 6 we introduced a new set of APIs meant to replace the use of the UDID and will soon be banning the use of UDID," Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris pointed out on Wednesday.

Continued : http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=13536

Also:
UDID leak: Apple says it did not provide the list
Apple denies giving device IDs to FBI
Apple plots the end of the UDID, denies sharing them with the FBI

Related: Anonymous Leaks Apple UDIDs Following Alleged Hack of FBI

"Quite possibly a giant waste of time for the Secret Service, an investigation has been launched into threats of stolen tax returns."

Covered by Venturebeat earlier today, the United States Secret Service is looking into a claim that hackers stole several years worth of Mitt Romney's tax returns from the offices of PriceWaterhouseCoopers in Franklin, Tennessee. Posted on Pastebin earlier this week, the hacking team that allegedly stole Romney's tax returns detailed an account of the theft. According to the account, the thieves gained access to the PriceWaterhouseCoopers office on August 25 through the third floor of the office building. Moving down to the second floor, the group allegedly accessed the PriceWaterhouseCoopers office in question and copied scans of all available Romney tax returns to a USB drive. After leaving the offices, the hacking team allegedly copied the documents onto three USB drives. They had flash drives delivered to the PriceWaterhouseCoopers office as well as the local branches of the Republican and Democratic party.

After the group threatened to release all files to the public on September 28, they posted a follow-up threat on September 4 regarding payment by Bitcoins. Detailed in the second Pastebin post, the group claims to have accessed the network file servers at the Tennessee office of PriceWaterhouseCoopers and copied the tax documents.

Continued : http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/feds-investigating-alleged-hacking-of-romneys-tax-returns/

Also:
PWC: No evidence of breach in Romney tax return extortion case
Firm has no evidence that Romney's tax returns were stolen
Hacker Claims to Have Mitt Romney's Tax Records, Wants $1 Million in Bitcoins

"Researchers may have figured out a way to break out of a virtual machine and take over the underlying host."

Researchers developed an "advanced exploitation method" which triggered a previously discovered vulnerability in order to escape a Xen virtual machine running on Citrix XenServer and get onto the host machine, Jordan Gruskovnjak, a security researcher at VUPEN Security wrote on the Vulnerability Research Team Blog on Tuesday. The vulnerability was discovered by Rafal Wojtczuk and presented during the recent Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas.

With this method, attackers who have root access on a guest virtual machine running under Xen can take over the host system and be able to execute arbitrary code with appropriate permissions, Gruskovnjak said. Once out of the virtual machine, attackers would be able to access all the other virtual machines running on that hardware.

"By controlling the general purpose registers, it is possible to influence the hypervisor behavior and gain code execution in the hypervisor context, escaping the guest context." Gruskovnjak wrote.

Continued : http://www.securityweek.com/vupen-method-breaks-out-virtual-machine-attack-hosts

Also: Virtual Machine Escape Exploit Targets Xen

It is a well-known fact that some Facebook users simply can't stand the (relatively) new Timeline interface and have actively sought for ways to revert their accounts to the old "look".

This fact hasn't escaped the notice of online scammers, who rushed to offer bogus apps and plugins that they claimed could do it, but only served to make users fill out surveys or share personal information.

With time, the users got wiser and stopped falling for these schemes - or so it seems at first.

Researchers from Barracuda Networks have decided to analyze six of these plugins offered on the Google Chrome Web store.

The all have some version of the words "Timeline" and "Remove" in their names, but a closer look showed that half of them also asked permission to access the users' data on Facebook and to their tabs and browsing activity, while the other three went even further and look for permission to access the users' data on all websites they visit.

Continued : http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=13537