Bluetooth Security

Many of us use and love Bluetooth technology. You can use it to send a document from your laptop to a printer in another room via a radio frequency. It’s easy to set up and convenient to use.
But you might want to think twice about what you use it for because that easy connection for you can also be an easy connection for a cybercreep.
THE RISKS:
1. You may be shouting out your information via your voice.
2. What makes Bluetooth easy to work for you, can make it open to someone to eavesdrop.
Have you ever been at a house where the baby monitor or the cordless phones pick up the neighbor’s conversations? This is sort of like that.
It’s also less about your actual Bluetooth itself and the fact that many people walk around with the Bluetooth enabled on their smartphone when they don’t use it which means it’s open for cybercreeps to Bluetooth their way in.
When you have Bluetooth turned on but not in use, you are basically broadcasting that your phone is on & available for other to Bluetooth to it!
HOW THEY DO IT:
A hacker can run a program on the computer that scans for Bluetooth connections. When they find one, bingo, they connect and they are in.
WHAT THEY TYPICALLY STEAL:
What do they take? Typically things like your address book, possibly your calendar, photos, using your phone to make long distance calls, or they may turn your phone into an impromptu speaker and listen to your conversations.
Three TIPS TO PROTECT YOURSELF:
1. Turn your Bluetooth to “off” on devices such as your phone when not using the Bluetooth feature.
2. You can also look at your manufacturer settings to see if there is a “hidden” or “private” mode.
3. Refrain from sensitive and personal conversations using the Bluetooth device.

Internet slows down after DNS attack on Spamhaus

Hundreds of thousands of Britons are unsuspecting participants in one of the internet's biggest cyber-attacks ever – because their broadband router has been subverted.

Spamhaus, which operates a filtering service used to weed out spam emails, has been under attack since 18 March after adding a Dutch hosting organisation called Cyberbunker to its list of unwelcome internet sites. The service has "made plenty of enemies", said one expert, and the cyber-attack appeared to be retaliation.

A collateral effect of the attack is that internet users accustomed to high-speed connections may have seen those slow down, said James Blessing, a member of the UK Internet Service Providers' Association (ISPA) council.

"It varies depending on where you are and what site you're trying to get to," he said. "Those who are used to it being really quick will notice." Some people accessing the online streaming site Netflix reported a slowdown.

Spamhaus offers a checking service for companies and organisations, listing internet addresses it thinks generate spam, or which host content linked to spam, such as sites selling pills touted in junk email. Use of the service is optional, but thousands of organisations use it millions of times a day in deciding whether to accept incoming email from the internet.

Cyberbunker offers hosting for any sort of content as long, it says, as it is not child pornography or linked to terrorism. But in mid-March Spamhaus added its internet addresses to its blacklist.

In retaliation, the hosting company and a number of eastern European gangs apparently enlisted hackers who have in turn put together huge "botnets" of computers, and also exploited home and business broadband routers, to try to knock out the Spamhaus system.

"Spamhaus has made plenty of enemies over the years. Spammers aren't always the most lovable of individuals, and Spamhaus has been threatened, sued and [attacked] regularly," noted Matthew Prince of Cloudflare, a hosting company that helped the London business survive the attack by diverting the traffic.

Rather than aiming floods of traffic directly at Spamhaus's servers – a familiar tactic that is easily averted – the hackers exploited the internet's domain name system (DNS) servers, which accept a human-readable address for a website (such as guardian.co.uk) and spit back a machine-readable one (77.91.248.30). The hackers "spoofed" requests for lookups to the DNS servers so they seemed to come from Spamhaus; the servers responded with huge floods of responses, all aimed back at Spamhaus.

Some of those requests will have been coming from UK users without their knowledge, If somebody has a badly configured broadband modem or router, anybody in the outside world can use it to redirect traffic and attack the target – in this case, Spamhaus."

Many routers in the UK provided by ISPs have settings enabled which let them be controlled remotely for servicing. That, together with so-called "open DNS" systems online which are known to be insecure helped the hackers to create a flood of traffic.


"You can't stop a DNS flood by shutting down those [DNS] servers because those machines have to be open and public by default. The only way to deal with this problem is to find the people doing it and arrest them."