Thursday, August 1, 2019
Cisco ‘Knowingly’ Sold Hackable Video Surveillance System to U.S. Government
Cisco Systems has agreed to pay $8.6 million to settle a lawsuit that accused the company of knowingly selling video surveillance system containing severe security vulnerabilities to the U.S. federal and state government agencies.
It's believed to be the first payout on a '
False Claims Act' case over failure to meet cybersecurity standards.
The lawsuit began eight years ago, in the year 2011, when Cisco subcontractor turned whistleblower, James Glenn, accused Cisco of continue selling a video surveillance technology to federal agencies even after knowing that the software was vulnerable to multiple security flaws.
According to the court documents seen by The Hacker News, Glenn and one of his colleagues discovered multiple vulnerabilities in Cisco
Video Surveillance Manager(VSM) suite in September 2008 and tried to report them to the company in October 2008.
Cisco Video Surveillance Manager (VSM)suite allows customers to manage multiple video cameras at different physical locations through a centralized server, which in turn, can be accessed remotely.
The vulnerabilities could have reportedly enabled remote hackers to gain unauthorized access to the video surveillance system permanently, eventually allowing them to gain access to all video feeds, all stored data on the system, modify or delete video feeds, and bypass security measures.
Apparently, Net Design, the Cisco contractor where Glenn was working at that time, fired him shortly after he reported Cisco's security violations, which the company officially described as a cost-cutting measure.
However, in 2010, when Glenn realized that Cisco never fixed those issues neither notified its customers, he informed the U.S. federal agency, who then launched a lawsuit claiming Cisco had defrauded U.S. federal, state and local governments who purchased the product.
Cisco, directly and indirectly, sold its VSM software suit to police departments, schools, courts, municipal offices and airports as we as to many government agencies including the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the Secret Service, the Navy, the Army, the Air Force, the Marine Corps and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
"Cisco has known of these critical security flaws for at least two and a half years; it has failed to notify the government entities that have purchased and continue to use VSM of the vulnerability," the lawsuit states.
"Thus, for example, an unauthorized user could effectively shut down an entire airport by taking control of all security cameras and turning them off. Alternately, such a hacker could access the video archives of a large entity to obscure or eliminate video evidence of theft or espionage."
After the lawsuit was filed, the company
acknowledgedthe vulnerabilities (CVE-2013-3429, CVE-2013-3430, CVE-2013-3431) and released an updated version of its VSM software suit.
As part of the lawsuit, Cisco has finally agreed to pay $8.6 million in the settlement—of which Glenn and his lawyers will receive $1.6 million and the rest $7 million going to the federal government and the 16 states that purchased the affected product.
In response to the latest settlement, Cisco issued an official
statementWednesday saying it was "pleased to have resolved" the 2011 dispute and that "there was no allegation or evidence that any unauthorized access to customers' video occurred" as a result of its VSM suit's architecture.
However, the company added that video feeds could "theoretically have been subject to hacking," though the lawsuit has not claimed that anyone had exploited the vulnerabilities discovered by Glenn.
from The Hacker News https://ift.tt/2SWMGxi
USN-4069-2: Linux kernel (HWE) vulnerabilities
linux-hwe vulnerabilities
A security issue affects these releases of Ubuntu and its derivatives:
- Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
Summary
Several security issues were fixed in the Linux kernel.
Software Description
- linux-hwe - Linux hardware enablement (HWE) kernel
Details
USN-4069-1 fixed vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel for Ubuntu 19.04. This update provides the corresponding updates for the Linux Hardware Enablement (HWE) kernel from Ubuntu 19.04 for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.
It was discovered that an integer overflow existed in the Linux kernel when reference counting pages, leading to potential use-after-free issues. A local attacker could use this to cause a denial of service (system crash) or possibly execute arbitrary code. (CVE-2019-11487)
Jann Horn discovered that a race condition existed in the Linux kernel when performing core dumps. A local attacker could use this to cause a denial of service (system crash) or expose sensitive information. (CVE-2019-11599)
It was discovered that the ext4 file system implementation in the Linux kernel did not properly zero out memory in some situations. A local attacker could use this to expose sensitive information (kernel memory). (CVE-2019-11833)
It was discovered that the Bluetooth Human Interface Device Protocol (HIDP) implementation in the Linux kernel did not properly verify strings were NULL terminated in certain situations. A local attacker could use this to expose sensitive information (kernel memory). (CVE-2019-11884)
Update instructions
The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:
- Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
- linux-image-5.0.0-23-generic - 5.0.0-23.24~18.04.1
- linux-image-5.0.0-23-generic-lpae - 5.0.0-23.24~18.04.1
- linux-image-5.0.0-23-lowlatency - 5.0.0-23.24~18.04.1
- linux-image-generic-hwe-18.04 - 5.0.0.23.80
- linux-image-generic-lpae-hwe-18.04 - 5.0.0.23.80
- linux-image-lowlatency-hwe-18.04 - 5.0.0.23.80
- linux-image-snapdragon-hwe-18.04 - 5.0.0.23.80
- linux-image-virtual-hwe-18.04 - 5.0.0.23.80
To update your system, please follow these instructions: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/Upgrades.
After a standard system update you need to reboot your computer to make all the necessary changes.
ATTENTION: Due to an unavoidable ABI change the kernel updates have been given a new version number, which requires you to recompile and reinstall all third party kernel modules you might have installed. Unless you manually uninstalled the standard kernel metapackages (e.g. linux-generic, linux-generic-lts-RELEASE, linux-virtual, linux-powerpc), a standard system upgrade will automatically perform this as well.
References
from Ubuntu Security Notices https://ift.tt/2yqpWMS