34 major tech companies are uniting to fight cyberattacks

Cyberattacks are a global issue that can cause havoc regardless of who's involved, and key members of the tech industry are uniting in a bid to fight these attacks. A group of 34 companies has signed the Cybersecurity Tech Accord, an agreement promis...

Juniper will release another patch for its backdoored firewalls

A couple of weeks after announcing it found "unauthorized code" in firewalls that could've let someone spy on secure VPN traffic, Juniper Networks has another update on the issue. Despite the release of a patch that it says makes the firewalls secure...

Exploit uses firewalls to hijack smartphones, turns friends into foes

Image

Normally, firewalls at cellular carriers are your best friends, screening out malware before it ever touches your phone. University of Michigan computer science researchers have found that those first lines of defense could be your enemy through a new exploit. As long as a small piece of malware sits on a device, that handset can infer TCP data packet sequence numbers coming from the firewall and hijack a phone's internet traffic with phishing sites, fake messages or other rogue code. The trick works on at least 48 carriers that use firewalls from Check Point, Cisco, Juniper and other networking heavy hitters -- AT&T being one of those providers. Carriers can turn the sequences off, although there are consequences to that as well. The only surefire solution is to either run antivirus apps if you're on a mobile OS like Android or else to run a platform that doesn't allow running unsigned apps at all, like iOS or Windows Phone. Whether or not the exploit is a serious threat is still far from certain, but we'll get a better sense of the risk on May 22nd, when Z. Morley Mao and Zhiyun Qian step up to the podium at an IEEE security symposium and deliver their findings.

Exploit uses firewalls to hijack smartphones, turns friends into foes originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 22 May 2012 03:18:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Ars Technica  |  sourceUniversity of Michigan (PDF)  | Email this | Comments