A few days ago, Secaron was invited by the CLUSSIL to participate in the first “Group de travail CASES” meeting. Some of us, Anne-France, Manu and myself, went to this meeting which was animated and interesting. But what is Cases?

CASES (Cyberworld Awareness Security Enhancement Structure) is a project by the Luxembourgish Ministry of economy which aims at make users aware of the dangers related to Information security. It operates through an Internet portal, trainings, and a anonymous alerting structure. One of its goal is to highlight, in an easy-to-understand and sanitized language, what’s at stake for the citizens and the SME. On another level, Cases is also completely integrated in a european structure that deals with the same problematic.

During the meeting, we were introduced to CasiX which is actually the tool that enable the Cases Nodes to put in place the necessary structure to anonymously report alerts and communicate with the the Cases control center.

It ended with a relatively animated question session that allowed the participants to order the CasiX CDs to test it. So did we . For more information about the Cases initative and CasiX framework, please visit http://www.cases.public.lu/ and http://casix.cases-cc.org/.

A few weeks ago, Manu, Laurent and I decided to take a laptop, a GPS device, a car, and good mood to drive across Luxembourg city to asses the status of wireless networks. And so, armed with patience, we wardrove through the city and its neighborhood amused by the repeating sound of a newly discovered Access Point.

This wasn’t the first time for some of us. In fact, Laurent and Manu had done it a few years ago. And so, we were all interested in the findings. Were there more AP? Were they more protected?

Here are some numbers! Pretty frightening, I have to say.

• 559 Access Points
• 342 AP with no encryption (more than 50%)
• 89 with default SSID

As we wanted to have something visual and because Google provides us with Google Earth, we decided to map the points to satellite pictures using Google Earth. I’ll post the kml file so that you can open it in your Google Earth and search for your AP . In the meantime, here is a screenshot:

Unfortunately, I don’t know why, the points do not really correspond. I suppose this has to do with precision that gets lost between the device and the soft…

Oh yes! What we used?

Software:

• Netstumbler v0.4.0 on Windows XP, I know what a shame.
• A home-made script to extract the data.

Hardware:

• GPS device: Bluetooth Holux GR232.
• Fujitsu Siemens Bluetooth-enabled laptop
• Peugot 307

Mozilla released on Thursday its updated e-mail application. Thunderbird 1.5, which is designed to deliver improved security and functionality.

Get it!

FX has reported a vulnerability in BlackBerry Enterprise Server, which can be exploited by malicious people to cause a DoS (Denial of Service) and potentially to compromise a vulnerable system. The vulnerability is caused due to an unspecified error in the BlackBerry Attachment Service when rendering malformed PNG image attachments.

This can be exploited to cause a heap-based buffer overflow, which can cause BlackBerry users to be unable to view file attachments and may allow arbitrary code execution on the server.

Here is the link: http://secunia.com/advisories/18393/. A few days ago, another vulnerabilty was released. As a system starts to generate interest, it will be a marvellous target for bad people . This is nicely discussed in an AGEFI article by Laurent. Unfortunatly, you will have to wait for an online version, but you can run to your local newspaper store and get a paper version. Posted in the January 2006 release.

Updated 17 Feb. : The online version is there.