Of Cracks, Hacks And Jailbreaks

What a day. It started with news that hackers managed to circumvent controls in the T-Mobile G1 Android mobile phone that allowed them to install new programs and even a new operating system. A step by step tutorial has been posted on an Android developer forum. Applied incorrectly the hack could render the mobile phone completely useless and void the warranty leaving the user with a bricked phone and no way of getting a free repair or replacement for it. The hack is giving the user root access to the phone.

Then there was the news that Adobe issued a security patch for both Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat that fixed several security issues which would allow attackers to remotely execute code on the target machine. The patch can be downloaded from the official Adobe website and should be applied by users who work with Adobe Reader or Adobe Acrobat.

Lastly PC World published an article claiming that WPA Wi-FI encryption was cracked. (Thanks to Lee Mathews for sending this in via email). Security researcher Erik Tews is said to demonstrate how he was able to crack any WPA encryption in around 15 minutes at the PacSec conference in Tokyo next week.

To do this, Tews and his co-researcher Martin Beck found a way to break the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) key, used by WPA, in a relatively short amount of time: 12 to 15 minutes, according to Dragos Ruiu, the PacSec conference's organizer.

Users who use wireless connections should make sure that they are using WPA2 encryption. If their router is not supporting that kind of encryption it could mean to check the Internet for firmware updates that add that possibility or to purchase a new wireless router that supports it.

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