Hacktivist group Anonymous is claiming responsibility for an attack on the computer systems of the Syrian government and its evil overlord Bashar Assad thanks to which over two million emails ended up in the hands of whistle-blowing site WikiLeaks.

As of last Thursday, the site began drip-feeding sections of the ‘Syria Files’ to its selected media partners, and given there are a total of 2.4m emails from 680 separate domains going all the way back to August 2006, it could take some time.

Anonymous revealed in a press release that its Op Syria team – comprising members of Anonymous Syria, AntiSec and sometime collaborator the Peoples Liberation Front – first breached multiple domains and servers in the war-torn country back in February.

“So large was the data available to be taken, and so great was the danger of detection (especially for the members of Anonymous Syria, many of whom are ‘in country’) that the downloading of this data took several additional weeks,” the release said.

Not knowing quite what to do with the huge treasure trove of information it had snarfed, the group handed it over to WikiLeaks, the organisation it had partnered with before in the hack of private intelligence firm Stratfor.

There were no details of exactly how the attack took place but given the usual MO of Anonymous, you can expect it took advantage of some pretty obvious web application vulnerabilities.

The hacktivist group was also keen to portray itself as a force for good offline as well as on, claiming six of its members carried medical supplies across the border and that it has been helping local activists and protesters avoid surveillance efforts by the Assad regime.

Anti-government activists in Syria have been targeted by phishing campaigns and spyware for months, most recently the BlackShades Trojan which spreads via compromised Skype accounts.

On the car forum 1Addicts, a one-time poster by the name of “stolen1m” uploaded the video showing how his BMW was stolen in under three minutes. He suspects the thieves used devices that plug into the car’s On-Board Diagnostic (ODB) port to program a new keyfob.

In this particular video, there are a few security flaws that the hackers are exploiting simultaneously: there is no sensor that is triggered when the thieves initially break the window, the internal ultrasonic sensor system has a “blind spot” just in front of the OBD port, the OBD port is constantly powered (even when the car is off), and last but not least, it does not require a password. All of this means the thieves can gain complete access to the car without even entering it.

BMW has acknowledged that there is a problem, but is downplaying this particular issue by saying the whole industry struggles with thievery. This is unfortunate given that the evidence seems to point towards BMWs being specifically targeted. Whether that’s because they are luxury cars or because they have a security loophole doesn’t matter: the point is BMW needs to do something about it.

If you want to protect yourself from this hack, look into how you can disable the OBD port on your BMW by disconnecting the corresponding wires. If you or your dealer needs it, you can always reenable it. Alternatively, you can try to further secure the port in your own custom way.

A team of security researchers have demonstrated how a security flaw in Android 4.0.4 can be exploited by a clickjacking rootkit.

The research team is lead by North Carolina State University professor Xuxian Jiang, who succeeded in developing a proof-of-concept rootkit that attacks the Android framework as opposed to the underlying operating system kernel. The researchers contend that such a rootkit could potentially be downloaded with an infected app and be used to manipulate the smartphone.

In the video, the demonstrator was able to hide applications on the device, as well as get them to launch when icons for other applications are clicked. If downloaded with an infected application, the rootkit could for example hide the smartphone’s browser and replace it with a browser that looks exactly the same but actually steals all of the user’s information.

A new Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) crimeware bot known as “Zemra” and detected by Symantec as Backdoor.Zemra. Lately, this threat has been observed performing denial-of-service attacks against organizations with the purpose of extortion. Zemra first appeared on underground forums in May 2012 at a cost of €100.

This crimeware pack is similar to other crime packs, such as Zeus and SpyEye, in that is has a command-and-control panel hosted on a remote server. This allows it to issue commands to compromised computers and act as the gateway to record the number of infections and bots at the attacker’s disposal.

Similar to other crimeware kits, the functionality of Zemra is extensive:

• 256-bit DES encryption/decryption for communication between server and client
• DDoS attacks
• Device monitoring
• Download and execution of binary files
• Installation and persistence in checking to ensure infection
• Propagation through USB
• Self update
• Self uninstall
• System information collection

However, the main functionality is the ability to perform a DDoS attack on a remote target computer of the user’s choosing.

Initially, when a computer becomes infected, Backdoor.Zemra dials home through HTTP (port 80) and performs a POST request sending hardware ID, current user agent, privilege indication (administrator or not), and the version of the OS. This POST request gets parsed by gate.php, which splits out the information and stores it in an SQL database. It then keeps track of which compromised computers are online and ready to receive commands.

Inspection of the leaked code allowed us to identify two types of DDoS attacks that have been implemented into this bot:

• HTTP flood
• SYN flood

Symantec added detection for this threat under the name Backdoor.Zemra, which became active on June 25, 2012. To reduce the possibility of being infected by this Trojan, Symantec advises users to ensure that they are using the latest Symantec protection technologies with the latest antivirus definitions installed.

RSA’s SecurID 800 is one of at least five commercially available security devices susceptible to a new attack that extracts cryptographic keys used to log in to sensitive corporate and government networks.

Scientists have devised an attack that takes only minutes to steal the sensitive cryptographic keys stored on a raft of hardened security devices that corporations and government organizations use to access networks, encrypt hard drives, and digitally sign e-mails.

The exploit, described in a paper to be presented at the CRYPTO 2012 conference in August, requires just 13 minutes to extract a secret key from RSA’s SecurID 800, which company marketers hold out as a secure way for employees to store credentials needed to access confidential virtual private networks, corporate domains, and other sensitive environments. The attack also works against other widely used devices, including the electronic identification cards the government of Estonia requires all citizens 15 years or older to carry, as well as tokens made by a variety of other companies.

“They’re designed specifically to deal with the case where somebody gets physical access to it or takes control of a computer that has access to it, and they’re still supposed to hang onto their secrets and be secure,” Matthew Green, a professor specializing in cryptography in the computer science department at Johns Hopkins University, told Ars. “Here, if the malware is very smart, it can actually extract the keys out of the token. That’s why it’s dangerous.” Green has blogged about the attack here.

It’s this version of the attack the scientists used to extract secret keys stored on RSA’s SecurID 800 and many other devices that use PKCS#11, a programming interface included in a wide variety of commercial cryptographic devices. Under the attack Bleichenbacher devised, it took attackers about 215,000 oracle calls on average to pierce a 1024-bit cryptographic wrapper. That required enough overhead to prevent the attack from posing a practical threat against such devices. By modifying the algorithm used in the original attack, the revised method reduced the number of calls to just 9,400, requiring only about 13 minutes of queries, Green said.

Other devices that store RSA keys that are vulnerable to the same attack include the Aladdin eTokenPro and iKey 2032 made by SafeNet, the CyberFlex manufactured by Gemalto, and Siemens’ CardOS, according to the paper.