June 2019

EU’s Free and Open Source Software Auditing project, EU-FOSSA 2

Many people are not aware that the EU has an initiative to help improve the quality and security of match of the Open Source software that is in use within many EU institutions across the EU, the Free and Open Source Software Auditing (EU-FOSSA 2) project. They also promote a bug bounty scheme paying bounties up to €60,000 which has proven to be successful as confirmed by VLC whose popular video media player has benefited from he bounty scheme.

Jean-Baptiste Kempf, one of the lead developers of VLC media player (and President of VideoLan) wrote on the 7th June 2019 in his
blog that they would not have identified and fixed so many bugs had it not been for the FOSSA bounty program.

FBI warns against trusting "secure" websites

The FBI released an alert on the 10th June 2019 on their Internet Crime Complaint Centre (IC3) advising the public not to trust implicitly the padlock which is displayed to indicate that the browser session is secure. They also include some basic recommendations. Sophisticated criminals are frequently including 'legitimate' certificates when mounting campaigns against unsuspecting users. Our recommendation is to always click on the padlock and confirm that the certificate matches the domain name to which it is supposed to be related.

Article about Apple's new 'Find My' feature by Wired

There is a new feature to be released with the next update of Apple software, a new 'Find My service that replaces the current 'Find My Device' and 'Find My friend' service. The article in Wired gives a good insight into the approach and underlying cryptography used to deliver the service whilst securing and maintaining privacy.

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