Verizon Fixes Serious Securty Flaw In FiOS

Verizon corrected a serious vulnerability in its My FiOS mobile application that granted unfettered access to email accounts, according to a developer who found the problem.

Randy Westergren, a senior software developer with XDA Developers, looked at the Android version of My FiOS, which is used for account management, email and scheduling video recordings.

“Since Verizon has a good amount of my information, I thought it would be a good candidate for research,” Westergren wrote on his personal blog. “I was right, and the results were astonishing.”

The flaw, contained in the application’s API, could have allowed an attacker to read individual messages from a person’s Verizon inbox and even send emails from an account, he wrote.

Westergren looked at the traffic sent back and forth between My FiOS and Verizon’s servers. He found My FiOS would return the content of someone else’s email inbox by simply substituting a different user ID in a request.

He contacted Verizony, which later acknowledged the problem. Verizon issued a fix last Friday, Westergren wrote.

“Verizon’s security group seemed to immediately realize the impact of this vulnerability and took it very seriously,” Westergren wrote. “They were very responsive during this process and even arranged for a free year of FiOS Internet service as a token of their gratitude.”

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Ericsson Acquires Fabrix Systems

The distinctions between TV and mobile services continues to merge and in many cases that occurs in the cloud.

That’s the logic behind Ericsson’s planned $95 million acquisition of Fabrix Systems, which sells a cloud-based platform for delivering DVR (digital video recorder), video on demand and other services.

The acquisition is intended to help service providers deliver what Ericsson calls TV Anywhere, for viewing on multiple devices with high-quality and relevant content for each user. Cable operators, telecommunications carriers and other service providers are seeing rapid growth in video streaming and want to reach consumers on multiple screens. That content increasingly is hosted in cloud data centers and delivered via Internet Protocol networks.

Fabrix, which has 103 employees in the U.S. and Israel, sells an integrated platform for media storage, processing and delivery. Ericsson said the acquisition will make new services possible on Ericsson MediaFirst and Mediaroom as well as other TV platforms.

Stockholm-based Ericsson expects the deal to close in the fourth quarter. Fabrix Systems will become part of Ericsson’s Business Unit Support Solutions.

Other players usually associated with data networks are also moving into the once-specialized realm of TV. At last year’s CES, Cisco Systems introduced Videoscape Unity, a system for providing unified video services across multiple screens, and at this year’s show it unveiled Videoscape Cloud, an OpenStack-based video delivery platform that can be run on service providers’ cloud infrastructure instead of on specialized hardware.

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Apple’s iCloud Could Have A Secret Objective?

Many analysts have come to the conclusion that Apple’s iCloud may not be designed to appeal to new customers.  Apple’s iClouds service true objective is to keep existing customers locked into Apple’s iOS environment. Forester’s Charles Golvin went on to say that for people who own one or more iOS devices, they’re going to discover an even better experience.

Charles Govin also said Apple’s iCloud will keep customers because once they’ve used the service; they will hesitate to leave the Apple ecosystem because they will lose all the data they have stored. Since they do not have to worry about where their content is stored, it will make them feel that much more satisfied with their smartphone or tablet, and means that the next time they go to buy one, they’re more likely to buy from Apple.

Furthermore, Carolina Milanesi of Gartner told Computerworld, “The most important thing is that it is a complete cloud package.  It shows the benefit of living in the Apple ‘house. It will be a way for Apple to retain customers in the face of a rising tide of Android-based smartphones, and growing competition from media tablets that run Google’s operating system.”

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