Yoggie CEO Blog

You probably read on our web site that Yoggie Security Systems™ launched its new Open Firewall Pico and Open Firewall SOHO.  This means that we made an SDK and the BSP source code of our Firewall product line available to download from our web site and those developers and hobbyists can buy (very inexpensively $49 and $79) the hardware to develop on. If you are not one of our customers who keep asking for this since we launched our first product, you probably ask yourself “Why are they doing this?” or “Why is a security company opening its platform, are they nuts, hackers will try to break it”.

Well, this is really part of the idea. I mean, not that Yoggie is nuts, but that having hackers breaking into our system, is something that we believe can help, help us to improve our products, and therefore help everyone. Some people may think, “a bunch of naives…” but while we understand that some may use it for a negative purpose, we are all going to benefit from those who will report Yoggie bugs and help us improve the overall security of our products.  Unfortunately we yet cannot open every piece of code, but over time, you should expect more and more to open up.

This is not the only reason for opening our Firewall platform.  Since day one of Yoggie, we are having so many amazing ideas on what can be done with it. So many applications could benefit from a miniature robust hardware platform, running Linux 2.6 and coupled with a Windows PC or Mac computer.  Many of these ideas, could be a great base for new companies, and as success requires focusing on the core expertise, we at Yoggie are forced to not do now, many of the things we can and may want.

What happened internally over the last 3 years at Yoggie, also happened externally with our great loyal customers. They come up with so many ideas of what to do and may challenge us asking to allow them to do it. Now, finally we address this internal and external desire.

Everyone can buy an Open Firewall hardware (Pico or SOHO) and start to develop their own application, share with everyone else their contribution and help us improve our platform, for the benefit of everyone.

BTW, one of the early applications we compiled and loaded into the Yoggie hardware is Asterisk. Many of you know this great digital PBX that can easily serve many IP Phones at home and small offices. In fact, one of our developers loaded it on Open Firewall SOHO and made calls out of it. We do not have it as a project in Yoggie, so I cannot have it loaded in the Yoggie Developer Community repository, however, I am sure that soon, some of you will do. The SOHO version comes with 2 RJ45 sockets, so you can easily connect the digital phone line to the “network” interface, and the IP headsets to the other connection, having a very rich and powerful full digital telephony system at a cost of $79.

Another example I saw, was activating the DNS server (already in the original pack) and use it in a home office to speed up DNS requests (no need to go to the ISP DNS for resolutions).

Think of a Linux box, and this is your new $49 or $79 miniature Linux box. BTW, the SOHO version comes with SD slot, so you can add many GB and mount them for extra storage. What to do with it, maybe a home Web server acting as media server.  You can open ports and forward external HTTP calls to this server only, and you can now let your family and friends access it from the outside.

You can have your personal Mail Server running there and again, have it fetching your email locally from 5 different web mail accounts and forwarding to a single mailbox.

If you have strong network expertise, I am sure you can use it to monitor and maybe manipulate network traffic for different use. You can divert traffic, hunt for specific traffic and implement many network based applications.

I am sure you may have more and better ideas. If you want to propose and share, please feel free to do so, beyond the developer forum, I will publish some here on my blog and will comment back.

That’s for today, please feel free to post your comments here, I will do my best to reply.

Cheers,
Shlomo.

We’re very excited and proud to announce that Gatekeeper Pico has been selected as one of the top 10 gadgets of the year by The Gadget Show Web site. We’re competing against the likes of Apple’s iPhone, Wii Fit and Asus Eee PC. Not a bad group to be a part of..

The Gadget show is the most popular prime time gadget TV show in the UK!

Please vote for Yoggie (scroll down to Yoggie at the bottom). Feel free to watch the Yoggie appearances online.
Thank you for your support!

If you’re a Mac user or fan (or both, as in most cases!), I’m delighted to let you know that Yoggie Security Systems™ announced the world’s first miniature hardware internet security devices for MacBooks and Mac desktop computers.

The new Gatekeeper Pico™ for Mac and Gatekeeper Card Pro™ for Mac, provide 12 internet security applications on a dedicated hardware platform that offloads security, improves productivity and protects users wherever they connect.

Special Time-Limited Offer: PRE-ORDER Gatekeeper Mac Version!

Both are available for pre-order today and will be shipped and available for sale from 1 December 2008 online at www.yoggie.com and soon at leading etailers and retailers.

Yoggie invites you to Pre-Order now and be among the first to own these exciting new products, for a special time-limited 20% discount off of the official price!

Read More and Pre-Order

The internet has been buzzing the last couple of weeks regarding the “Facebook virus” that started to spread around.
That’s natural, the Social Web, Web 2.0 and Facebook specifically have been the hot internet subject material in the last couple of weeks. Practically everyone is on Facebook these days.
And now Facebook is used to spread viruses! Scary right?

Well.. The truth of the matter is that technically, Facebook is not exploited in any way. Yes, it’s a convenient platform for a virus to work with, but the virus is not using any vulnerability in Facebook itself.
The Facebook Virus is really a great example of how a virus, and a relatively simple one at that, can infect so many people by using a series of multiple attack tactics and a lot of “social engineering“.

The attack begins with a classic Phishing email attack. Many people are spammed by emails luring them into clicking a link claiming to be to Facebook.
Clicking on the link takes you to a Phishing Web site that looks exactly like Facebook, and even has a very similar domain name.
The user is asked to login, and enters his username and password credentials.
At that moment the trap has sprung and the attacker has complete control over the victim’s Facebook, since he can login as the user. This victim is “patient zero” in a sense.

The next step is the attacker logs into the victim’s Facebook and sends a message to all the victim’s friends – Providing a link to a “funny video”.
The Website looks almost exactly like YouTube and the user tries to play the video, triggering a message saying that the Flash player needs to be updated.
The user than downloads the “Flash player update” which is the actual payload of the whole attack – This is the malware. This malware, or spyware that opens your computer up completely and herds into a botnet.

To summarize:

While Facebook does indeed provide a great platform for viral distribution, the technical methods by which attackers reach their victims are anything but new. It’s simply an elegant combination of “good old” Phishing and social engineering. Each step could have maybe been detected by a clever user, but the combination of them works better on the target. The same spyware link could have just been sent in an email – but very few people would have clicked it. What makes it stronger is that a known and trusted friend on Facebook sent it. Moreover, you don’t just download anything, it’s simply a Flash update file that you need in order to see that great funny movie.
So nothing special technically here, but a great example for social engineering techniques.

This is how can you protect yourself from this attack:

1. Since the attack, as described above, is composed of several consecutive smaller attacks, your defense should be multi-layered as well. This attack can be stopped by your security measures in several different points. The phishing email can be detected as such and blocked, the phishing Web site can be detected as such and blocked and the spyware application itself can be detected by an anti-virus and stopped. You should have all these measure in place.
And how do we at Yoggie implement this? Simple. Yoggie’s products cram 12 different security applications to run inside the device. You have multiple engines protecting you transparently. This attack would be blocked at multiple different steps by Yoggie devices. Moreover, the attack itself was first detected and reported by Kaspersky, which is the anti-virus engine that Yoggie uses inside.

2. Make sure all your security measures are up to date!
This is super important – It’s not enough to have security measure in place. The security applications you use must always be updated otherwise they are useless.
In a worst-case-scenario, when your security measures would have failed to detect the Facebook attack at any other point – An updated anti-virus would already be familiar with the spyware’s signature and stop it dead in its tracks.
And how do we at Yoggie implement this? Even simpler. All Yoggie’s products automatically and transparently update all the different engines running inside. EVERY 5 MINUTES. And the user doesn’t even feel it is happening.

3. The most important and simplest advice is this – Never EVER click on anything before careful consideration. I can’t stress this enough. It can be a link in an email message. A link in an instant message. A Web link in Facebook. Always be suspicious of such links. Always check the browser’s status bar before actually clicking the link, to make sure the URL you will get to is indeed where you want to go.

Note: this post is based on researching the reported information online and not by first-hand analysis of the virus.

Dear friends,

As those of you following the news from Yoggie know, we’ve announced an exciting new product, the Gatekeeper Card Pro.
While the features are the same as the Gatekeeper Pico ones, the form factor is the exciting thing about it – You simply slide it into your ExpressCard slot of your laptop, and VOILA, you actually have a miniature dedicated security computer running INSIDE your computer, protecting it.

There’s another very exciting aspect to the release of Gatekeeper Card Pro – The hardware platform architecture has been updated and improved.
Yoggie has invested a lot of resources and effort to improve its products. And with the launch of the Gatekeeper Card Pro, Yoggie also releases the first product with a new and improved hardware architecture.
Among the many changes, the 2 major ones are:

• CPU changed from Intel PXA to Freescale i.MX31
• RAM changed from SDRAM to DDR

The result of this improvement of architecture leads straight to some serious performance gains.
We’ve created a benchmark lab here in Yoggie, and created a special Yoggie Index that reflect just how powerful and fast a Yoggie device is.
The existing Yoggie products are working at a 1X level (Which is of course very fast as is).
Gatekeeper Card Pro works at 4X performance!
That’s a very major improvement we’re all very proud of.

Yours truly,
Shlomo.