Ashish Chhatani WRITINGS

Dell  installed a self-signed root certificate  and corresponding private key on its customers’ computers, apparently without realizing that this exposes users’ encrypted communications to potential spying, in an attempt to streamline remote support. Even more surprising is that the company did this while being fully aware of a  very similar security blunder  by one of its competitors, Lenovo, that came to light in February,2015. This incident surely raises questions on Dell’s Research and Development team. In Lenovo’s case it was an advertising program called Superfish that came preinstalled on some of the company’s consumer laptops and which installed a self-signed root certificate. In Dell’s case it was one of the company’s own support tools, which is arguably even worse because Dell bears full responsibility for the decision. Dell actually took advantage of Lenovo’s mishap to highlight its own commitment to privacy and to advertise its products. The product pages for Dell’s

STAGEFRIGHT- a vulnerability that made tech giants sleepless WHAT IS STAGEFRIGHT? Stagefright is a serious vulnerability found in Android's media processing service. The Android service that processes multimedia files has been the source of some vulnerabilities. In recent time, including a new one that could give rogue applications access to sensitive permissions to access the data.The vast majority of Android phones can be hacked by sending them a specially crafted multimedia message (MMS). WHO DISCOVERED? This latest vulnerability in Android's media server component was discovered by security researchers from antivirus firm Trend Micro and Joshua Drake,vice president of platform research and exploitation at mobile security firm Zimperium. BRIEF ME ABOUT THIS: Drake developed the dangerous exploit that only requires knowing the victim’s phone number. He found multiple vulnerabilities in a core component called  Stage fright  which is used to