This week offered a representative sampling of different corners of the cyber security world: The monthly Patch Tuesday, a brazen attack against the Olympics, new Meltdown and Spectre concerns, and a boost for Intel’s bug bounty program.

Oh, and the gargantuan Equifax data breach may have been even bigger than previously thought.

Winter Olympics hack confirmed

The 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea are in full swing, featuring the world’s best ice skaters, skiers, hockey players and snowboarders, and also attracting, unfortunately, malicious hackers.

Attackers’ goals seem to be to disrupt the games in a variety of ways by interfering with and disabling IT systems.

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A number of security researchers recently discovered that Dell laptops come pre-installed with an additional root certificate call eDellRoot. Since the private key is also available on the machine this exposes their customers to the risk of a Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) attack. In a MITM attack, the attacker sits on the network between server and client and uses the eDellRoot certificate to intercept and manipulate HTTPS connections. This vulnerability leaves anyone using these Dell laptops at risk for sensitive data exposure and even infections with malicious payload, all under the cover of a trusted connection.

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