STE WILLIAMS

Everything and everybody is hackable – and that includes Big Brother.

That’s one takeaway from a criminal complaint filed last week against two Romanians in the US District Court of Washington DC for allegedly hacking into nearly two thirds of the outdoor surveillance cameras operated by the city’s police department.

According to an 11 December affidavit from US Secret Service Special Agent James Graham, Mihai Alexandru Isvanca and Eveline Cismaru took control of 123 of the 187 cameras used by the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia (MPDC) for four days, from 9-12 January 2017.

The scheme apparently wasn’t intended to commandeer cameras to spy on the city, however. According to Graham, the two sought to use the internet-connected computers behind the cameras to send “ransomware-laden spam emails.”

And while they made some efforts to cover their tracks, Graham said that email accounts they used…

…reflect not just the ransomware scheme, but in various ways (and through related accounts and activity) ultimately identify ISVANCA and CISMARU as the participants in the conspiracy, including by leading back to email and other online accounts in their own names.

The attack was halted on 12 January after the MPDC’s IT network administrator discovered that multiple cameras had been disabled.

Graham said the administrator used a Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) to show another Secret Service agent that one of the victim computers was running software not installed by the department, and showing multiple windows that had been opened by the attackers. They included:

• A window displaying a tracking number for the European shipping company known as “Hermes”.
• A web browser open at an email delivery website
• A Google search page with search results for “email verifier online”.
• Notepad, showing code for various executable and text files.
• The splash screen for a variant of ransomware known as “cerber.”

A forensic investigation also showed another ransomware variant on the compromised computers known as dharma (for which, as Naked Security reported in May, decryption keys were released in March), plus a text file that contained 179,616 email addresses.

Graham’s affidavit doesn’t say how successful the ransomware campaign was, but said he and other agents contacted a number of people or companies whose IP addresses had been mentioned in correspondence between the hackers. One of them, “Company M”

…indicated they had experienced an unauthorized network intrusion. COMPANY M provided screenshots reflecting a cerber splashscreen from the period of unauthorized access, as well as multiple other indicators of network intrusion.

Another apparent target, a healthcare company in the UK, told investigators it had, “confirmed evidence of unauthorized access to its computer server…”

The US does have an extradition treaty with Romania that was amended and renewed in 2009, but the court did not post the actual complaint, nor did it respond to a question about whether it will seek to have the defendants brought to the US to face trial.

Also no word from the MPDC about what steps they may be taking to make their outdoor surveillance systems more secure.

The complaint came around the same time that, as Naked Security reported Thursday, Romanian police raided seven locations and arrested five suspects for alleged spreading CTB Locker and Cerber ransomware that they had rented on the Dark Web.

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Since at least a year ago, users of certain iPhones began to report that their phones were randomly shutting off, even though their batteries showed that they were about 30% charged.

Apple addressed the issue in November, announcing a free battery-replacement program for “unexpected shutdown issues.”

The iThing maker didn’t give much by way of explanation: just that it was affecting only “a very small number of iPhone 6s” manufactured between September and October 2015. Apple provided a serial number look-up to check whether a given handset was one of the iPhainting iPhones.

Hardware issue, one assumes?

But no. Fast-forward a year – or perhaps crawl forward a year, depending on whether you’ve got one of those phones whose CPUs turned out to have been intentionally throttled by Apple in an effort to save their old lithium-ion batteries from power peaks that they couldn’t handle.

Redditor TeckFire put up a post in which he or she noted that their iPhone 6S had been very slow for a few weeks, even after updating.

TeckFire figured that it was just iOS 11, being awful. But when they used their brother’s iPhone 6 Plus, it was actually faster. TeckFire did some research, replaced the iPhone 6S battery, and, along with other older iPhone users, reported that the new battery actually made the phone run faster.

You’d expect battery capacity to decrease as batteries age. Older batteries need charging more frequently, for longer, and they don’t like being cold. And so it turns out that Apple has been quietly managing power in these older iPhones in order to spare the batteries.

Apple has confessed: It quietly put a throttle into older model iPhones – 6, 6s, and SE – to keep their CPUs sedated and to hence stop their doddering batteries from suddenly fainting.

The fix was included in the release of iOS 10.2.1 in January. It was a CPU speed limit designed to stop older model iPhones from demanding too much from batteries with diminished capacity, thus preventing the handsets from rapidly running out of power and shutting down. The fix was also included on the iPhone 7 as of December, with the release of iOS 11.2. It’s also on track to be rolled out to newer devices in the future.

Here’s Apple’s statement on the battery/CPU issue:

Our goal is to deliver the best experience for customers, which includes overall performance and prolonging the life of their devices. Lithium-ion batteries become less capable of supplying peak current demands when in cold conditions, have a low battery charge or as they age over time, which can result in the device unexpectedly shutting down to protect its electronic components.

Last year we released a feature for iPhone 6, iPhone 6s and iPhone SE to smooth out the instantaneous peaks only when needed to prevent the device from unexpectedly shutting down during these conditions. We’ve now extended that feature to iPhone 7 with iOS 11.2, and plan to add support for other products in the future.

As TeckFire points out, Apple offers a $79 battery-replacement service. Many users haven’t realized it, but as TeckFire found out, swapping in a new battery will actually speed up these older iPhones.

Some have decried Apple’s save-the-batteries twiddling with CPU speed, suggesting that it’s all a ploy to get people to upgrade their phones before it’s absolutely necessary.

John Poole, founder and president of Primate Labs – the company behind the GeekBench software that TeckFire and others used to track iPhone performance – on Monday published an analysis of iPhone 6s and 7 performance in which he said that the CPU fix would reinforce users’ suspicions about planned obsolescence.

This fix will… cause users to think, ‘my phone is slow so I should replace it’ not, ‘my phone is slow so I should replace its battery.’

Poole also criticized Apple’s quiet, behind-the-scenes power management. He told The Register that it would have been better had Apple been upfront about it all:

If Apple had disclosed to people that it had to reduce performance because the battery was degraded. I think that would have gone a long way toward helping people understand.

Unfortunately, Apple can’t seem to win on this one. Either its operating systems are draining so much power with greedy apps that phones crash, making people unhappy, or the company creates a fix that causes phones to slow down but not to completely keel over unexpectedly… making people unhappy because they suspect it of hiding the truth about simply needing new (rather affordable) batteries.

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Every Christmas, retailer’s shelves fill with bigger, more complex and pricier “smart” and internet-connected children’s toys.

Electronic gimmicks in toys are not exactly novel, but is there more going on inside these devices now that parents should be aware of before they buy?

In fact, an accumulation of evidence suggests buyers should be very cautious for reasons that mirror the troubles that in recent years have the engulfed Internet of Things (IoT) sector, of which connected toys are one part.

These being:

• Is the personal data they collect at risk?
• Can they be directly hijacked or interact with, or spy on, children?
• Or even used to carry out attacks on third parties?

Let’s start with the issue of personal data.

The warning flag for this was raised in 2015 when Hong Kong toy maker VTech suffered a data breach that compromised the personal data of 4.8m user accounts connected to 6.3m children.

Beyond several technical failings, it didn’t exactly inspire confidence when the company later tried to shift responsibility for any future breach to its customers by changing its terms conditions to read:

You acknowledge and agree that any information you send or receive during your use of the site may not be secure and may be intercepted or later acquired by unauthorized parties.

Essentially, if we screw up it’s your problem for trusting us. This was probably unenforceable but class-action legal cases from this breach rumble on even today.

Our first advice, then, is where a toy is used with an app or online service, check the terms and conditions very carefully for sneaky get outs and view any you find as a very bad sign.

Proving this was no one-off, in 2017 US company Spiral Toys’ CloudPets stuffed toys suffered a breach exposing a database of 2.2m voice messages to hackers.

Worse, the researcher who discovered it was ignored by Spiral Toys when he tried to warn them of the issue.

And toy surveillance?

Around the same time, Germany’s Federal Network Agency put out a warning that the popular Genesis Toys’ My Friend Cayla doll could be used to spy on children or, indeed, anyone within range.

The German authorities didn’t mess around. Said a spokesperson:

Ownership of this device is illegal.

By Christmas 2017, it seems connected toys continue to be easy meat for researchers to pick holes in, big and small. Take Hasbro’s Furby Connect, for instance, which had its deficient BlueTooth security design pulled apart by a UK penetration testing company.

More serious flaws were found by another research company in toys using Wi-Fi, not to mention flaky firmware updating, poorly-secured smart watches, and vulnerable drones whose data was open to interception.

Like it or lump it, there is no way for anyone buying a connected toy to know how well it is secured, either locally or when any data it collects is sent to remote servers.

If it isn’t well secured, there is no guarantee the problem will be fixed or even acknowledged – it’s almost as if the economics of the industry don’t justify such a thing for a toy costing less than $50.

Retailers, meanwhile, don’t see security flaws as a reason to take toys back beyond specified time periods.

Our second advice, then, is to run a search on a toy and its maker to research known issues before buying it.

A final issue is whether toys might become another platform for device hijacking of the sort that fuelled the Mirai DDoS botnet in 2016.

For now, the threat of “toybots” seems overblown. Toys are not turned on for long enough and the vast majority lack enough processing power or battery life to run the sort of software that makes such things possible.

But let’s not praise them with faint damnation – even the ones that work as advertised have a growing ability to collect data on young people that’s surprisingly hard to quantify or monitor. Most of this will be buried in terms conditions that people rarely bother to read.

Parents should try and keep in mind that as far as children are concerned, being smart isn’t the only game in town.

Lego anyone?

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The Ministry of Justice has been slammed for poor handling of requests made under data protection laws, and told to fix the 700-plus backlog by October.

In an enforcement notice (PDF) issued yesterday, the UK’s data protection watchdog said the department had been too slow in processing requests from people asking what information was held on them.

The Data Protection Act requires that organisations respond to these subject access requests – without undue delay – to say whether it is processing their personal data, and if so, what data that is.

In the document, the Information Commissioner’s Office revealed that, as of July 28, 2017, there was a backlog of 919 subject access requests made to the department, some of which data back to 2012.

It acknowledged that there had been “some progress” to dealing with this; an update on November 10 said that 793 were over 40 days old – which is the prescribed period for a response.

This comprises: 14 from 2014, which the department has said it aims to deal with by December 31, 2017; 161 from 2015, which are due for completion by April 30; 357 from 2016, due by August 31; and 261 from 2017, due by October 31.

Despite this progress, the ICO said that the justice secretary – in his role as data controller – has contravened section 7 of the Data Protection Act for failing to act “without undue delay”.

Moreover, it said, the data controller is contravening another principle because the “systems, procedures and policies in relation to him dealing with subject access requests… are unlikely to result in compliance with those same requirements under the DPA”.

There has been “no reasonable explanation” for the failings, the notice continued.

Because of this, and in light of the fact it is likely that these contraventions could cause damage or distress, the ICO said it had decided to issue an enforcement notice.

The notice orders the justice secretary to ensure that internal systems, procedures and policies comply with the law by January 31, 2018, and formally requires him to ensure all requests are dealt with by October 31, 2018, at the latest.

In addition, the justice secretary must provide the ICO with a monthly progress report, and “continue to his best endeavours to surpass the milestones” above.

The MoJ did not immediately respond to a request for comment. ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2017/12/22/ico_tells_justice_secretary_to_deal_with_mass_backlog_of_personal_data_requests/

Foreign secretary Boris Johnson will warn Russia that the UK will retaliate against cyber attacks in a rare visit to Moscow today.

Johnson will tell his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov that “the UK will continue to defend its interests where they, and those of its allies, are threatened amid concerns that hostilities between Russia and the West are the highest since the end of the Cold War,” according to a Foreign Office statement.

However, the Foreign Office also emphasises that Johnson will “encourage cooperation on joint international challenges”, citing the Second World War and the Iran nuclear deal as the fruits of prior Anglo-Russian labours, according to its statement.

The National Cyber Security Centre has warned against the threats of Russian cyber attacks. Ciaran Martin, CEO of the body, said: “Russian interference… has included attacks on the UK media, telecommunications and energy sectors.”

The NCSC has also issued guidance that effectively bans the use of Kaspersky antivirus on government computers.

Prime Minister Theresa May herself has accused her Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin of spreading fake news and disarray in a November speech, saying: “We know what you are doing and you will not succeed.”

Russia denies all accusations but its reputation when it comes to cybersecurity matters, such as banning VPNs or its use of cybercriminals in its spy operations doesn’t do it any favours.

Cybersecurity is only one of several issues Johnson and Lavrov expect to discuss, with Syria, Iran, North Korea and the 2018 World Cup also on the docket for the first UK foreign sec visit to the land of beef stroganov for five years. ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2017/12/22/boris_johnson_kremlin_visit/

If CISOs could make a wish to solve a problem, these would be among the top choices.

Image Source: Adobe Stock © ra2 studio

With the holiday season in full swing, this is the time of year that has people thinking of happy miracles. Which got us at Dark Reading pondering: if CISOs had their pick of career miracles this holiday season and New Year, what would their miracle be? Based on our engagement with security practitioners, data from recent surveys and opinions from industry pundits, here are our best guesses.

 

Ericka Chickowski specializes in coverage of information technology and business innovation. She has focused on information security for the better part of a decade and regularly writes about the security industry as a contributor to Dark Reading.  View Full Bio

Article source: https://www.darkreading.com/careers-and-people/ciso-holiday-miracle-wish-list/d/d-id/1330658?_mc=rss_x_drr_edt_aud_dr_x_x-rss-simple

When analysts investigate an indicator of compromise, our primary goal is to determine if it is malicious as quickly as possible. Identifying attack patterns helps you mitigate quicker.

Vetting threats is a necessary task for security analysts, but it’s also agonizingly tedious. You want to quickly determine if something is good or bad, block it, and move on. The problem is, sometimes you can’t see the forest through the trees. There is so much noise you need a means of quickly distilling what in that data actually matters. That’s where pattern recognition comes in. Identifying patterns in TTPs (tactics, tool, and procedures) can tip you off to correlations, which is the fastest path to mitigation because you can categorically identify and block significantly more directly related indicators in a shorter amount of time.

Let’s apply this pattern recognition concept to the evolution of exploit kits.

Pattern #1: Exploit Kits Don’t Die, They Evolve 

Exploit kits are cheap and easy to purchase on the Dark Web. The most successful EKs quickly gain popularity, thus generating the greatest activity in the threatscape. When the vulnerabilities targeted by EKs are finally identified and patched, a new vulnerability gets added to the EK, and the cycle starts again. This is a good example of why you’ll see an exploit kit like Magnitude rise and fall in popularity over time.

Pattern #2: When One Tool Falls, Another Takes It’s Place

So not only are there patterns in the rise and fall in popularity of an exploit kit, but there are also migratory patterns in how and when bad guys move from one exploit kit to the next. Sometimes it is merely a matter of an exploit kit no longer being effective enough. On rare occasions, however, an exploit kit may fall off the map completely due to the developer(s) behind it being taken down, as what happened when the Angler EK vanished after the Lurk criminal gang was taken down back in 2016.

It took a little while until hackers found an acceptable replacement. They experimented with a few different exploit kits like Sundown and Nuclear until finally they found RIG. Using our graph visualization tool, we tracked the migration from Angler to RIG and saw how this exploit kit beat out others.

This video (1:23) shows different EKs gaining in popularity, then dwindling, then being replaced by something new. Click here  to see the original on YouTube.

It’s not just EKs that behave this way. Noting what malware tools are used to deliver different payloads can tip an analyst off to what else to look for when they see one but not the other. For example finding Pony and, based on data spanning multiple sectors, knowing to look for Chancitor or Hancitor TTPs can help you mass identify and block indicators of compromise (IOCs), since they are often used to download that payload.

In sum, pattern recognition allows analysts to stop playing whack-a-mole by making every single indicator worth three. Keep these three tips in mind on your next investigation.

1. Keep your eye on dormant EKs. Don’t discount the research you’ve done about an EK that is not active right now. TruSTAR platform data indicates new EKs use similar IOCs from old EKs (e.g. payloads).

2.  Look within historical data.  Find a way to manage your historical incident data and closed tickets to make historical data/patterns easily accessible. Graph visualization tools are useful tools in this scenario.

3. Exchange threat intelligence.  Participating in threat intelligence exchange networks can provide a more holistic view of the threat landscape, helping you identify valid patterns within a larger ecosystem and be better prepared to block threats.

This research was provided by the TruSTAR Data Science Unit. Click here to download a CSV of trending EKs and their most common IOCs.

• Forget APTs: Let’s Talk about Advanced Persistent Infrastructure
• 6 Steps for Sharing Threat Intelligence
• Comprehensive Endpoint Protection Requires the Right Cyber Threat Intelligence

 

Curtis Jordan is TruSTAR’s lead security engineer where he manages engagement with the TruSTAR network of security operators from Fortune 100 companies and leads security research and intelligence analysis. Prior to working with TruSTAR, Jordan worked at CyberPoint … View Full Bio

Article source: https://www.darkreading.com/threat-intelligence/block-threats-faster-pattern-recognition-in-exploit-kits/a/d-id/1330697?_mc=rss_x_drr_edt_aud_dr_x_x-rss-simple

Two of the five unnamed individuals cuffed this month in Romania on suspicion of spreading ransomware face US computer crime charges – for their alleged role in taking over 123 out of 187 networked computers that control Washington DC’s CCTV cameras earlier this year.

According to Europol, which led the arrests, this week, two of those arrested are suspected of attacking American computer systems using the Cerber ransomware. The Euro plod noted that the US Secret Service is also investigating those malware infections.

In an affidavit obtained by CNN – unsealed by mistake and then resealed – Secret Service agent James Graham laid out the basis for the US Department of Justice’s computer fraud case against two Romanian nationals, Mihai Alexandru Isvanca and Eveline Cismaru.

In an email to The Register, a justice department spokesperson confirmed the linkage of the arrests and the US court filing. “These are separate but related investigations and the people you name are among those arrested by Europol,” the spokesperson said. “Any court documents are not publicly available.”

In other words, the Isvanca and Cismaru nabbed in Romania by police as suspected Cerber ransomware extortionists are the Isvanca and Cismaru accused in the US of attacking the American capital’s CCTV camera system.

Traffic cameras

Graham described how around January 9, 2017, and January 12, 2017, the pair, as part of an alleged ransomware scheme, took control of the networked Windows computers used by the Washington DC Metropolitan Police to run their traffic cameras.

On January 12, having recognized that some of the cameras were offline, DC police IT staff and a Secret Service agent used Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) software to connect to one of the servers controlling the cameras.

They observed the device with a number of open desktop windows running unexpected software. The windows displayed: a tracking number for a European shipping company, Hermes; a browser window with a Sendgrid account with activity for multiple email addresses; a browser window with Google search results for “email verifier online”; a browser window for http://emailx.discoveryvip.com/; a desktop window with a notepad program showing programming code and text files; and a window showing the splash screen for Cerber ransomware.

The IT administrator subsequently blocked network access for the compromised device, which was subsequently removed, along with two other computers, for forensic analysis.

Investigators determined that two ransomware variants, Cerber and Dharma, had been installed on the computers. They also found a text file, USA.txt, that contained 179,616 email addresses, used to spam intended ransomware victims. A text file with the same checksum was subsequently found in an email account associated with one of the defendants.

Among the various email addresses used in the scheme, analysts identified [email protected] as being of particular interest. According to Graham, the Romanian phrase “vand suflete” translates to “selling souls” in English.

Remote control

Graham explained that records for that Gmail address obtained from Google included a message with a link to what is believed to be a Cerber control panel. Allegedly, Isvanca and Cismaru were renting access to Cerber in order to infect victims, scramble their files, and extort money from them to restore the data.

“In my training and experience, within the Cerber business model, the owner and creator of the Cerber malware leases out Cerber resources to affiliates (essentially, customers),” he explained in the court filing. “A Cerber control panel is a website that allows a Cerber affiliate to control the Cerber framework without having access to the source code, thereby allowing the owner and creator to retain for themselves the intellectual property of the malware and thus to generate additional income from other affiliates.”

The Europol release calls this “crime-as-a-service.”

Tracing the connections across the various email accounts led to Isvanca and Cismaru.

Investigators contacted some of the people and organizations mentioned in the [email protected] email account to determine whether their systems had been compromised. An unnamed company, confirming that it had been hacked, responded with screenshots of the Cerber splash page on its systems.

The Hermes shipment tracking number seen on one of the compromised DC computers was traced to an address in London, UK, but an inquiry by the UK National Crime Agency found no evidence the recipients were involved in the ransomware scheme.

UK healthcare biz hacked

The IP address used to create the order, found on a DC computer, was traced to a UK healthcare company. That IP address was also found in an email in the [email protected] account.

The company, which confirmed to investigators that a user account on its eXpressApp Framework (XAF) system had been compromised, is left unnamed in the affidavit. A quick lookup of the IP address indicates that it is associated with the Newcastle office of healthcare firm WellWork Ltd, a name that’s also spelled out in what appears to be an RDP connection string in the court filing.

The various email accounts and IP addresses, cross-references with fraud databases, provided enough details to ask Romanian officials for further digital data linked to the defendants.

Facebook and YouTube posts helped too. Graham said that in his experience, people often make slight alterations to their social media accounts to disguise their identities. Those alterations proved insufficient to hide from investigators. ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2017/12/22/romanian_hackers_used_cops_surveillance_cam_network_for_ransomware/

Nissan Canada’s vehicle-financing wing has been hacked, putting personal information on as many as 1.13 million customers in the hands of miscreants.

In an email to Nissan car buyers, seen by The Register, the biz admitted its computer systems were compromised, with “unauthorized person(s) gaining access to the personal information of some customers that have financed their vehicles through Nissan Canada Finance or Infiniti Financial Services Canada.”

“We apologize for any frustration and anxiety this may cause our customers, and we thank you for your patience and support as we work through this issue,” the note added. A similar message is now on the automaker’s website.

According to Nissan Canada, the exposed data includes at least customer names, addresses, vehicle makes and models, vehicle identification numbers (VINs), credit scores, loan amounts and monthly payment figures.

“We are still investigating precisely what personal information has been impacted,” the biz said, adding that it was working with the cops and infosec experts to work out what the heck happened. “At this time, there is no indication that customers who financed vehicles outside of Canada are affected.”

Nissan Canada admitted it discovered on Monday, December 11, that it had been hacked, and alerted the world, er, 10 days later.

No personal banking information, such as card numbers, were taken, we’re told. However, the automaker is offering 12 months of free credit monitoring to its customers just in case scumbags exploit the exposed records. ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2017/12/22/nissan_canada_hacked/

We asked some of our friends around Sophos what’s at the top of their Christmas list.

1. Deck the Halls (with flags I stole)

Senior Information Security Engineer, Luke Groves

There are a couple of security related books I’m hoping Santa will bring me. I find the quieter period over Christmas is often a good time to catch up on some reading without too many distractions.

Time permitting, I’m also hoping to have a go at few online capture the flag challenges. The holiday period usually sees the release of a number of festive challenges giving everyone a chance to put their hacking skills to the test. It’s a great way to learn and it’s fun. If that sort of thing interests you then I would definitely recommend giving one of them a go.

2. Overclockin’ Around The Christmas Tree

Data Scientist, Hillary Sanders

Of the things that those close to me have the power to give, at the very top of my holiday list is just to spend time talking, walking, baking and playing board games with friends and family. But hey, if someone wants to send a few Monero, Ethereum, or fractions of a Bitcoin my way, I’d be pretty pleased as well!

3. Let it Glow! Let it Glow! Let it Glow!

Service Engineer, Sam Cave

I’d love a new 7-piece screwdriver set for Christmas. I use them for general tech DIY as well as building things at home. Recently I finished making an oak-housed Bluetooth speaker and I’m planning some projects for the new year, but my current set is pretty worn down.

In terms of a nice piece of tech I would be really happy to find a projector under the tree this year. On principle I don’t own a TV, to encourage me to get out of the house and be more sociable, but it’s great being able to watch films in 1080p on a 3.5 metre screen.

Finally the last thing I am after is a heavily modified and powerful laptop that I can connect to my cloud servers with, but that is also lightweight and runs Linux. That would make me a very happy nerd this year.

4. Silent flight

Threat Researcher, Dorka Palotay

During the Christmas holidays I actually like being as tech free as possible. So, this year at the top of my Christmas list is a ticket to a trampoline park; I can do exercise (without really having to think about it) while getting to throw shapes in mid-air with my family.

We usually play a lot of board games, so a new one is always a great gift to top off the festive family time. But probably I enjoy the meals the most, having the chance to sit around a table with friends or family, eating delicious food and having great conversations.

5. I’ll be Home(ward Bound) for Christmas

Security Specialist, Greg Iddon

I’ll be asking Santa why my request for a talking Golden Retriever has gone unanswered since I first made it in 1993 after watching Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey. I appreciate that Santa is busy flying around, delivering gifts to less fortunate (man-)children than myself. However, given that we’re now in an age where little AI helpers in tiny Bluetooth speakers is the norm, is it so much to ask that I get a dog that I can have a more intelligent conversation with than half of those had around the Christmas table with inebriated members of my family?

If Santa wants his brandy and mince pies this year, he better cough up! (Rudolf, we’re still good. I won’t skimp on the carrots).

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