From Help Net Security’s “Zero-day vulnerabilities in Firefox extensions discovered” (20 November 2009):
At the SecurityByte & OWASP AppSec Conference in India, Roberto Suggi Liverani and Nick Freeman, security consultants with security-assessment.com, offered insight into the substantial danger posed by Firefox extensions.
Mozilla doesn’t have a security model for extensions and Firefox fully trusts the code of [...]
Posted on November 29th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Kelly Jackson Higgins’s “New Massive Botnet Twice the Size of Storm” (DarkReading: 7 April 2008):
A new botnet twice the size of Storm has ballooned to an army of over 400,000 bots, including machines in the Fortune 500, according to botnet researchers at Damballa. (See The World’s Biggest Botnets and MayDay! Sneakier, More Powerful Botnet [...]
Posted on November 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Munir Kotadia’s “NSW Police: Don’t use Windows for internet banking” (ITnews: 9 October 2009):
Consumers wanting to safely connect to their internet banking service should use Linux or the Apple iPhone, according to a detective inspector from the NSW Police, who was giving evidence on behalf of the NSW Government at the public hearing into [...]
Posted on October 30th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Kim Zetter’s “New Malware Re-Writes Online Bank Statements to Cover Fraud” (Wired: 30 September 2009):
New malware being used by cybercrooks does more than let hackers loot a bank account; it hides evidence of a victim’s dwindling balance by rewriting online bank statements on the fly, according to a new report.
The sophisticated hack uses a [...]
Posted on October 30th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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Image by Dim Sum! via Flickr
From Tim Greene’s “Black Hat set to expose new attacks” (Network World: 27 July 2009):
Black Hat USA 2009, considered a premier venue for publicizing new exploits with an eye toward neutralizing them, is expected to draw thousands to hear presentations from academics, vendors and private crackers.
For instance, one talk will [...]
Posted on August 3rd, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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Image by rustybrick via Flickr
From Robert McMillan’s “Security certificate warnings don’t work, researchers say” (IDG News Service: 27 July 2009):
In a laboratory experiment, researchers found that between 55 percent and 100 percent of participants ignored certificate security warnings, depending on which browser they were using (different browsers use different language to warn their users).
…
The researchers [...]
Posted on July 27th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From David Becker’s “Hitachi Develops RFID Powder” (Wired: 15 February 2007):
[Hitachi] recently showed a prototype of an RFID chip measuring a .05 millimeters square and 5 microns thick, about the size of a grain of sand. They expect to have ‘em on the market in two or three years.
The chips are packed with 128 bits [...]
Posted on July 7th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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photo credit: sleepymyf
2005
From Brian Krebs’ “Leaving Las Vegas: So Long DefCon and Blackhat” (The Washington Post: 1 August 2005):
DefCon 13 also was notable for being the location where two new world records were set — both involved shooting certain electronic signals unprecedented distances. Los Angeles-based Flexilis set the world record for transmitting data to [...]
Posted on July 7th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Jim Giles’ “The inside story of the Conficker worm” (New Scientist: 12 June 2009):
Earlier this year, smartphone users in China started to get messages promising a “sexy view” if they clicked on a link. The link led to a download. That download was a spam generator which, once installed, sent identical “sexy [...]
Posted on July 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Jim Giles’ “The inside story of the Conficker worm” (New Scientist: 12 June 2009):
23 October 2008 … The dry, technical language of Microsoft’s October update did not indicate anything particularly untoward. A security flaw in a port that Windows-based PCs use to send and receive network signals, it said, might be used [...]
Posted on July 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Brian Krebs’ “Glut of Stolen Banking Data Trims Profits for Thieves” (The Washington Post: 15 April 2009):
A massive glut in the number of credit and debit cards stolen in data breaches at financial institutions last year has flooded criminal underground markets that trade in this material, driving prices for the illicit goods to the [...]
Posted on June 30th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Jacqui Cheng’s “Report: botnets sent over 80% of all June spam” (Ars Technica: 29 June 2009):
A new report (PDF) from Symantec’s MessageLabs says that more than 80 percent of all spam sent today comes from botnets, despite several recent shut-downs.
According to MessageLabs’ June report, spam accounted for 90.4 percent of all e-mail sent in [...]
Posted on June 30th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Bruce Schneier’s “The Economics of Spam” (Crypto-Gram: 15 November 2008):
Researchers infiltrated the Storm worm and monitored its doings.
“After 26 days, and almost 350 million e-mail messages, only 28 sales resulted — a conversion rate of well under 0.00001%. Of these, all but one were for male-enhancement products and the average purchase price was close [...]
Posted on June 27th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Bruce Schneier’s “Quantum Cryptography” (Crypto-Gram: 15 November 2008):
Quantum cryptography is back in the news, and the basic idea is still unbelievably cool, in theory, and nearly useless in real life.
The idea behind quantum crypto is that two people communicating using a quantum channel can be absolutely sure no one is eavesdropping. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle [...]
Posted on June 27th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Bruce Schneier’s “Second SHB Workshop Liveblogging (5)” (Schneier on Security: 11 June 2009):
Angela Sasse, University College London …, has been working on usable security for over a dozen years. As part of a project called “Trust Economics,” she looked at whether people comply with security policies and why they either do or do not. [...]
Posted on June 20th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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photo credit: Andres Rueda
From Brian Kreb’s “An Odyssey of Fraud” (The Washington Post: 17 June 2009):
Andy Kordopatis is the proprietor of Odyssey Bar, a modest watering hole in Pocatello, Idaho, a few blocks away from Idaho State University. Most of his customers pay for their drinks with cash, but about three times a day [...]
Posted on June 20th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Bruce Schneier’s “Second SHB Workshop Liveblogging (4)” (Schneier on Security: 11 June 2009):
Diana Smetters, Palo Alto Research Center …, started with these premises: you can teach users, but you can’t teach them very much, so you’d better carefully design systems so that you 1) minimize what they have to learn, 2) make it easier [...]
Posted on June 13th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Rob Cottingham’s “From blocking to botnet: Censorship isn’t the only problem with China’s new Internet blocking software” (Social Signal: 10 June 2009):
Any blocking software needs to update itself from time to time: at the very least to freshen its database of forbidden content, and more than likely to fix bugs, add features and [...]
Posted on June 13th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Scott Wolchok, Randy Yao, and J. Alex Halderman’s “Analysis of the Green Dam Censorware System” (The University of Michigan: 11 June 2009):
We have discovered remotely-exploitable vulnerabilities in Green Dam, the censorship software reportedly mandated by the Chinese government. Any web site a Green Dam user visits can take control of the PC.
According to [...]
Posted on June 13th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Brian Prince’s “How Terrorism Touches the ‘Cloud’ at RSA” (eWeek: 23 April 2009):
When it comes to the war on terrorism, not all battles, intelligence gathering and recruitment happen in the street. Some of it occurs in the more elusive world of the Internet, where supporters of terrorist networks build social networking sites to recruit and [...]
Posted on May 19th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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