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OpenDNS To Block and Monitor Conficker Worm

By aewhale - 2/9/2009 "According to The Register, OpenDNS plans to introduce an new service that will prevent PCs infected with the Conficker (aka Downadup) malware from contacting its control servers, and will also make it easy for admins to know if even a single machine under their control has been infected by Conficker: 'Starting Monday, any networks with PCs that try to connect to the Conficker addresses will be flagged on an admin's private statistics page. The service is available for free to both businesses and home users.' With the amount of trouble this worm has caused, perhaps this is a good time to take a look at OpenDNS if you haven't done so already."

Houston Courts Shut Down By Malware

By aewhale - 2/8/2009 "The municipal courts of Houston were shut down yesterday after a computer virus spread through the courts' computer systems. The shutdown canceled hearings and suspended arrests for minor offenses and is expected to extend through Monday. The disruption affected many city departments, the Houston Emergency Center was briefly disconnected and police temporarily stopped making some arrests for minor offenses. The infection appears to be contained to 475 of the city's more than 16,000 computers, but officials are still investigating. Gray Hat Research, a technology security company, has been brought in on an emergency contract to eradicate the infection. In 2006, the City spent $10M to install a new computer system and bring the Courts online, but the system has been beset by multiple problems. After threatening litigation, the city reached a $5 million settlement with the original vendor, Maximus, and may seek another vendor."

Major Spike in Security Threats to Online Games

By aewhale - 2/8/2009 Gamasutra reports on data from security software firm ESET, which shows a major increase in the number of gaming-related security threats over the last year. They attribute the rise in attacks to the amount of money involved in the games industry these days. ESET's full report (PDF) is also available. "[ESET's research director, Jeff Debrosse] explains: 'It's a two-phase attack. If someone's account was compromised, then someone else can actually [using their avatar] during a chat session, or through in-game communication... they could leverage that people trust this person and point them at various URLs, and those URLs will either have drive-by malware or a specific [malware] executable. What ends up happening is that folks may end up downloading and using it. This is just one methodology.' These attackers also target gamers in external community sites, says Debrosse, through 'banners on websites or URLs in chat rooms or forums' — which can lead to unsafe URLs. 'If [users] don't have adequate protection, they could very well be downloading malware without their knowledge.'"

UK Can't Read Its Own ID Cards

By aewhale - 2/6/2009 "Despite the introduction of ID cards last November, it has emerged that Britain has no readers that are able to read the cards' microchips, which contain the person's fingerprints and other biometric information. With cops and border guards unable to use the cards to check a person's identity, critics are calling the £4.7bn scheme 'farcical' and a 'waste of time.'"

Users' Admin Logins Make Most Windows Malware Worse

By aewhale - 2/6/2009 "A new analysis claims that over 90% of the Windows security vulnerabilities reported last year were made worse by users logged in with administrative privileges — an issue Microsoft has been hotly debating recently. According to BeyondTrust Corp., the result of the analysis of the 154 critical Microsoft vulnerabilities indicated that a full 92% could have been prevented if users were not logged into their systems with administrator status. BTC believes that restricting the number of users who can log in with these privileges will 'close the window of opportunity' for attackers. This is particularly true for users of Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office."

Hackers record Passports In Driveby RFID Heist

By aewhale - 2/6/2009 "A hacker has shown how easy it is to clone US passport cards that use RFID by conducting a drive-by test on the streets of San Francisco. Chris Paget, director of research and development at Seattle-based IOActive, used a $250 Motorola RFID reader and an antenna mounted in a car's side window and drove for 20 minutes around San Francisco, with a colleague videoing the demonstration. During the demonstration he picked up the details of two US passport cards. Using the data gleaned it would be relatively simple to make cloned passport cards he said. Paget is best known for having to abandon presenting a paper at the Black Hat security conference in Washington in 2007 after an RFID company threatened him with legal action." Apparently this is a little unfair- he sniffed the data, he didn't actually make a fake passport.

Google: This Internet May Harm Your Computer:

By aewhale - 2/6/2009 A glitch in a computer security program embedded deeply into Google's search engine briefly prevented users of the popular search engine from visiting any Web sites turned up in search results this morning. Instead, Google users were redirected to page that warned: "This site may harm your computer."

VeriSign remedies massive SSL blunder

By aewhale - 2/2/2009 Analysis After being publicly outed issuing web credentials that were vulnerable to attacks that could allow criminals to spoof the encryption certificates of any website on the internet, VeriSign has issued assurances it has neutralized any real-world threat.

Fannie Mae Worker Indicted For Malicious Script

By aewhale - 1/30/2009 "A former Fannie Mae contractor has been indicted by a federal grand jury in Baltimore, MD for computer intrusion. He attempted to propagate a malicious script throughout the company's 4,000 servers. The DC Examiner has details of the incident: 'Had this malicious script executed, [Fannie Mae] engineers expect it would have caused millions of dollars of damage and reduced if not shutdown operations at [Fannie Mae] for at least one week. ... The virus was set to execute at 9 a.m. Jan. 31, first disabling Fannie Mae's computer monitoring system and then cutting all access to the company's 4,000 servers, Nye wrote. Anyone trying to log in would receive a message saying "Server Graveyard." From there, the virus would wipe out all Fannie Mae data, replacing it with zeros, Nye wrote. Finally, the virus would shut down the servers.'"

Google and Friends Release Net Neutrality Measuring Tools

By aewhale - 1/29/2009 "Google and a group of partners have released a set of tools designed to help broadband customers and researchers measure performance of Internet connections. The set of tools, at MeasurementLab.net, includes a network diagnostic tool, a network path diagnostic tool and a tool to measure whether the user's broadband provider is slowing BitTorrent peer-to-peer (P-to-P) traffic. Coming soon to the M-Lab applications is a tool to determine whether a broadband provider is giving some traffic a lower priority than other traffic, and a tool to determine whether a provider is degrading certain users or applications. 'Transparency is our goal,' said Vint Cerf, chief Internet evangelist at Google and a co-developer of TCP/IP. 'Our intent is to make more [information] visible for all who are interested in the way the network is functioning at all layers.'"

Confessed Botnet Master masquaraded as a Security professional.

By aewhale - 1/27/2009 "John Schiefer, the Los Angeles security consultant who in last 2007 admitted wielding a 250,000-node botnet to steal bank passwords, sometimes from work, says he's spent the past 15 months working as a professional in the security scene while awaiting sentencing. Prosecutors are pushing for a five-year sentence, noting the exceptional threat he represented to society."

Monster.com latest to be hacked, and hacked again.

By aewhale - 1/26/2009 "There's been another break-in at Monster.com. It's surprising that there are still unencrypted passwords stored in database despite the previous hack, as is the decision to not email users — presumably so that no one will make a fuss. From PC World: 'Monster.com user IDs and passwords were stolen, along with names, e-mail addresses, birth dates, gender, ethnicity, and in some cases, users' states of residence. The information does not include Social Security numbers, which Monster.com said it doesn't collect, or resumes. Monster.com posted the warning about the breach on Friday morning and does not plan to send e-mails to users about the issue, said Nikki Richardson, a Monster.com spokeswoman. The SANS Internet Storm Center also posted a note about the break-in on Friday.'"

Downadup Worm — When Will the Next Shoe Drop?

By aewhale - 1/25/2009 "The Downadup worm — also called Conflicker — has now infected an estimated 10 million PCs worldwide, and security experts say they expect to see a dangerous second-stage payload dropped soon. 'It has the potential to infect about 30% of Windows systems online, a potential 300 to 350 million PCs,' says Don Jackson, director of threat intelligence in the counter threat unit at SecureWorks. The worm, first identified in November and suspected to have originated in the Ukraine, is quickly ramping up, and while Downadup today is not malicious in the sense of destroying files — its main trick is to block users from accessing antivirus sites to obtain updates to protect against it — the worm is capable of downloading second-stage code for darker purposes."

Linus Switches From KDE to Gnome

By aewhale - 1/25/2009 "In a recent Computerworld interview, Linus revealed that he's switched to Gnome — this despite launching a heavily critical broadside against Gnome just a few years ago. His reason? He thinks KDE 4 is a 'disaster.' Although it's improved recently, he'll find many who agree with this prognosis, and KDE 4 can be painful to use."

Network Solutions Under Large-Scale DDoS Attack

By aewhale - 1/25/2009 "CircleID is reporting a large-scale DDoS attack affecting all of Network Solutions' name servers for the past 48 hours, potentially affecting millions of websites and emails around the world hosting their domain names on the company's servers. The NANOG mailing list indicates that it is due to a very large-scale UDP/53 DDoS which Network Solutions has also confirmed: 'There is a spike in DNS query volumes that is causing latency for the delay in web sites resolving. This is a result of a DDOS attack. We are taking measures to mitigate the attack and speed up queries.""

Building a Better CAPTCHA

By aewhale - 1/25/2009 "Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols reports that CAPTCHA cracking isn't that difficult these days. It has even become a business. For example, DeCaptcher.com will solve CAPTCHAs for your spamming needs at a rate of $2 per 1,000 successfully cracked CAPTCHAs. In response, newer systems are in development. Both Carnegie Mellon and Penn State (is there something about the water in PA?) are working on image-based systems. ESP-PIX and SQ-PIX both require the viewer to interpret pictures. Imagination CAPTCHA from Penn has the user find the center of an image. The idea is that humans are better at image recognition that computers, but humans can legitimately disagree on their interpretations and some humans are color blind. Problems remain. For now, sites would be well advised to look at reCAPTCHA — the system that works with Google Books and the Internet Archive to digitize printed texts — which comes with a wide variety of application and programming plug-ins and an open API."

SpamZapper users benefit from Bill Gates 2004 prediction that Spam would disappear

By aewhale - 1/23/2009 "Bill Gates declared in 2004 at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland that spam would be 'a thing of the past' within five years. However, Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, has written in a blog post that 'with the prophecy's five-year anniversary approaching, spam continues to cause a headache for companies and home users.'"

US-CERT Says Microsoft's Advice On Downadup Worm Bogus

By aewhale - 1/22/2009 "Microsoft's advice on disabling Windows' 'Autorun' feature is flawed, the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) said today, and it leaves users who rely on its guidelines to protect their PCs against the fast-spreading Downadup worm open to attack. US-CERT said in an alert that Microsoft's instructions on turning off Autorun are 'not fully effective' and 'could be considered a vulnerability.' The flaw in Microsoft's guidelines are important at the moment, because the 'Downadup' worm, which has compromised more computers than any other attack in years, can spread through USB devices, such as flash drives and cameras, by taking advantage of Windows' Autorun and Autoplay features."

The largest Credit card disclosure of account information in history, disclosed during the inauguration.

By aewhale - 1/22/2009 "Brian Krebs over at the Washington Post just published a story that Heartland Payment Systems disclosed what may be the largest data breach in history. Today. During the inauguration. Heartland processes over 100 million transactions a month, mostly from small to medium-sized businesses, and doesn't know how many cards were compromised. The breach was discovered after tracing fraud in the system back to Heartland, and involved malicious software snooping their internal network. I've written some additional analysis on this and similar breaches. It's interesting that the biggest breaches now involve attacks installing malicious software to sniff data — including TJX, Hannaford, Cardsystems, and now Heartland Payment Systems." One bit of good news out of this massive breach is that, according to Heartland's CFO, "The nature of the [breach] is such that card-not-present transactions are actually quite difficult for the bad guys to do because one piece of information we know they did not get was an address." Heartland just put up a press release on the breach.

Internet Worm Conficker Worm Could Create World's Biggest Botnet

By aewhale - 1/22/2009 "The worm that's supposedly infected almost nine million PCs running Windows, dubbed Cornficker or Downadup, could lead to a massive botnet, security researchers have said. The worm initially spread to systems unpatched against MS08-067, but has since 'evolved and is now able to spread to patched computers through portable USB drives through brute-force password-guessing.'"

January release from Microsoft - Microsoft® Windows® Malicious Software Removal Tool (KB890830)

By Admin - 1/18/2009 As a follow-up here's to the PC vulnerable to internet Worms, here is the download information for Microsoft's January release of Malicious Software Removal Tool.

Is your PC vulnerable to a worm attack?

By Admin - 1/18/2009 Have you updated your PC with the latest patches? Do you have a reliable Firewall protecting your PC? If your Anti-Virus scanning has recently detected an infection on your machine, do you really think that you are well protected?

Federal Gov't adding security to the Internet Core Routers

By Admin - 1/17/2009 The U.S. federal government is accelerating its efforts to secure the Internet's routing system, with plans this year for the Department of Homeland Security to quadruple its investment in research aimed at adding digital signatures to router communications. DHS says its routing security effort will prevent routing hijack attacks as well as accidental misconfigurations of routing data. The effort is nicknamed BGPSEC because it will secure the Internet's core routing protocol known as the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP).

New Phishing attacks, gets your Bank Details while you are on-line.

By Admin - 1/17/2009 If you are using on-line, you should start to consider ONLY banking with one window open at a time. A New javascript is detecting whether you have a window open to your bank, and then sends a pop-up message to you to confirm your credentials.

A Nightmare before Christmas

By Admin - 1/10/2009 What could be worse than to find out from your friends that the website you use for business purposes has been hacked? Compound that with it occurring right before christmas, and your stress level could also go through the roof.

Employees continue to be the biggest security threat

By Admin - 1/6/2009 monitoring your network and servers has never been more important than it is during hard economic times. However, you don't need to break the bank to provide exceptional security for your networks. Let us show you how small improvements can save you money.

Max Butler's run for fame

By Admin - 1/6/2009 This article from Wired magazine tells how Max Butler's desire to rule the underground took over.

From hacking the Pentagon to ruling the underground

By Admin - 1/6/2009 This white hat hacker figured that after taking a jail stint for hacking the pentagon, that he would be able to rule the underground world on the internet.

Who can you trust anymore?

By Admin - 12/30/2008 Rogue certificates strike blow to Internet security A team of seven security researchers has found a way to exploit a weakness in the MD5 hash function to construct a rogue certificate authority and issue digital certificates that will be trusted by all of the common Web browsers in use today.

Have some Malware with your Photos

By Admin - 12/30/2008 The latest keychain digital photo frames are now equipped with Malware. The better to hack you with!

New SPAM messages are selling Narcotics

By Admin - 12/29/2008 Now direct from Hotmail, we warned you that you could not determine where the Hotmail connections were coming from, and here's our latest SPAM Message offering illegal narcotics via hotmail.

Web Server logs - an interesting User-Agent scanning you.

By Admin - 12/28/2008 Even the Name "Morfeus Fucking Scanner" does not sound like a friendly bot.

New Prime Minister for Thialand Spams the country, for a fee!

By Admin - 12/27/2008 The recently installed prime minister recently spammed all cell phone users.

Brute force attack botnets on the rise, Again!

By Admin - 12/23/2008 We've seen these attack types before, and we know how to block them. In fact we were just contacted about a closing the vulnerabilities for another internet webserver. Changing the IP Address of the machine does not stop the attacks.

Cyber logs are not being reviewed at the IRS

By Admin - 12/21/2008 We feel that if you have a front-line defense solution in place, that you minimally need to verify that these tools are protecting your network. Whether you are a small or regional business, or a far reaching government operation, internet security which stops the hackers is necessary in today's Internet.

Personalized SPAM rising sharply

By Admin - 12/20/2008 We've been filtering Email to eliminate Spam for many years. Our techniques employ our own recipe, and we've seen a dramatic decrease in Spam, Malware and Viruses. This study merely reinforces the fact that more people then ever are getting personalized Spam.

Scareware tactics stopped by the FTC

By Admin - 12/12/2008 First there were Viruses, then Spyware and Trojans, now with all of the Malware floating about the internet, we have Scareware! If you are reading this and have been connected to the interenet for some time, chances are good that you may have some type of infection on your PC as well. Just to remind you, we have the security tools available to prevent these infections from happening to you.

Need a Bank account? Your's might be for sale!

By Admin - 12/10/2008 Maybe you thought that your baking information was safe, but today's article in the UK Register shows just wrong you are. More than 21 Million German Bank Accounts are available for sale. In case you wanted to do the math, 21 million is 75% of the existing German Bank accounts.

Audio CAPTCHAs Cracked, ReCAPTCHA still unbroken

By Admin - 12/9/2008 From the headlines it would appear that ReCAPTCHA is a clear winner. However, if you are faced with using this authentication scheme, you'll soon see how difficult these tools are, at least for humans.

Scripts overrun eBay $1 Holiday specials

By Admin - 12/9/2008 So where did they get all of the scripts? It seems that script kiddies are making $1 bids on eBay to take advantage of a holiday special. Too bad eBay is not taking advantage of a multi-layered defense strategy.

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