antiworm

In a simple demonstration, a hapless team discovers the truth. "Your server is vulnerable. It's already been cracked. Oh, and by the way, it's already distributing malware for a botnet." A Big Case of Oops! Attitude of management in many organizations is one of the biggest barriers to improved security on the internet. People simply don't want to believe that their systems are vulnerable. Denial is pervasive, and affects organizations from the biggest of the Fortune 500 or Federal government agencies, down to modestly sized companies, local governments, and non-profit corporations. The attitude of the unnamed client described at the "Following the White Rabbit" blog (link above) is all too common. I suspect that an underlying cause is that people want to believe several things that worked pretty well from an evolutionary perspective, but don't work very well on the internet. When everybody around is a bunch of cave dwellers, consumed entirely with...

Phishing has matured. The bad guys are now so adept at mimicking the actual emails sent by PayPal, that PayPal support apparently cannot tell the actual PayPal email apart from the Phishing emails. PayPal mistakes own email for phishing attack [The Register] PayPal admits to Phishing Users [eset.com] I've wondered for years why the phishing emails were often so terribly lame. The ideal strategy would seem to be to read some actual emails from the intended target, and mimmic those as closely as possible. The traditional excuse offered by the security community is that the emails appear often to be generated by people who speak English as a second language, but that doesn't seem like it would be such a limiting factor, given the ease with which the translations could be corrected, even anonymously, using clever internet tricks, even fairly simple ones. The real answer seemed to be that the text content of the email didn't much matter, as people don't read them very ...

It was only a matter of time before it became possible to create fake DNA evidence. That time is now. DNA Evidence Can be Fabricated [New York Times] Think it's bad when somebody steals your identity, drains your bank account, and spends thousands of dollars on credit cards they opened with your name on it? This run of the mill identity theft can cost you thousands of dollars, and many years to clean up. It pales in comparison to what will happen if biometric data becomes commonly used as proof of identity. Sometimes also called bio-print (like fingerprint) or bio-identity mechanisms, such things as retina scans and fingerprint scans are already in use, or even common use. DNA scans are likely to become possible several years from now, as the technology to read DNA is evolving rapidly. An entire genome can be sequenced by three people and equipment costing a few hundred thousand dollars, in a very short period of time, several days. When it become possible to read DNA in more or...

Yes, the Washington Times is not exactly a premier source of security information, but with analysis and reporting like this, who needs enemies? Two fascinating tidbits from this article: China blocks U.S. from cyber warfare . The first is an absolutely classic Freudian slip: U.S. offensive cyberwar capabilities have been focused on getting into Chinese government and military computers outfitted with less secure operating systems like those made by Microsoft Corp. (This observation isn't attributed in the article.) That ought to have you rolling on the floor, laughing, until you realize that these are the very same "less secure operating systems like those made by Microsoft Corp." which the bureaucrats at every level of Federal, State, and local governance in the U.S. have been "standardizing" on. Then your sphincters pucker. The point of the article is that the Chinese have developed and deployed their own operating system and "hardened" ...

The flaws discovered in DNS recently by Dan Kaminsky have existed for years. He linked several of them together, a concept known as " exploit chaining " to reveal a much more serious flaw. His technique makes it possible to hijack and misdirect a user's web browser to a malicious web site, even in cases where the user types the correct URL. ' That, of course, completely makes a fool of Verisign's Ken Silva, chief technology officer, who's been running around to the press saying irresponsible if not utterly foolish things like: "We have anticipated these flaws in DNS for many years and we have basically engineered around them." Kudos to Mr. Kaminsky, for working in private with the major vendors of DNS server software, who had patches ready to go before the flaw was announced. This kept the script kiddies from having a field day with the vulnerabilities, which were endemic to nearly all DNS servers. Apparently there remain some issues not yet addr...

British hacker Gary McKinnon apparently was able to crack over 90 computer systems at various government agencies of the United States, including NASA, the U.S. Army, the U.S. Air Force, and the Department of Defense in 2001 and 2002. He was apparently hunting for secrets about aliens. No, he wasn't searching for illegal immigrants, but rather, aliens from outer space. He believed that the U.S. government was hiding evidence that these aliens exist, and maybe hiding materials and bodies of dead aliens, as well. I hope that if he's extradited and then tried, the judge goes easy on him. Yes, he's guilty of embarrassing several U.S. government agencies by breaking into their computer systems and rifling through data. It shouldn't have been so easy for him to do. The layers of management who didn't take network and information system security seriously until 9/11 will not be on trial, and they certainly bear partial responsibility for contributing to this probl...