antiworm

This was not RSA's lucky day. This will be one to keep an eye on. RSA Hacked by automated attack [Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

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...

If you ever doubted that the lock on your door was in place to keep out the kids, doubt no more. This fascinating article details one of the world's top lock pickers. The Ultimate Lock Picker Hacks Pentagon, Beats Corporate Security for Fun and Profit A good friend of mine has been picking locks as a hobby most of his life. This is a skill that can be learned by any bright, patient person. It's a safe bet there are more people around who know how to pick locks than there are people getting paid to rethink the lock and key.

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" ...

That didn't take long, did it? Apparently Microsoft released their "out of band" patch in a hurry because they had already seen exploits "in the wild" for this defect. They guessed a worm couldn't be far behind, and they were right. Gimmiv: New worm feeds on latest Microsoft bug The cycle of patching will never fix this problem. If you are a CIO or manager of an enterprise or government network which has been hit by new worms this week, contact Intrinsic Security to discuss FireBreak AntiWorm. Worms are detected instantly and trapped without signatures.