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...

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...