Dennis Fisher

Stealthy malware that can sneak onto machines during the boot process and remain undetected indefinitely is one of the brass rings of security research. There have been a number of tools developed over the years that aimed to accomplish this goal, with Joanna Rutkowska’s Evil Maid attack being perhaps the most famous. Now a developer in Canada has produced a similar tool that  impersonates the CHKDSK utility and can grab a user’s password and then exit without the user’s knowledge.

Passwords, unfortunately, still are the main authentication mechanism on most Web sites, including all of the popular webmail services, such as Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo Mail. Many sites encourage users to pick complex and long passwords, so it’s surprising to see that Microsoft now has limited Hotmail passwords to no more than 16 characters. Even more surprising, however, is that Hotmail will accept the first 16 characters of an existing, longer password, indicating that the company may have been storing users’ passwords in plaintext.

Dennis Fisher talks with Mike Mimoso, the new editor of Threatpost, about his decade covering security, how the industry and threat landscape have changed and how security researchers are like Bill Parcells.

There is a serious vulnerability in the authentication protocol used by some Oracle databases, a flaw that could enable a remote attacker to brute-force a token provided by the server prior to authentication and determine a user’s password. The attacker could then log on as an authenticated user and take unauthorized actions on the database. The researcher who discovered the bug has a tool that can crack some simple passwords in about five hours on a normal PC.

People in the security industry often criticize the federal government for being woefully behind the times on information security, not understanding the current threat landscape and not having enough trained law enforcement agents who can handle sophisticated computer crimes. Steven Chabinsky doesn’t want to hear it. A longtime FBI lawyer and former chief of the bureau’s Cyber Intelligence Section, Chabinsky believes that the government is doing a better job at security than ever before, as is the private sector. But, he also believes the attackers are still gaining ground every day.

The Grum botnet, which Dutch authorities and security researchers knocked offline earlier this summer, made a second, unsuccessful attempt at a comeback over the weekend when the bot herders stood up two new command-and-control servers in Turkey. The revival was short-lived however, and both C&Cs now are offline.

Twitter quietly is assembling a serious security team, with the most recent addition being Charlie Miller, the security researcher known for finding a long line of bugs in the iPhone and other Apple products. Miller, a respected and prolific researcher, will join the social network’s security team next week.