About
Dennis Fisher is a journalist with more than 13 years of experience covering information security.
Members of the loosely organized group conducting the AntiSec hacking campaign have compromised a company called IRC Federal, which does contracting for the FBI and other federal agencies, posting a large trove of information online in retaliation for what the group says is IRC Federal’s record of “selling out their ‘skills’ to the US empire.
In a House committee hearing on cybersecurity threats Thursday, a DHS official said he was aware of some cases in which software and hardware manufactured overseas had arrived in the U.S. pre-loaded with security bugs. However, the official did not say that those cases involved vulnerabilities or backdoors planted intentionally.
Most Internet users at this point understand that Web sites routinely and extensively track the behavior and movements of their visitors. It’s an unsettling reality. But few people have a handle on just how widespread and pervasive the practice is. Now, a developer has released an add-on for Firefox called Collusion that enables users to see exactly which sites and third parties are tracking them, in real time.
Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday release next week will comprise four bulletins, one of which is rated critical, covering vulnerabilities in numerous versions of Windows as well as Visio 2003.
An attack against the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has forced the lab to shut off access to the Internet, and the lab’s external Web site also is inaccessible right now. The attack on the lab, which conducts national security and cybersecurity research among other things, is the latest in a series of such attacks against research facilities.
The Internet Systems Consortium has released new versions of the ubiquitous BIND server software that fix a pair of vulnerabilities in existing releases, one of which enables an attacker to stop the software from running on remote DNS servers.
In a rare and sweeping move, Google has removed all of the sites hosted on .co.cc domains from its search results, saying that because such a large percentage of the sites on that freehosting provider are low-quality or spammy, they decided to de-index all of them.
In March, Microsoft announced that its Digital Crimes Unit had scored a major victory in the war against hackers with the takedown of the Rustock botnet. Since then, the company has continued to monitor the activity of the network and the machines infected with the Rustock-related malware and found that the botnet is now less than half the size that it was before the takedown.
Someone was able to compromise a version of the vsftpd secure FTP server recently, inserting a simple backdoor that gives the attacker a shell on compromised machines. The bad version of the server has been removed and the creator of the app has moved it to a different hosting provider as a precaution.
It’s been an ugly year so far for the security industry. In fact, if you’re looking at it objectively, almost nothing has gone right in the last six months. The long list of attacks this year–including RSA, Sony, Epsilon, Lockheed Martin, Citigroup and many others–coupled with the emergence of amorphous hacking groups like LulzSec and Anonymous on the scene have led to a growing sentiment in the industry that security has become an exercise in futility and that, one way or another, we’re all owned.
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