Donald Sears

Affinity Health Warns 409K Customers of Breach

Affinity Health Plan, a New York managed care
service, is notifying more than 400,000 current and former customers
employees that their personal data might have been leaked through the
loss of an unerased digital copier hard drive. Read the full article. [Dark Reading]

New Zeus Botnet Variant Targets Firefox

A new version of the data-stealing trojan Zeus is for the first time able to successfully exploit Mozilla’s Firefox browser to commit sophisticated online banking fraud. Read the full article. [Secure Computing]


How many botnets are there? Symantec says 6.8 million, but a former Symantec executive at Immunet and a key creator of the Internet Security Threat Report says his former company is off by several magnitudes of order. Gunter Ollmann of Damballa concurs with Immunet and puts the numbers between 19 and 24 million. Read the full article. [The Last Watchdog]

Google has released version 4.1.249.1059 of Chrome for Windows, a security update that addresses four high risk vulnerabilities in its WebKit-based browser. These vulnerabilities are; a memory corruption issue in Chrome’s V8 JavaScript Engine, type confusion errors with forums, cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities on the Chrome downloads page and HTTP request errors that could lead to possible cross-site request forgeries (XSRF). Read the full article. [The H Security]

According to research, the malicious iframe used in the latest Network Solutions attack pointed to corpadsinc.com which then downloads Adobe exploits onto victims’ machines. The hacks raise an issue increasingly being faced by Website owners: what’s the responsibility of the ISP or service or cloud provider to provide more application-layer security?

Google is investigating a growing number of reports that hackers are breaking into legitimate Gmail accounts and then using them to send spam messages. The problem started about a week ago but seems to have escalated over the past few days. Read the full article. [IDG News Service]

Researchers at the Univeristy of Texas at Dallas have developed a method for analyzing the activity log
files of corporate firewalls. Their analysis can determine what rules the firewall is actually applying
to incoming and outgoing network traffic and then compare these with
the original rules to spot errors and omissions. Read the full article. [Science Daily]

The SANS Institute has released critical security controls for cyber defense agreed to by a consortium of agencies including: “NSA, US Cert, DoD, DoD JTF-GNO, the Department of Energy Nuclear Laboratories, Department
of State, DoD Cyber Crime Center plus the top commercial forensics
experts and pen testers that serve the banking and critical
infrastructure communities,” according to the SANS website. Read the SANS Institute consensus audit guidelines.