With tax time rapidly approaching, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service still has not sealed up all of the holes that could allow insiders or external hackers to access taxpayer data, according to a new report. The Government Accountability Office states that the IRS has corrected less than one-third of the 89 security weaknesses identified in its audit of the tax agency last year. Read the full article. [Dark Reading]
The prolific Pushdo spam botnet has found a new way to penetrate
Microsoft’s Live.com by exploiting weaknesses in the audio captchas
designed to prevent automated scripts from accessing the popular email
service. Read the full article. [The Register]
Opera has announced the release of version 10.51 of its web browser for Windows-based systems, closing two “highly severe” security holes. The security and stability update addresses a previously reported vulnerability caused by an incorrectly set value in HTTP headers. Read the full article. [The H Security]
Cyber-criminals see law firms as particularly lucrative targets that
can earn them hundreds of thousands of dollars per heist. Cyberspies
also attack attorney firms to steal client data that can be sold or
used to learn the details of future litigation. Read the full article. [SF Chronicle]
Germany’s official cyber-security response team is advising surfers not
to use Firefox pending the release of a patch to defend against a
critical unpatched vulnerability. Read the full article. [The Register]
Computer hacker Albert Gonzalez deserves a quarter-century behind bars
for leading a gang of cyberthieves who stole tens of millions of credit
and debit card numbers from a transaction processor and several giant
retail chains, federal prosecutors argued in a recent court filing. Read the full article. [Wired]
Thorsten Holz, researcher at Vienna University of Technology, whose team not only participated in the recent takedown of the Waledac botnet, but released an interesting paper earlier this year, summarizing their findings based on 33GB of crimeware data obtained from active campaigns talks to Dancho Danchev of ZDNet. Read the full article. [ZDNet]
Security blogger Brian Krebs has compiled lists of the top 10 ISPs who are hosting the worst botnets, spam, phishing, and other malware from independent tracking organizations. These lists come from: Stop Badware, F.I.R.E., Phishtank, Zeustracker, Malware Domain List, Arbor Top ASN List, Emerging Threats Compromised IPS, Emerging Threata RBN, Shadowswerver, and Google Safebrowsing. Read the full article. [KrebsonSecurity]
Robert Maley was fired from his job as the chief information security officer for the state of Pennsylvania earlier this month after he spoke, without proper authorization, about security incidents involving the state during a panel discussion at the RSA trade show. In this interview, Maley gives his side of the events that led to his dismissal. Read the full article. [Computerworld]
Here are four techniques and related technologies several cited as
underrated in today’s security fight. Since one security pro’s miracle
tool is another’s waste of budget, it’s no surprise that a couple of
the technologies panned earlier are praised here. Read the full article. [CSO]
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