Donald Sears

Malware Infested PDFs Ruled 2009 Exploits

A newly released report shows that based on more than a trillion Web requests processed in 2009, the use of malicious PDF files exploiting flaws in Adobe Reader/Adobe Acrobat not only outpaced the use of Flash exploits, but also, grew to 80% of all exploits the company encountered throughout the year. Read the full article. [ZDNet]


A former security
researcher turned criminal hacker has been sentenced to 13 years in
federal prison for hacking into financial institutions and stealing
credit card account numbers. Max
Ray Butler, who used the hacker pseudonym Iceman, was sentenced Friday
morning in U.S. District Court in Pittsburgh on charges of wire fraud
and identity theft. Read the full article. [Computerworld]

There are indications that the system crashes and the dreaded blue
screen of death (BSoD) that many Microsoft Windows users reported
suffering after installing this week’s batch of security updates may be caused at least in part by malware infestations on the affected machines. Read the full article. [KrebsonSecurity]

Critical infrastructure organizations, such as those in the energy,
oil, pharmaceutical and chemical sectors, encountered at least twice as
much web malware as other organizations during 2009, researchers found. Read the full article. [Secure Computing]

The targeted attacks that hit Google, Adobe,
and other U.S. organizations are still ongoing and have affected many
more companies than the original 20 to 30 or so reported by Google and
others. One researcher believes they are close to naming the suspected coder. Read the full article. [Dark Reading]