From Computerworld (Ryan Faas)
One of the commonly touted advantages to using a Mac is that it’s more secure and less prone to malware than a PC running Windows. It’s easy to see where this attitude comes from: The prevalence of viruses and network attacks against Windows machines is greater by several orders of magnitude.
From The H Security (Jürgen Schmidt)
Secure data transmission on the internet relies on encryption and security certificates. Mozilla has revised the way Firefox 3 handles certificates, but not always for the better. A few modifications will sort things out – and give you more security. Read the full story [h-online.com]
Adobe’s security response team is scrambling to investigate new public reports of a new zero-day vulnerability affecting uses of its widely deployed PDF Reader software.
In a brief note posted to its PSIRT blog, Adobe confirmed it was investigating a code execution flaw, which affects Adobe Reader 9.1 and 8.1.4.
From CNet News (Elinor Mills)
An attack on the main domain name system registrar in Puerto Rico led to the local Web sites of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Coca-Cola, and other big companies being redirected for a few hours on Sunday to sites that were defaced, according to security firm Imperva.
Those sites and others including PayPal, Nike, Dell, and Nokia, were redirected to sites that were black except for messages in hacker lingo saying that the sites had been hacked. However, the sites themselves were not hacked, Amichai Shulman, chief technology officer at Imperva, said on Monday. Read the full story [cnet.com]
Security researchers are starting to sound the alarm [avertlabs.com] for e-mail scams related to news stories on the Swine Flu.
According to a notice from US-CERT, the attacks arrive via an unsolicited email message typically containing a subject line related to the Swine Flu. These email messages may contain a link or an attachment. If users click on this link or open the attachment, they may be directed to a phishing website or exposed to malicious code. Read the full advisory [us-cert.gov] for protection advice.
From PC Advisor (Carrie-Ann Skinner)
More than one third of employees would steal sensitive company information if they thought they could earn a decent price from the theft, says Infosecurity Europe.
Research by the security event organiser revealed that of those willing to steal sensitive data, 63 percent would expect at least £1m for their troubles, while 10 percent want enough to pay off their mortgage. Worryingly, 2 percent admitted all they’d want in return for data theft was a slap up meal. Read the full story [pcworld.com]
From ZDNet Zero Day
Now that Oprah’s all a twitter, it looks like everyone’s favorite micro-blogging tool is finally taking a hard look at security.
According to a job listing posted online, Twitter is searching for software engineers to focus specifically on application and infrastructure security. Read the full story [zdnet.com]
Last week, after I dropped clues that the cover of this year’s Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report contained a cryptographic challenge, several readers immediately jumped on the challenge.
In this blog post, Veracode’s Chris Eng provides a fun walk-through of how he decoded the pattern of 1s and 0s on the report’s cover and used a combination of Google searches and hidden clues to solve the puzzle.
The United States Computer Emergency Response Team (US-CERT) has released a new ActiveX fuzzer to help developers pinpoint browser-based security vulnerabilities.
The tool, called Dranzer, lets software developers test ActiveX controls for vulnerabilities before the software is released to the public. It is available as an open-source utility.
From ZDNet (Dancho Danchev)
In a recent blog post, the Cyber Secure Institute claims that based on their previous studies into the average cost of suck malware attacks, the economic loss due to the Conficker worm could be as high as $9.1 billion.
Despite that their analysis also considered a much limited infection rate (200,000 infected hosts), they claim that the cost of the virus in this case is still around $200 million. Read the full story [zdnet.com]
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