By Joan Goodchild, CSO
Whether it is employees who travel frequently for their job or staff that work out of a home office full or part-time, their mobility poses serious security risks to your organization. Here are the common mistakes employees often make [csoonline.com] while telecommuting some advice on how to put a damper on them.
In an essay published on his personal blog [doxpara.com], security researcher Dan Kaminsky is starting to sound the alarm about “the extraordinary damage” we face from infrastructure attacks, warning that the industry needs to treat infrastructure with more security due diligence and care.
“Forget patching infrastructure. When my DNS bug hit, a remarkable number of sites suddenly found themselves simply identifying the DNS servers they were dependent on. We can do better. We need better operational awareness of our infrastructure. And we need infrastructure, over time, to become a lot safer and easier to update,” Kaminsky said.
By Byron Acohido, LastWatchdog.com
Two schools of thought exist about what the Conficker worm will do come the wee hours of April 1, 2009, GMT.
Some experts, like WinPatrol creator Bill Pytlovany, are sensing that the worm’s controllers will run circles [lastwatchdog.com] around the Microsoft-led “cabal” of security groups trying to block some 3 million to 12 million Conficker-infected PCs from phoning home on April Fools Day.
By Michael Field, Sydney Morning Herald
TelstraClear, Telstra’s New Zealand subsidiary, has hired one of the worlds best known hackers [smh.com.au] — a teenager known as “Akill”.
Owen Thor Walker, a 19-year-old who became the subject of a US Federal Bureau of Investigation’s “Operation Bot Roast” cyber crime investigation, was part of a hacker group known as the A-Team.
By Gregg Keizer, Computerworld
A recently released report claims that Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) is more than twice as effective at blocking malware sites than its nearest rival.
By Bill Brenner, CSO
Ask a room full of security practitioners for a list of security settings that’ll make Internet Explorer (IE) safe to use and you’ll either hear laughter or advice to get a new browser like Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Safari or Google Chrome.
Even as Microsoft has worked diligently to improve security in its troubled browser, especially in IE7 and the newly-released IE8, security pros simply don’t trust it. Most have turned to alternative browsers, especially Firefox. Those who have no choice but to use IE have turned to a number of coping mechanisms [cio.com]. Here are ten of the best security settings for Internet Explorer:
The researchers at Microsoft are working on a new automated vulnerability analysis tool called Paladin, which will be included in the next version of the company’s Forefront enterprise security suite. The new technology was unveiled at CanSecWest last week and is designed to speed up the process of analyzing exploits and how the malicious code works.
Researchers at DroneBL have spotted signs of a stealthy router-based botnet worm [zdnet.com] targeting routers and DSL modems.
The worm, called “psyb0t,” has been circulating since at least January this year, infecting vulnerable embedded Linux devices such as the Netcomm NB5 ADSL modem and launching denial-of-service attacks on some Web sites.
From the article:
After taking some heat for its decision to buy a botnet and use it to send spam and launch a denial-of-service attack against a site owned by Prevx, the BBC has released an editor’s note to explain and defend the broadcast experiment.
Here’s the gist of the Beeb’s defense, via BBC Click executive editor Mark Perrow:
By Robert McMillan, ComputerWorld
Computer security researchers have devised a new Twitter attack that they say could spread virally, much like a worm on the microblogging service.
The attack, publicized by researchers at Secure Science, is an innocuous proof-of-concept that forces users to send out a predetermined Twitter message, but it could be repurposed into a very nasty worm, said Lance James, chief scientist at Secure Science.
“You can couple an attack with our code and it would just tear the crap out of Twitter,” he said.
Read the full article [computerworld.com] Here’s the proof-of-concept code [securescience.net].
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