New Storm Botnet Variant Making Spam
Security watcherssay they’ve spotted a new botnet that bears the
hallmarks of Storm and is sending out a “massive volume of spam emails
to targeted recipients.” Read the full article. [The Register]
Cryptography
How Zeus Development Is Evolving
Researchers offered a peak into the new variants of the Trojan and the changes that
will assure its longevity for a good while. Read the full article. [Help Net Security]
Advertising Losses Mount in Botnet Click Fraud
The clever hacking of online advertisements has quietly grown into a
multi-million dollar criminal industry showing no signs of slowing. The big losers: online advertisers. Read the full article. [The Last Watchdog]
Faced with stricter Internet security measures like CAPTCHAS, some spammers have begun
borrowing a page from corporate America’s playbook: they are
outsourcing. Read the full article. [The New York Times]
Blippy users recently got a taste of the social media fad’s dark side when simple Google searches turned up 127 transactions that included credit card numbers of four users. Read the full article. [The Register]
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]
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]
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?
A pair of security researchers has discovered a number of new attack vectors that give them the ability to not only locate any GSM mobile handset anywhere in the world, but also find the name of the subscriber associated with virtually any cellular phone number, raising serious privacy and security concerns for customers of all of the major mobile providers.
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]
