More Mariposa Botnet Suspects Questioned
Slovenian police have arrested four suspects over allegations that they developed the Mariposa botnet malware. Read the full article. [The Register]
Government
Corporate Identity Theft Is On the Rise
Just days after Colorado officials warned businesses about scammers who are forging corporate identities to commit financial fraud, an official in Georgia said the same has been happening in that state as well. Read the full article. [Computerworld]
This Week In Security: Black Hat, Spammers and Trusted Rootkits
The old saying that there’s nothing new under the sun is just as true in the security industry as it is anywhere else. Many new attacks are variants or tweaks of existing ones, new software fails in exactly the same way as old software and new technologies crop up to solve problems that are 30 years old. You can add to that list the sad frequency with which interesting talks at security conferences are having to be canceled because someone doesn’t like the content. This week saw yet another talk pulled from Black Hat, a major cybersecurity meeting in Washington, a rootkit with digitally signed drivers and some new tactics by spammers. Read on for the full week in review.
The meeting convened Wednesday at the White House by the country’s top cybersecurity official, Howard Schmidt, which included more than 100 security experts from the private sector and various government agencies, didn’t end with Schmidt revealing any new programs or initiatives, but some of the key participants said they left feeling more optimistic about the direction the government’s security efforts are headed than at any other point in recent memory.
Developers could build a framework that could maintain transactional records among web services in order to recreate the scene of the crime in the aftermath of a cyber attack, scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology suggest in a new study. Read the full article. [Information Week]
A talk on China’s state-sponsored offensive security efforts scheduled for the Black Hat conference later this month has been pulled from the conference after concerns were raised by some people within the Chinese and Taiwanese government about the talk’s content.
Cisco Industrial Ethernet 3000 (IE 3000) Series switches contain well-known,
hard-coded read and write SNMP community strings. An remote attacker
could take full control of a vulnerable device. Read the full statement. [US-CERT]
Thirty-eight defendants from across the United
States have been charged with participating in a multimillion-dollar
black market travel agent ring that used the stolen identities of
thousands of victims to purchase airline tickets for customers. Read the full article. [Dark Reading]
FBI agents have raided the homes of three alleged members of a hacker
gang that harassed a security expert who helped put the group’s leader
in jail, according to a recently unsealed search warrant affidavit. Read the full article. [Wired]
Few phrases in the English language are as terrifying as, “We’re from the government and we’re here to help.” And that’s essentially what the Obama administration, in the form of the National Security Agency, is saying to the companies that run the country’s utilities and other privately owned critical infrastructure with its proposed “Perfect Citizen” surveillance and coordination program: You had your chance, now step aside and let us show you how it’s done.
