Hacks

Citing a looming crisis over lax computer security, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said on Wednesday that the Senate will debate cybersecurity legislation. The move comes despite the lack of a coherent Senate plan and could set up a showdown with House Republicans over the government’s role in forcing industry to strengthen cyber protections, according to a report by The Hill.

Researchers are fairly confident now that whoever wrote the Duqu malware also was involved in some way in developing the Stuxnet worm. They’re also confident that they have not yet identified all of the individual components of Duqu, meaning that there are potentially some other capabilities that haven’t been documented yet.

More than 60 current and former students at Santa Clara University had their academic records hacked into and grades changed – for the better, according to a letter posted to the school’s site on Monday by university president Michael Engh.

Researchers cracked the pride of Apple’s latest iPhone iteration yesterday, reverse-engineering the language processing, interactive personal assistant application called Siri.

The Finnish arm of the Hacktivist collective Anonymous announced their intent to wage a war against domestic mining company Talvivaara over the weekend, according to a press release posted to the Pastebin file sharing Web site on Saturday.

F-Secure researchers claim that malware spreading via malicious PDF files is signed with a valid certificate stolen from the Government of Malaysia, in just the latest evidence that scammers are using gaps in the security of digital certificates to help spread malicious code.

The TDSS rootkit has proven to be more pliable and adaptable than a campaigning politician, and attackers have used it in various forms for the last three or four years for all sorts of different attacks. It shows up in drive-by downloads, targeted attacks and just about everything in between, and one of the newer jobs it’s been assigned is to deliver the DNSchanger Trojan.