The U.S. Government is demanding that an alleged member of the online hacking group Anonymous be banned from using the Internet as a condition of his release, but won’t require him to run FBI monitoring software on his computers, saying the monitoring wasn’t enforceable.
Scareware gangs have been using pretty much the same tactics since the dawn of time. Or at least since 2005. They compromise Web sites, use them as jumping off points for pop-up boxes that aim to terrify the citizenry into thinking their PCs are infected and downloading fake security software. But now, at least some of the crews are shifting their techniques to a much more subtle trick that waits for the victims to try to watch a video and then pounces.
HED:Report: Iran resorting to rip and replace to kill off Stuxnet infectionsDEK: Reports that Iran had recovered from the infection of the Stuxnet worm may have been overblown, as a new report suggests the country is being forced to replace thousands of expensive centrifuges damanged by the worm. Reports that Iran had recovered from the infection of the Stuxnet worm may have been overblown, as a new report suggests the country is being forced to replace thousands of expensive centrifuges damanged by the worm. The report fromt he Web site DEBKAfile cites “intelligence sources” to claim that Stuxnet was not purged from Iran’s nulcear sites and that the country was never able to return its uranium enrichment operation to “normal operation.” Instead, the country has said in recent days that it is installing newer and faster centrifuges at its nuclear plants and intends to speed up the uranium enrichment process, according to the country’s foreign ministry. Iran was believed to have 8,700 centrifuges in operation at the country’s Natanz facility the time the Stuxnet worm was released, which is believed to be around June, 2009. A recent report from Wired’s ThreatLevel blog (http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/wired-unpacks-stuxnet-mystery-071111)cites International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) officials who inspected the plant in January 2010 as saying up to a quarter of those centrifuges were disabled at that point, just months after the worm was released, and a full six months before it would be publicly identified by researchers at the Belarussian antivirus firm VirusBlokAda. A report from the Institute for Science and International Security (http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/world/documents/stuxnet_update_15Feb2011.pdf), dating from February, 2011, as well as contemporary news reports at the time that assessed the damage caused to Iran’s uranium enrichment program to be limited. Debkafile, citing Western intelligence sources, reports that Iran failed to erradicate the worm, which resurfaced and began spreading within the Iranian facilities, prompting the government to replace an estimated 5,000 working centrifuges. Stuxnet is widely believed to have been created specifically to disable Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities, possibly with the involvement of the U.S. and Israel. (http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/stuxnet-analysis-supports-iran-israel-connections-093010)The worm was among the most sophisticated pieces of malware ever discovered in the wild. However, experts also note that Stuxnet wasn’t perfect and, in fact, that its authors made several, basic errors that may have prevented it from being discovered at all.(http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/stuxnet-authors-made-several-basic-errors-011811) Reports that Iran had recovered from the infection of the Stuxnet worm may have been overblown, as a new report suggests the country is being forced to replace thousands of expensive centrifuges damaged by the worm.
Security researcher Charlie Miller, widely known for his work on Mac OS X and Apple’s iOS, has discovered an interesting method that enables him to completely disable the batteries on Apple laptops, making them permanently unusable, and perform a number of other unintended actions. The method, which involves accessing and sending instructions to the chip housed on smart batteries could also be used for more malicious purposes down the road.
It’s a sad day when attackers turn on each other, cannibalizing one another for cheap thrills and easy profits. But that’s the situation now, as phishers have begun going after the weakest among their kind: the lazy, unmotivated wannabe phisher with no skills.
In a test designed to analyze various Web browsers’ abilities to protect European users against socially engineered malware attacks, researchers at NSS Labs determined that Internet Explorer 8 and 9 were significantly more effective at curbing malicious downloads than were the other major browsers.
It has come to this: CNN is now running segments on the attacks attributed to LulzSec, Anonymous and other groups and the FBI raids on suspected members of those crews. The network had Dave Aitel of Immunity Inc. on this morning to discuss the effects of the recent arrests and what the groups’ agendas might be.
Google is taking the unusual step of displaying a message at the top of its search results pages for some users, alerting them to the fact that their computers may be infected with malware. The action is the result of an investigation in which the search giant discovered that some malware-infected PCs were sending their search requests through one of a number of proxies.
There has been a spate of spear-phishing attacks against a number of high-profile targets in the last few months, including RSA and others, and that trend is continuing unabated. Researchers have come across a fresh attack using the familiar malicious PDF attachment that appears to be targeting users in the defense industry.
Ever attuned to the headlines, the hacker collective Anonymous have inserted themselves into the ongoing scandal over hacking by Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World Tabloid, hacking the Web site of The Sun, another Murdoch publication, and redirecting traffic to that paper’s home page to a phony story announcing the media mogul’s death.
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