ARLINGTON, VA–In order to address the fundamental questions surrounding the concept of cyberwar and what it might mean for both the government and the enterprise, the United States should develop a skunk works-type think tank comprising highly skilled private-sector security experts as well as operational and policy experts from the government, a former deputy Secretary of Defense said.
Phishers and scammers have developed a new tactic for separating victims from their money that involves getting them to pay for software that’s normally free, such as Mozilla Firefox or Adobe Flash.
Details of the Stuxnet worm’s origins and functioning have been seeping into the media, tidbit by intriguing tidbit, since last Summer, when news of the worm went mainstream. But a new exclusive from the New York Times breaks the Stuxnet story wide open, confirming oft-cited theories that it was a state-sponsored attack and pointing the finger at both the U.S. and Israel as the creators of the worm.
After a lull in the fourth quarter of 2010, spam appears to be back in full force, according to reports from both Websense, Commtouch and Symantec Corp.Spam volume was up 45% in the first half of January after diving in Q4 according to a Commtouch spam report.
China’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) admitted that it missed a September e-mail message from a researcher at NSS Labs that pointed out a critical vulnerability in a commonly used SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) software package. The lapse resulted in a gap of almost four months before the hole was patched.
The Web sites of some of the nation’s top universities were discovered to be serving up links to bogus online stores offering everything from popular software by Microsoft to student visas and Viagra, according to a report from security firm zScaler.
Google has released version 8.0.552.237 of its Chrome browser, which includes fixes for 16 security vulnerabilities. The company also paid out more than $14,000 in bug bounties for the flaws fixed in this release, including the first maximum reward of $3133.7.
Looks like The Home Depot needs to turn their own ‘Doing
Dials’ up a notch: the website of the home improvement retailer was compromised
by a piece of hidden code that redirected browsers to a site infected with malware.
The credit union used by members of the U.S. armed forces and their families has admitted that a laptop infected with malware was used to access a database containing the personal and financial information of customers.
The amount of spam hitting users’ inboxes fell off a cliff in late December, with many security experts attributing the decline to the sudden disappearance of the Rustock botnet and other networks from the spam business. But the level of spam has begun to gain back some of the ground it lost today as other spammers have taken up the slack.
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