Three months after the world first learned of the sophisticated Stuxnet worm, insiders say that there’s a scramble to find and hire engineers with knowledge of both security and the industrial control systems that were Stuxnet’s intended target.
This month’s batch of security patches from Microsoft will be a record-breaking one: 16 bulletins addressing a whopping 49 security vulnerabilities.
In the face of continued attacks targeting its hugely popular Gmail service, Google has put together a checklist to help Gmail users better secure their accounts by looking at the settings in their inboxes, their browsers and their PCs. The security guide doesn’t automate any of these tasks for users, but instead gives them a guide comprising 18 steps to help lock down their Gmail inboxes.
Spammers have jumped on the little-used soft hyphen (or SHY character) to fool URL filtering devices. According to researchers at Symantec Corp., spammers are larding up URLs for sites they promote with the soft hyphen character, which many browsers ignore.
It took a malware attack with an unprecedented level of sophistication to make it happen, but officials in charge of the security of much of the country’s electrical grid have come ot the conclusion that there is a need for more secure software and better security processes and procedures to prevent future attacks in the vein of Stuxnet.
Since at least the time of the release of the first generation Apple iPhone, sophisticated smartphone users have been working diligently to jailbreak their devices in order to load their own software, install third-party applications and make other modifications. Now, one Android device, the G2 from HTC, has the ability to roll back modifications and restore the phone to its original state.
Adobe officials have said that the next version of Reader, one of the more popular and oft-targeted applications on the Internet right now, will have a sandboxing feature, and now the company is providing a detailed description of the new Protected Mode addition.
We’ve known for a long time that botnets are the Madwoman in the Attic at most major Internet service providers (ISPs)- an unseemly and occasionally embarrassing presence that is occasionally dealt with, but usually silently tolerated. But now, it seems, there’s pressure mounting on ISPs to do something about the endemic botnet operations that are leveraging their global networks to spew spam, carry out denial of service attacks and push malware.
Kaspersky Lab released its malware statistics report for September. Buried among the data on the top malware detected on users’ machines and being pushed from malicious Web sites is an interesting factoid: Iran no longer ranks as a Stuxnet hotspot, while India continues to struggle with the effects of the sophisticated virus.
The volume of spam e-mail is down…way down. That’s the good news. But experts aren’t exactly sure what’s caused the precipitous drop in spam e-mail or how long it will last.
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