Internet service providers have the ability to wipe nearly all malicious activity in their network without stepping on individual privacy and civil liberties, said Adam Rice, chief security officer at Mumbai-based Tata Communications. Read the full article. [TechTarget]
Computer scientists and policy experts say that such seemingly
innocuous bits of self-revelation on social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc. can increasingly be collected and
reassembled by computers to help create a picture of a person’s
identity, sometimes down to the Social Security number. Read the full article. [NY Times]
The authors of the Zeus bot client, perhaps the most popular and pervasive piece of malware of its kind right now, have taken an extraordinary step to protect their creation: inserting a hardware-based licensing scheme into the Trojan. This represents a significant leap in the sophistication and professionalism of malware development, researchers say.
A U.S. federal judge has agreed to freeze the assets of a company being accused of manipulating the stocks of 38 companies listed on the Nasdaq and New York Stock Exchange via compromised trading accounts. Read the full article. [CNet]
Most small business owners have no clue about the threats they face or
the liability they assume when banking online, even as the frequency
and sophistication of attacks appears to be increasing. Read the full article. [KrebsonSecurity]
An exploit writer at Core Security Technologies has discovered a serious vulnerability that exposes users of Microsoft’s Virtual PC virtualization software to malicious hacker attacks.The vulnerability, which is unpatched, essentially allows an attacker to bypass several major security mitigations — Data Execution Prevention (DEP), Safe Exception Handlers (SafeSEH) and Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) — to exploit the Windows operating system.
After Microsoft’s actions to take down the Waledac botnet last month, there was some question about whether the operation was much more than a grab for headlines that would have little effect on actual spam levels or malware infections. But more than three weeks after the takedown, researchers say that Waledac has essentially ceased communications and its spam operations have dropped to near zero.
In need of a fresh example that cybercriminals are actively looking for ways to monetize infected Mac OS X hosts? Early-stage discussions at several web forums, including a PoC (proof of concept, source code included) Mac OS X blocker as well as potential GUIs for the ransomware, offer an insight into the potential to monetize OS X infected hosts using SMS-based ransomware.
Criminals increasingly attempt to camouflage the traces of their malware on the internet to keep control of a hijacked server for as long as possible. However, their paths can be retraced using special tools to identify the vulnerability the malware intends to exploit to enter a system. Read the full article. [The H Security]
Through 2012, 60 percent of virtualized servers will be less secure
than the physical servers they replace, according to Gartner. Although
they expect this figure to fall to 30 percent by the end of 2015,
analysts warned that many virtualization deployment projects are being
undertaken without involving the information security team in the
initial architecture and planning stages. Read the full article. [Help Net Security]
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