Droid Smartphone Hacked for Jailbreaking
A hacker has unleashed an exploit that lets a user wrest administrative root control of a Motorola Droid smartphone. Read the full article. [Dark Reading]
Malware
In Rare Move, MS Disables Old Code
Microsoft has decided to disable a 17-year-old video codec in older
versions of Windows rather than patch multiple vulnerabilities,
according to the company’s security team. Read the full article. [Computerworld]
Marc Maiffret on Modern Malware, Code Red and the State of Security Research
Dennis Fisher talks with researcher Marc Maiffret of FireEye about the evolution of modern malware, the discovery of the Code Red worm and how far security research has come in the last 10 years.
Malware writers have revamped code that uses a popular Twitter command
to generate hard-to-predict domain names, a technique that brings
stealth to their drive-by exploits. Read the full article. [The Register]
A large scale SQL injection attack has injected a malicious iframe on
tens of thousands of susceptible websites; The
injected iframe loads malicious content from 318x.com, which eventually
leads to the installation of a rootkit-enabled variant of the Buzus
backdoor trojan. Read the full article. [Help Net Security]
If you think the spam problem is bad right now — and it is, with more than 90 percent of email consisting of spam — the good news is it’s not going to get worse. The bad news is it’s going to get much worse.
A rogue anti-malware product called DefenceLab redirects infected PCs
to Microsoft’s Support portal, but modifies the HTML content as it
returns so as to appear as if Microsoft is endorsing the worthless
software. Read the full article. [The Register]
Botnets – apart from inundating out inboxes with spam – can also be
used for ulterior purposes such as executing DDoS attacks or hosting
websites, so understanding the “modus operandi” and size behind the
well-known names is a good idea; Here’s a top ten botnet list. Read the full article. [Help Net Security]
Notre Dame University, who originally discovered a data breach back in early November 2009, said 24,000 NDU employees were affected. Read the full article. [The Observer]
Security researchers have intercepted a new variant of the Zeus crimeware using Amazon’s EC2 services to command and control the botnet. The cybercriminals appear to be using Amazon’s RDS managed database hosting service as a backend alternative in case they lose access to the original domain, which would result in the complete loss of access to the compromised financial data obtained from the infected hosts. Read the full story [ZDNet]
