A consortium of cybersecurity researchers from MIT, Purdue and Carnegie Mellon was announced in Washington D.C. with the stated goal is to collaborate on cybersecurity research including 10 projects, one which is the development of an Internet-scale model on which to perform
constrained experiments not possible on the live Internet. Read the full article. [TechTarget]
Microsoft released data collected from an FTP-server
honeypot, showing that attempts to guess passwords continue to focus on
the low-hanging fruit: passwords with an average length of eight
characters, with “password” and “123456” being the most common. Read the full article. [Security Focus]
Nigel Parkinson, president of Parkinson Construction who built the D.C Convention Center and Nationals baseball stadium, fell victim to phony SSN email site that stole passwords, including those to the company’s bank account where money mules were used to steal funds. Read the full article. [Washington Post]
Malicious hackers are using fake alerts around H1N1 (Swine Flu) vaccines to trick end users into installing malware on Windows computers, according to warnings issued by computer security firms.The latest malware campaign begins with e-mail messages offering information regarding the H1N1 vaccination. The e-mail messages contain a link to a bogus Centers for Disease Control and Prevention site with prompts to create a user profile. During this process, a malware file gets planted on the user’s machine.
Dennis Fisher talks with Jose Nazario of Arbor Networks about the Mafiaboy attacks, the history of DDoS attacks and the botnet epidemic.
The Koobface botnet, one of the most efficient social engineering driven botnets, is entering the Xmas season with a newly introduced template spoofing a YouTube video page, in between enticing the visitor into installing a bogus Adobe Flash Player Update (New Koobface campaign spoofs Adobe’s Flash updater), which remains one of the most popular social engineering tactics used by the botnet masters. Read the full article. [ZDNet]
Whether Hannaford Bros. customers may recover damages for the time and
trouble it took them to straighten out their bank or credit card
accounts after the Scarborough-based firm’s computer system was
breached in late 2007 and early 2008 now is up to the Maine Supreme
Judicial Court. Read the full article. [Bangor Daily News]
The free Picviz tool from the Honeynet Project takes data from various log analysis sources and converts them into a multidimensional visual map of events. Read the full article. [Dark Reading]
Security researchers have stumbled upon a new piece of ransomware that blocks an infected computer from accessing the Internet until a fee is paid via SMS (text message).The latest ransomware file is bundled
with a program called uFast Download Manager. Once a machine is
infected, a message is posted in Russian demanding a
ransom under the guise of activating the uFast Download Manager
application.
A U.S. district court judge has ordered the largest “spam gang” in the
world to pay nearly $15.2 million for sending unsolicited e-mail
messages marketing male-enhancement pills, prescription drugs, and
weight-loss supplements, according to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. Read the full article. [InfoWorld]
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