Vulnerabilities


NYTimes Report: Attackers Hit Google’s Password System

The New York Times is reporting that Google’s password system was compromised during a targeted attack last December.The system, called Gaia or Single Sign-On,  controls access by millions of users worldwide to almost all of the company’s Web services, including e-mail and business applications.

Network Solutions’ Customers Hacked Again

A week after Web hosting company Network Solutions dealt with a
large-scale infection of WordPress-driven blogs, the company
acknowledged that other sites it hosts have been compromised. Read the full article. [Computerworld]


Forbes reporter Andy Greenberg polled a group of security researchers about the security posture of Apple’s new iPad device and comes away with a simple conclusion:  The iPad is just as insecure as the iPhone.  Some quotes from the story:

Miscreants have created a Trojan that poses as a Google Chrome
extension. Spammed messages attempt to dupe prospective marks into trying an
add-on that “helps you better organise your documents received in your
email”. Read the full article. [The Register]

A new study from Prof. Avishai Wool of Tel Aviv University’s School of Electrical
Engineering finds serious security drawbacks in chips that are being embedded in credit, debit and “smart” cards. The
vulnerabilities of this electronic approach — and the vulnerability of
the private information contained in the chips — are becoming more
acute. Read the full article. [ScienceDaily]

The Cisco Secure Desktop contains a vulnerable ActiveX control that could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user who is currently logged into the affected system, according to a warning from the networking vendor.

The good news is that Microsoft’s Internet
Explorer 8 browser offers a new set of filters designed to prevent some
cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. The bad news is that those same
filters could be used to enable XSS attacks. That was the gist of a presentation offered by security
researchers David Lindsay and Eduardo Vela Nava at the Black Hat Europe
conference in Barcelona. Read the full article. [Dark Reading]

The Zeus botnet is now using an unpatched flaw in Adobe’s PDF document
format to infect users with malicious code, said security researchers. Read the full article. [Computerworld]