Like the sequel to a successful movie, the botnet behind the distributed denial of service attacks that hit the country of Georgia during its conflict with Russia in 2008 has been updated. This time though, the idea isn’t hacktivism—it’s stealing financial data and, unlike in the case of other Russian botnets, the targets are the operators’ own countrymen. Read the full article. [eWEEK]
The average Microsoft Windows user has software from 22 vendors on her PC, and needs to install a new security update roughly every five days in order to use these programs safely, according to an insightful new study released this week. Read the full article. [KrebsonSecurity]
Economic pressures are driving more businesses and governments to nervously eye cloud computing, despite
myriad unanswered questions that swirl around a single central concern: security. This was backdrop for a panel discussion
between CISOs at this week’s RSA Conference. Read the full article. [Network World]
Computer scientists say they’ve discovered a “severe vulnerability” in the world’s most widely used software encryption package that allows them to retrieve a machine’s secret cryptographic key. The bug in the OpenSSL cryptographic library is significant because the open-source package is used to protect sensitive data in countless applications and operating systems throughout the world. Read the full article. [The Register]
Independent Security Evaluators’ Charlie Miller discusses Safari bugs, his predictions for this year’s PWN2OWN and mobile security with Ryan Naraine at RSA 2010.
Microsoft has announced plans to ship two security bulletins next week to fix a total of eight vulnerabilities affecting Windows and Office products.Both bulletins are rated “important” because of the risk compromising the confidentiality, integrity or availability of user data.
University of Michigan scientists have found they could foil RSA authentication by varying the
voltage supply to the holder of the “private key,” which would be the
consumer’s device in the case of copy protection and the retailer or
bank in the case of Internet communication. It is highly unlikely that
a hacker could use this approach on a large institution, the
researchers say. Read the full article. [ScienceDaily]
The new class of threat represented by today’s banking malware like ZeuS can
defeat much of the technology out there to combat it, admitted RSA bank-security panelists. Read the full article. [Tech Target]
Security B-Sides: Security penetration testers Mike Bailey and Mike Murray rely plenty on
attacks that exploit weaknesses in websites and servers, but their
approach is better summed up by the famous phrase “There’s a sucker
born every minute.” Read the full article. [The Register]
More details follow the news of the Spanish botnet Mariposa and its owners being caught. The Mariposa Working Group infiltrated the command-and-control
structure of Mariposa to monitor the communication channels that
relayed information from compromised systems back to the hackers who
run the botnet. Read the full article. [The Register]
Infosec Insider content is written by a trusted community of Threatpost cybersecurity subject matter experts. Each contribution has a goal of bringing a unique voice to important cybersecurity topics. Content strives to be of the highest quality, objective and non-commercial.
Sponsored Content is paid for by an advertiser. Sponsored content is written and edited by members of our sponsor community. This content creates an opportunity for a sponsor to provide insight and commentary from their point-of-view directly to the Threatpost audience. The Threatpost editorial team does not participate in the writing or editing of Sponsored Content.
