Web Security

Security-related policy or legislation is enacted and then enforced to protect corporate, government or military interests. Civil organizations are often left flailing in the wind, fending for themselves with fewer IT resources and experience than a Middle America mom-and-pop operation. Yet these non-governmental—and not-for-profit—organizations have tasked themselves with helping those targeted by lethal adversaries who aren’t just after corporate secrets, but are out to deny people their freedom or, in some cases, their lives.

Mozilla has added a new privacy feature to Firefox that enables users to begin a new private browsing session in a separate tab while still running a normal session in other tabs. Firefox 20 also includes patches for 11 critical security vulnerabilities.The new version of Firefox expands the capabilities of the private browsing function in the browser, a feature that allows users to browse without any cookies, logs or any other data retention.

Tibetan activists in China as well as those living in exile around the world are being targeted by dangerous malware that not only steals data from infected computers, but also has graduated to reporting location data from mobile devices for surveillance purposes.

For some perspective on what 300 Gbps of traffic represents, let’s just pretend that your company, as a potential customer, put this massive volume of bits and bytes in front of 20 of the leading Internet service providers. Chances are, all but three or four will tell you “Thanks, but no thanks, we can’t handle your business.”

There is a critical vulnerability in several current versions of the BIND nameserver software that could allow an attacker to knock vulnerable DNS servers offline or compromise other applications running on those machines. The bug is present in several versions of the ubiquitous BIND software and the maintainers of the application have released a patch for it that they recommend users install as soon as possible.

So you thought the 100 Gbps distributed denial-of-service attacks against U.S. banks were big? Ongoing attacks against Spamhaus have three times the fury and have affected unrelated online services as collateral damage.

China has become the go-to bogeyman behind every cyber attack or malware campaign, but if you’re looking for the most malicious hosting providers on the Web, you won’t find any of the top 10 in China. In fact, the United States and Russia have many more bad hosting providers in the top 20 than China does.