It was December 8, 2000 – the waning days of the Clinton Administration. Richard Clarke, a member of President Clinton’s National Security Council, was addressing attendees at SafeNet 2000, a conference sponsored by Microsoft Corp. that brought together computer security experts from around the country to talk about ways to increase cooperation around cyber security.
Botnets have been a problem for more than a decade now, but in recent years they’ve become a serious security threat, delivering exploit kits, malware and mass Web site injections. In this video, Jose Nazario of Arbor Networks discusses the current botnet landscape and the adoption of new modular functionality in some bot families.
In the wake of this weekend’s revelations of the seriousness of the attack on certificate authority DigiNotar, security experts have renewed criticism of the Internet’s digital certificate infrastructure, with some wondering if larger certificate authorities (CAs) might be too big to fail.
By Joe BasiricoAs a security researcher, I regularly come across software vulnerabilities. Some can have a deep and lasting effect on the way customers and clients view the security of the organization and some can have a fairly minimal impact.
While security experts and lawmakers debate the seriousness of cyber threats to critical infrastructure, one security researcher says that evidence that viruses and spyware already have access to industrial control systems is hiding in plain sight: on Web based user support forums.
by Roel SchouwenbergEditor’s note: This story was reposted from Securelist.com.In an almost unprecedented event the Dutch minister of internal affairs gave a press conference at 1:15 AM Friday to Saturday night. He announced the Dutch government was revoking trust in Diginotar.
There are a lot of things in the security world that are broken and there isn’t room to list them all, even on the Internet. But if the events of the last few days have shown us anything, it’s that the certificate authority infrastructure is beyond broken and there’s no quick fix looming on the horizon. In fact, the way things look now, there may not be any practical solution to the problem at all.
A co-founder of The Tor Project says his organization is being kept in the dark about the status of a dozen fraudulent SSL certificates issued in its name by a compromised root server operated by Diginotar. The bogus certificates could be used to carry out man in the middle attacks, or trick unsuspecting Internet users into downloading a compromised version of the Tor anonymity software.
There are more signs that a July compromise of DigiNotar, a certificate authority based in the Netherlands, may have been driven by political motives. A Dutch Web site, nu.nl, reported on Wednesday that digital certificates belonging to Mozilla, Yahoo.com, Wordpress and The Tor Project were among dozens reported stolen from DigiNotar.
Researchers at NSS Labs claim that they’ve spotted attacks that use Sipvicious, a common auditing tool for Voice over IP (VoIP) networks as part of malicious attacks aimed at taking control of vulnerable VoIP servers. The attacks are apparently aimed at taking control of VoIP servers to place unauthorized calls.
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