ARLINGTON, VA–There is a growing sentiment among security researchers that the programmers behind the Stuxnet attack may not have been the super-elite cadre of developers that they’ve been mythologized to be in the media. In fact, some experts say that Stuxnet could well have been far more effective and difficult to detect had the attackers not made a few elementary mistakes.
ARLINGTON, VA–In order to address the fundamental questions surrounding the concept of cyberwar and what it might mean for both the government and the enterprise, the United States should develop a skunk works-type think tank comprising highly skilled private-sector security experts as well as operational and policy experts from the government, a former deputy Secretary of Defense said.
Phishers and scammers have developed a new tactic for separating victims from their money that involves getting them to pay for software that’s normally free, such as Mozilla Firefox or Adobe Flash.
The specter of Stuxnet reared its head again this week, with news of a critical hole in some Chinese SCADA software, while, elsewhere, botnets reloaded following a holiday break, and patches from Microsoft, Google and RIM made headlines. Read on for the full week in review.
The Web sites of some of the nation’s top universities were discovered to be serving up links to bogus online stores offering everything from popular software by Microsoft to student visas and Viagra, according to a report from security firm zScaler.
Google has released version 8.0.552.237 of its Chrome browser, which includes fixes for 16 security vulnerabilities. The company also paid out more than $14,000 in bug bounties for the flaws fixed in this release, including the first maximum reward of $3133.7.
The amount of spam hitting users’ inboxes fell off a cliff in late December, with many security experts attributing the decline to the sudden disappearance of the Rustock botnet and other networks from the spam business. But the level of spam has begun to gain back some of the ground it lost today as other spammers have taken up the slack.
One of the most widely used SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) applications in China may be harboring a critical security vulnerability that could allow an attacker to exploit the bug
and execute arbitrary code.
The inventiveness and avarice of the underground community knows few bounds and one of the latest bits of evidence of this is the creation of a new service designed to help newbies get their Zeus botnets up and running as quickly as possible.
Things are getting curioser and curioser of late at Microsoft. The company is no longer the punch line for every joke in the IT security industry, but now the lessons the company learned in the last 10 years about dealing with researchers and making product security a priority are falling by the wayside.
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