Sometimes news events just come together in a way that opens a window
– even if its a kind of cloudy window – onto the future. So it was this
week, as stories about a coming generation of wired automobiles
collided with some thought-provoking reports on the vulnerability of
said cars to traditional kinds of wireless attacks.
An onslaught of spammy holiday cards ushered out a 2010 that saw spam, for the first time ever, in decline. Meanwhile, the DoD warned about foreign governments stealing military technology, while researchers warned that application sandboxes might not be so safe to play in, after all. Read on for the full week in review.
Just a day after Apple introduced its Mac App Store, some users already have found a way around the DRM system designed to ensure that they have paid for the apps that they’re using. The technique seems to work only on apps that don’t correctly implement the method for checking the App Store receipts.
A security researcher has published a simple method for bypassing one of the sandboxes that Adobe has implemented to prevent Flash files from taking unwanted or malicious actions on users’ PCs.
A new spam campaign that appeared shortly before the New Year is part of a new effort by the crew behind the Storm/Waledac botnet and is using some rather elementary tactics–in combination with fast-flux–to attempt to compromise unsuspecting users.
Ever since the traditional print industry collapsed in on itself like a decommissioned ‘Vegas casino, replaced with blogs, micro blogs, social networking and other forms of Web based publishing, the end of the year has brought with it a blizzard of retrospective and prospective Top 10 lists from click hungry sites. There’s a good reason for this, of course: data says that you readers like ’em. Top 10 lists are really like editorial Happy Meals – conceptual packages that say to the reader “You don’t have to do anything – we’ve got everything you need behind this one link!”
2010 ended with dire predictions about a new age of Internet enabled hacker-activism, but the big story in 2011 will be the explosion in IP enabled, loosely secured, Internet connected stuff.
The creators of the Phoenix exploit kit have begun using obfuscation and other techniques to prevent security researchers and others from reverse-engineering the installation process for the kit, adopting a tactic that has become increasingly popular among attackers recently.
By Alex RothackerDenial of Service (DoS) attacks are a common method used to take down Websites, servers, or even sections of the Internet. These attacks typically come in two forms: Distributed DoS (DDos) and DoS attacks. DDoS create a flood of traffic to a Website, server, or section of the internet that overwhelms it to a degree that it cannot function and eventually shuts down. Regular DoS exploits a vulnerability in a Web server, database server, etc. to crash the server.
Microsoft on Wednesday issued a security advisory to users of its Internet Explorer Web browser about a newly disclosed vulnerability that could be exploited and used to run malicious code on vulnerable Windows systems.
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