Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Feeds
11066 items (6553 unread) in 5 feeds
OpenSource
(3331 unread)
-
SourceForge.net: Front page news
(790 unread)
-
Slashdot: IT (2541 unread)
Security
(1000 unread)
-
Digg / Security (1000 unread)
Linux
(2222 unread)
-
-
Slashdot: Linux (1107 unread)
Unread items (10)
Slashdot: IT
-
Behind the Scenes and Inside Workings of a CERT
Posted: September 7th, 2010, 3:42pm CEST by timothy
Tags: security
An anonymous reader writes "Ireland's Computer Emergency Response Team differs from what you can find in most other countries, since it's not government-backed and relies mainly on the good will of several security professionals. In this interview, the founder and head of the CERT, Brian Honan, talks about how the CERT was formed, what equipment they use and what challenges they face in their daily work without having a government to back them up."
Slashdot: Linux
-
Programming Things I Wish I Knew Earlier
Posted: September 6th, 2010, 8:14pm CEST by Soulskill
Tags: programming
theodp writes "Raw intellect ain't always all it's cracked up to be, advises Ted Dziuba in his introduction to Programming Things I Wish I Knew Earlier, so don't be too stubborn to learn the things that can save you from the headaches of over-engineering. Here's some sample how-to-avoid-over-complicating-things advice: 'If Linux can do it, you shouldn't. Don't use Hadoop MapReduce until you have a solid reason why xargs won't solve your problem. Don't implement your own lockservice when Linux's advisory file locking works just fine. Don't do image processing work with PIL unless you have proven that command-line ImageMagick won't do the job. Modern Linux distributions are capable of a lot, and most hard problems are already solved for you. You just need to know where to look.' Any cautionary tips you'd like to share from your own experience?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Slashdot: IT
-
Facebook Glitch Let Spammer Post To Walls
Posted: September 6th, 2010, 1:57pm CEST by samzenpus
Tags: bug
angry tapir writes "A clever spammer found a glitch in Facebook's photo upload system and used it to post thousands of unwanted Wall messages last week. Facebook confirmed the bug Friday, after notifying affected users of the issue. Most of the messages promised 'Free iPhones,' a common spam message on Facebook these days. Facebook says that the spammer hit thousands of profiles before the company removed the spammy photos and notified affected users. No accounts were compromised as a result of the bug."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
-
Ideas For a Great Control Room?
Posted: September 5th, 2010, 11:32pm CEST by samzenpus
Tags: business
lewko writes "Our company is about to build a central monitoring facility and I'm looking for ideas/suggestions about the best hardware and the best way to make it comfortable for those manning a screen. It will be manned 24x7 and operators will be monitoring a variety of systems including security, network, fire, video and more. These will be observed via local multi-monitor workstations and a common videowall. This is going to be a massively expensive exercise and we only get one chance to get it right. The facility is in a secure windowless bunker and staff will generally be in there for many hours at a time. So we have to implement design elements which make it a 'happy' place. At the same time, it has to be ergonomically sound. Lastly, we will be showing it to our clients, so without undoing the above objectives, it would be nice if it was 'cool' (yet functional). Whilst Television doesn't transfer to real life always, think 'CTU' from 24."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
-
Dubai's Police Chief Calls BlackBerry a Spy Tool
Posted: September 5th, 2010, 8:20am CEST by Soulskill
Tags: security
crimeandpunishment writes "Does the battle over the Blackberry ban in the United Arab Emirates have its roots in a spy story? Dubai's police chief says concern over espionage (specifically, by the US and Israel) led to the decision to limit BlackBerry services. The UAE says it will block BlackBerry email, messaging, and web services on October 11th unless it gets access to encrypted data. Comments by Lt. Gen. Dahi Khalfan Tamim are often seen as reflecting the views of Dubai's leadership, and would appear to indicate a very hard line in talks with Research in Motion."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
-
DoD Takes Criticism From Security Experts On Cyberwar Incident
Posted: September 5th, 2010, 12:59am CEST by Soulskill
Tags: government
wiredmikey writes "Undersecretary of Defense William J. Lynn is being challenged by IT security experts who find it hard to believe that the incident which led to the Pentagon's recognizing cyberspace as a new 'domain of warfare' could have really happened as described. In his essay, 'Defending a New Domain,' Lynn recounts a widely-reported 2008 hack that was initiated when, according to Lynn, an infected flash drive was inserted into a military laptop by 'a foreign intelligence agency.' Critics such as IT security firm Sophos' Chief Security Adviser Chester Wisniewski argue that this James Bond-like scenario doesn't stand up to scrutiny. The primary issue is that the malware involved, known as agent.btz, is neither sophisticated nor particularly dangerous. A variant of the SillyFDC worm, agent.btz can be easily defeated by disabling the Windows 'autorun' feature (which automatically starts a program on a drive upon insertion) or by simply banning thumb drives. In 2007, Silly FDC was rated as Risk Level 1: Very Low, by security firm Symantec."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
-
Nasty Data-Stealing Bug Haunts Internet Explorer 8
Posted: September 4th, 2010, 11:48pm CEST by Soulskill
Tags: msie
Trailrunner7 writes "There's an unpatched vulnerability in Internet Explorer 8 that enables simple data-stealing attacks by Web-based attackers and could lead to an attacker hijacking a user's authenticated session on a third-party site. The flaw, which a researcher said may have been known since 2008, lies in the way IE8 handles CSS. The vulnerability can be exploited through an attack scenario known as cross-domain theft, and researcher Chris Evans originally brought the problem to light in a blog post in December. At the time, all of the major browsers were vulnerable to the attack, but since then, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera all have implemented a simple defense mechanism. The upshot of this is that if a victim has visited a given Web site, authenticated himself to the site, and then visits a site controlled by an attacker, the attacker would have the ability to hijack the user's session and extract supposedly confidential data. This attack works on the latest, fully patched release of IE8."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Slashdot: Linux
-
Ubuntu 10.10 Beta Released
Posted: September 4th, 2010, 4:40pm CEST by Soulskill
Tags: ubuntu
RandyDownes sends word that Canonical has released the beta version of Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat). The release announcement boasts faster boot times, GNOME 2.31, and a speedier version of Evolution. In addition, "The Ubuntu Software Center has an updated look and feel, including the new 'Featured' and 'What's New' views for showcasing applications, and an improved package description view. You can now easily access your package installation history too." The release notes and download page are both available.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Slashdot: IT
-
Spammers Attack Apple's Ping Social Network
Posted: September 4th, 2010, 3:29pm CEST by Soulskill
Tags: spam
An anonymous reader writes "Scammers and spammers have deluged the new Ping musical social network, created by Apple and built into the new version of iTunes. Sophos researchers have found that Ping is being overrun by scams and spam messages. 'Apple seems to have anticipated a certain degree of malfeasance, as profile pictures that you upload will not appear until approved by Apple. They are likely filtering for other offensive content as well, so they probably have means in place they could use to stop the spam.' It's ironic that the most common scams on Ping right now revolve around Apple's own iPhone." The Sophos blog post adds that Apple is doing their best to clamp down on the spam, manually deleting many of the offending messages for now. Reader Tootech adds that Facebook integration was quickly disabled, possibly because of blocked API access.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
-
Google Wave To Live On As 'Wave In a Box'
Posted: September 4th, 2010, 5:33am CEST by timothy
Tags: google
snydeq writes "Google Wave will morph into an application bundle for real-time collaboration, according to a blog post by Google Wave engineer Alex North. 'We will expand upon the 200K lines of code we've already open sourced (detailed at waveprotocol.org) to flesh out the existing example Wave server and Web client into a more complete application or "Wave in a Box,"' North said, adding that the future of the recently flat-lined Google service will be 'defined by your contributions. We hope this project will help the Wave developer community continue to grow and evolve,' he said."Read more of this story at Slashdot.