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Microsoft Proposes Fix For E-Voting Attack
Posted: October 31st, 2011, 10:09pm CET by Soulskill
Tags: microsoft
Trailrunner7 writes "Microsoft Research has proposed mitigation for a known potential attack against verifiable electronic voting machines that could help prevent insiders from being able to alter votes after the fact. The countermeasure to the 'trash attack' involves adding a cryptographic hash to the receipts that voters receive (PDF). Many verifiable voting systems already include hashes on the receipts, but that hash is typically made from the ballot data for each specific voter. The idea proposed by Microsoft Research involves using a running hash that would add a hash of the previous voter's receipt to each person's receipt, ideally preventing a privileged insider from using discarded receipts to alter votes. The trash attack that the mitigation is designed to address involves election workers or others who might be motivated to change votes gathering discarded receipts and then altering those votes." -
First Android Device Certified For DoD Personnel
Posted: October 31st, 2011, 9:27pm CET by Soulskill
Tags: android
aneroid writes "The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) has certified its first secure mobile device running Android 2.2 — the Dell Streak 5. It is certified for use in the Defense Department's secure but unclassified communications. 'Although the Streak 5 is no longer available commercially, Dell is supplying it to DOD because the military likes the form factor,' said John Marinho, director of Dell enterprise mobility solutions. It 'includes a set of Android application interfaces designed to enhance the security of the device. Besides being able to transmit secure unclassified messages, the device can have its data remotely wiped in the event of loss or theft.' The device also has the ability to lock down after multiple unsuccessful password entries and allows admins to remotely control the peripherals and security policy levels on the device. You may recall that President Obama got an NSA-certified phone-PDA to use instead of his BlackBerry. We also discussed a related article last year about the U.S. Army considering smartphones. So, how soon will we start seeing other smartphone vendors bid for secure-communications-devices contracts?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Federal Contractors Are $600 Screwdrivers
Posted: October 31st, 2011, 4:31pm CET by samzenpus
Tags: government
ideonexus writes "Last month an article appeared on Slashdot about how the government pays IT contractors twice what it pays its own workers. Missing from the article was how much the IT contractor pays its own workers. After working for a federal contractor for 10 years, a document accidentally leaked to employees by the contractor illustrated the incredible disparity between what the contractor was paying us and what they were charging the government. Like most contracts according to the GAO, the government provided our offices, utilities, computers, and training, leaving our salaries as the only overhead to the IT contractor, giving them an incredible incentive to keep them as low as possible to maximize profits. When the top 100 defense contractors cost taxpayers $306 billion, eliminating the federal contractor middle-man seems like an obvious place to start the austerity measures."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Authorities Seize Duqu's C&C Servers In Mumbai
Posted: October 31st, 2011, 3:11pm CET by samzenpus
Tags: security
wiredmikey writes "In Mumbai, Indian authorities seized components from servers in a data center after Symantec informed them that they were communicating with the command and control infrastructure used by Duqu, the Trojan that is touted as the precursor to the next Stuxnet. According to a report from Reuters, officials the Department of Information Technology in India seized hard drives and other components from a server hosted in a Mumbai data center. Security vendors and government labs are worried that malware such as Duqu and Stuxnet are the building blocks needed in order for attackers to target critical infrastructure. Based on the initial analysis of Duqu, many researchers warned that it was the second generation development of Stuxnet, but this is still the subject of much debate, with some experts now saying that the connection between the two malicious programs is questionable."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Microsoft Drops Suit Against Firm In Botnet Case
Posted: October 30th, 2011, 7:17pm CET by samzenpus
Tags: botnet
wiredmikey writes "Microsoft has dismissed a lawsuit against a company it contended a month ago was at the heart of the now-defunct Kelihos botnet. In September, Microsoft named Dominique Piatti and his company dotFree Group SRO as controllers of the botnet. The move marked the first time Microsoft had named a defendant in one of its botnet-related civil suits. 'Since the Kelihos takedown, we have been in talks with Mr. Piatti and dotFree Group s.r.o. and, after reviewing the evidence voluntarily provided by Mr. Piatti, we believe that neither he nor his business were involved in controlling the subdomains used to host the Kelihos botnet,' blogged Richard Domingues Boscovich, Senior Attorney for Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit. 'Rather, the controllers of the Kelihos botnet leveraged the subdomain services offered by Mr. Piatti's cz.cc domain.' In regards to Kelihos, Boscovich said Microsoft is continuing its legal fight against the 22 'John Does' listed as co-defendants in the lawsuit."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Ohio Emergency Responders Stage Mock Zombie Invasion
Posted: October 30th, 2011, 4:10pm CET by samzenpus
Tags: government
destinyland writes "An Ohio Emergency Management Agency staged a mock zombie attack using more than 225 volunteers dressed as zombies at an Ohio college. 'Organizers hoped the theme would attract more volunteers than previous simulations of industrial accidents or train crashes,' the AP reports, quoting a spokesman for the agency as saying that 'People got zombie fever here in Delaware.' The exercise included decontamination procedures for hazardous materials, and was inspired by an 'emergency preparedness' post on the CDC web site citing the popular fascination with zombies. Now, 'Dozens of agencies have embraced the idea,' the AP reports, 'spreading the message that if you're prepared for a zombie attack, you're prepared for just about anything.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Ohio Emergency Responders Stage Mock Zombie Invasion
Posted: October 30th, 2011, 4:10pm CET by samzenpus
Tags: government
destinyland writes "An Ohio Emergency Management Agency staged a mock zombie attack using more than 225 volunteers dressed as zombies at an Ohio college. 'Organizers hoped the theme would attract more volunteers than previous simulations of industrial accidents or train crashes,' the AP reports, quoting a spokesman for the agency as saying that 'People got zombie fever here in Delaware.' The exercise included decontamination procedures for hazardous materials, and was inspired by an 'emergency preparedness' post on the CDC web site citing the popular fascination with zombies. Now, 'Dozens of agencies have embraced the idea,' the AP reports, 'spreading the message that if you're prepared for a zombie attack, you're prepared for just about anything.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Can Open Hardware Transform the Data Center?
Posted: October 30th, 2011, 10:13am CET by Soulskill
Tags: Hardware
1sockchuck writes "Is the data center industry on the verge of a revolution in which open source hardware designs transform the process of designing and building these facilities? This week the Open Compute Project gained momentum and structure, forming a foundation as it touted participation from IT heavyweights Intel, Dell, Amazon, Facebook, Red Hat and Rackspace. That turnout is not an isolated event, but reflects a growing focus on collaborative projects to reduce cost, timelines and inefficiency in data center construction and operation. The Open Compute project is just one of a handful of initiatives to bring standards and repeatable designs to IT infrastructure."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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RIM Helps Indian Authorities Access BlackBerry Messages
Posted: October 28th, 2011, 11:33pm CEST by Soulskill
Tags: blackberry
judgecorp writes "RIM has set up a surveillance facility in India to help the authorities monitor users' BlackBerry messages, according to reports. This comes after a long argument in which RIM at first tried to resist opening up to Indian government scrutiny."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Four CAs Have Been Compromised Since June
Posted: October 28th, 2011, 10:08pm CEST by Soulskill
Tags: internet
Trailrunner7 writes "The EFF, through the use of its SSL Observatory, has taken a look at the data from certificate revocation lists for SSL certificates in recent months, and found that there were four separate CAs compromised in the last four months. The only widely known CA compromise since June is the attack on DigiNotar this summer that completely compromised that company's CA infrastructure and eventually led to it being shut down. All of the major browser vendors were forced to revoke their trust in the DigiNotar root certificates and the attacker who claimed credit for the attack said that he also had compromised several other CAs. There are apparently three other CAs that have discovered compromises since June, but have not made them public."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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TSA's VIPR Bites Rail, Bus, and Ferry Passengers
Posted: October 28th, 2011, 9:23pm CEST by Soulskill
Tags: security
OverTheGeicoE writes "TSA's VIPR program may be expanding. According to the Washington Times, 'TSA has always intended to expand beyond the confines of airport terminals. Its agents have been conducting more and more surprise groping sessions for women, children and the elderly in locations that have nothing to do with aviation.' In Tennessee earlier this month, bus passengers in Nashville and Knoxville were searched in addition to the truck searches discussed here previously. Earlier this year in Savannah, Georgia, TSA forced a group of train travelers, including young children, to be patted down. (They were getting off the train, not on.) Ferry passengers have also been targeted. According to TSA Administrator John Pistole's testimony before the Senate last June, 'TSA conducted more than 8,000 VIPR operations in the [previous] 12 months, including more than 3,700 operations in mass-transit and passenger-railroad venues.' He wants a 50% budget increase for VIPR for 2012. Imagine what TSA would do with the extra funding."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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FAA Goes To the Web To Fight Laser-Pointing
Posted: October 28th, 2011, 6:49am CEST by samzenpus
Tags: security
coondoggie writes "The Federal Aviation Administration wants you to go online to help it battle the growing safety problem of people pointing lasers at flying aircraft. The FAA today said it created a new website to make it easier for pilots and the public to report laser incidents and obtain information on the problem which continues to grow by leaps and bounds. This year, pilots reported 2,795 laser events through Oct. 20. Pilots have reported the most laser events in 2011 in Phoenix (96), Philadelphia (95) and Chicago (83). Since it began tracking laser events in 2005 reports rose from nearly 300 to 2,836 in 2010, the FAA said."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Inside Facebook's Cyber-Security System
Posted: October 28th, 2011, 2:14am CEST by samzenpus
Tags: cloud
An anonymous reader writes "The Facebook Immunity System (FIS) processes and checks 25 billion actions every day, or 650,000 actions every second. The social networking giant's cybersecurity system was developed over a three-year period to keep the service's users safe from spam and cyberattacks. FIS scans every click on Facebook for patterns that could suggest something malicious is spreading across the social network."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Cutting Open a Heatsink Heatpipe To See Inside
Posted: October 27th, 2011, 9:48pm CEST by timothy
Tags: upgrades
An anonymous reader writes "Frostytech gets to the heart of Zalman's CNPS11X heatsink by cutting a section of heatpipe from the CPU cooler to inspect its inner composite heatpipe wick structure. Now that's an in-depth heatsink review! Interesting photos of the dissected heatpipe's composite wick — sintered copper powder on top and axial groove wick below — that you're unlikely to see elsewhere. In the late 1960s the first commercial heatpipes were used by NASA to stabilize satellite temperatures; now they stabilize multi-core processors."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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DARPA: Reconstruct Shredded Docs, Win $50K USD
Posted: October 27th, 2011, 9:26pm CEST by timothy
Tags: encryption
ematic writes with a link to an interesting competition from DARPA: "The ability to reconstruct shredded documents will potentially yield information that may save lives or offer critical information about an adversary's plans. Currently, this process is much too slow and too labor-intensive, particularly if the documents are handwritten. We are looking to the Shredder Challenge to generate some leap-ahead thinking in this area. The Shredder Challenge is composed of five separate problems. The overall prize awarded depends on the number and difficulty of problems solved."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Avira Anti-Virus Detects Itself
Posted: October 27th, 2011, 8:41pm CEST by samzenpus
Tags: bug
ddfall writes "After a recent update, Avira's anti-virus software reports its own AESCRIPT.DLL file as a trojan or spyware. From the article: 'The dodgy AntiVir virus definition file was quickly pulled and replaced with a new version – 7.11.16.146 – that resolves the problem, as explained in an official post on Avira's support forum.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Hackers Briefly Controlled US Government Satellites
Posted: October 27th, 2011, 7:42pm CEST by timothy
Tags: security
Orome1 writes "Two U.S. satellites have been tampered with by hackers — possibly Chinese ones — in 2007 and 2008, claims a soon-to-be released report by the the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. The two satellites, Landsat-7 and Terra AM-1, had been interfered with on four separate occasions, allowing the attackers to be in command of the satellites for two to over twelve minutes each time. Luckily, both of the satellites are used only for observing the Earth's climate and terrain, and the hackers never actually misused their control over them in any way."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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How To Rob a Bank: One Social Engineer's Story
Posted: October 27th, 2011, 6:08pm CEST by timothy
Tags: business
itwbennett writes "Today's criminals aren't stealing money — that's so yesterday, according to professional social engineer Jim Stickley. In an interview with CSO's Joan Goodchild, Stickley explains how he's broken into financial institutions large and small, and stolen their sensitive data. In a companion story, Stickley walks through the steps he takes to fool clients into thinking he's there for fire safety, while he's really proving they are an easy target for a data breach."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Android Orphans: a Sad History of Platform Abandonment
Posted: October 27th, 2011, 4:34pm CEST by timothy
Tags: android
MBCook writes "After seeing the announcement that Nexus One users won't get ICS, Michael Degusta made a chart to show how current the OS version on Android phones was over time... and the results are not encouraging."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Americas New CIO Wants To Disrupt Government and Make It a Startup
Posted: October 26th, 2011, 8:33pm CEST by samzenpus
Tags: government
An anonymous reader writes "America's new CIO Steven VanRoekel wants to revamp the federal government and make it as agile as a startup. But first he has to get rid of bugs like the Department of Agriculture's 21 different e-mail systems. From the article: '“Too often, we have built closed, monolithic projects that are outdated or no longer needed by the time they launch,” he said. As an example, he mentioned the Defense Department’s human resources management system. Dubbed the “Defense Integrated Military Human Resource System,” the project was meant to take seven years to develop. Instead, it took 10, cost $850 million and had to be scrapped after 10 years of development in 2010 because it ended up being useless.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Expert: Duqu Is a Custom Attack Framework
Posted: October 26th, 2011, 7:03pm CEST by Unknown Lamer
Tags: security
Trailrunner7 writes "All of the hype about Duqu being the next Stuxnet obscured many of the real facts about the new malware. It turns out that Duqu not only is essentially a customizable attack framework with separate modules for each target, but that it has been found on high-value networks in Iran and the Sudan. A detailed analysis of the Duqu malware files by Alex Gostev of Kaspersky Lab shows that the malware uses different drivers and modules for every target. 'It is obvious that every single Duqu incident is unique with its own unique files using different names and checksums. Duqu is used for targeted attacks with carefully selected victims,' Gostev said."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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New Attack Tool Exploits SSL Renegotiation Bug
Posted: October 26th, 2011, 6:01am CEST by Soulskill
Tags: encryption
Trailrunner7 writes "A group of researchers has released a tool that they say implements a denial-of-service attack against SSL servers by triggering a huge number of SSL renegotiations, eventually consuming all of the server's resources and making it unavailable. The tool exploits a widely known issue with the way that SSL connections work. The attack tool, released by a group called The Hacker's Choice, is meant to exploit the fact that it takes a lot of server resources to handle SSL handshakes at the beginning of a session, and that if a client or series of clients sends enough session requests to a given server, the server will at some point fail. The condition can be worsened when SSL renegotiation is enabled on a server. SSL renegotiation is used in a number of scenarios, but most commonly when there is a need for a client-side certificate. The authors of the tool say that the attack will work on servers without SSL renegotiation enabled, but with some modifications."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Mitsubishi Hack Stole Nuclear, Defense Data
Posted: October 26th, 2011, 3:55am CEST by Soulskill
Tags: security
judgecorp writes "When Mitsubishi announced in September it had been hacked in August it was criticized for keeping quiet for a month. Now it appears that the attackers got nuclear power plant and military aircraft details according to sources quoted in the Japanese media."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Copiale Cipher Decoded
Posted: October 25th, 2011, 5:01pm CEST by timothy
Tags: ai
eldavojohn writes "The 18th century Copiale Cipher has finally been decoded after a few minor breakthroughs were made by linguists versed in machine translation analyzing the document. From the article, 'Kevin Knight, a computer scientist at the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California, collaborated with Beata Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer of Uppsala University in Sweden to decipher the first 16 pages. They turn out to be a detailed description of a ritual from a secret society that apparently had a fascination with eye surgery and ophthalmology.' The Roman characters and abstract symbols turned out to be a sort of encryption of the German language. The important clues they discovered were that the Roman characters were nulls (misleading junk) and the bogus looking symbols the actual text. Lastly, a colon would mean a duplication of the last consonant. A cipher falls to word-frequency analysis. Perhaps the researchers could start another 'weekend project' and tackle The Voynich Manuscript for us?" Update: 10/25 15:25 GMT by T : eldavojohn adds also a link to the final translation.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Ask Slashdot: DD-WRT Upgrade To 802.11n?
Posted: October 25th, 2011, 4:38pm CEST by timothy
Tags: networking
First time accepted submitter krinderlin writes "My home network consists of a Linksys WRT54GL for WAN access and a WRT54G version 8 for a wireless bridge for my Blu-Ray and old XBox 360*. Due to a recent move and coaxial jack placements, I can't run Ethernet to the office, so I'm now looking at about 8 wireless clients at any given time. I'd like to start piecing together a network upgrade to 802.11n, but want to keep the flexibility and power of DD-WRT. So what 802.11n routers do you have with DD-WRT? What would you recommend for PCIe x1 and USB adapters? *Because $100 for a 802.11g adapter is pure insanity."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Jaguar Recalls 18,000 Cars Over Major Software Fault
Posted: October 25th, 2011, 4:17pm CEST by timothy
Tags: business
DMandPenfold writes with this excerpt from ComputerWorld UK "Jaguar has recalled nearly 18,000 X-type cars after it discovered a major software fault, which meant drivers might not be able to turn off cruise control. The problem lies with engine management control software developed in-house by Jaguar. The problematic software is only installed on diesel engine X-Types, which were all produced between 2006 and 2010. Some 17,678 vehicles have been recalled, as a result of the potentially dangerous problem. If the fault occurs, cruise control can only be disabled by turning of the ignition while driving — which would mean a loss of some control and in many cars also disables power steering. Braking or pressing the cancel button will not work. 'Jaguar has identified that should an error with certain interfacing systems be detected the cruise control system will be disabled and an error message displayed to the driver on the instrument cluster,' the company said in a statement."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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The Register Email Address Blunder
Posted: October 25th, 2011, 10:13am CEST by Unknown Lamer
Tags: security
First time accepted submitter Tim99 writes "This morning I got an email from The Register informing me that they have sent 3,521 of their readers the names and e-mail addresses of 46,000 other readers. Considering their frequent rants about security this has got to be a major FAIL." El Reg writes: "Obviously, this was an error. The two-stage send process that is the norm for all of our mailers was over-looked because someone was in a hurry."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Bug Opens Chrome to Easy Remote Code Execution
Posted: October 24th, 2011, 5:31pm CEST by Unknown Lamer
Tags: bug
Orome1 writes "ACROS Security notified Google about a peculiar behavior of the Chrome browser that can be exploited for execution of remote code outside Chrome sandbox under specific conditions. It is another case of file planting, where an application loads a data file (as opposed to binary file, leading to binary planting) from the current working directory. Google decided that this was not a vulnerability, but rather a 'strange behavior that [they] should consider changing.' The reason they provided was that 'the social engineering level involved here is significantly higher than "Your computer is infected with a virus, download this free anti-virus software and run the exe file to fix it."'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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UK Government Pushing For 'Trusted Computing'
Posted: October 23rd, 2011, 6:33pm CEST by timothy
Tags: privacy
Motor writes "As has long been expected — we are now beginning to see governments pushing for the use of so-called 'trusted computing' — chips installed in all computers that effectively remove control of the PC from its owner. While there may be security advantages to some of the ideas, few can doubt that it represents a fundamental shift in the IT world. A radical move away from an open technology landscape and towards a system that denies all access unless you have the right credentials. Governments will demand the right credentials to access their services — meaning approved software stacks (i.e Windows) with the right digital signatures. Vernor Vinge had it right ."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Microsoft's Office365 Limits Emails To 500 Recipients
Posted: October 22nd, 2011, 9:21pm CEST by timothy
Tags: cloud
suraj.sun writes "ZDNet's Ed Bott warns small businesses that if you sign up with Microsoft's Office 365, make sure you read the fine print carefully as an obscure clause in the terms of service limits the number of recipients you're allowed to contact in a day, which could affect the business very badly. Office 365's small business accounts (P1 plan) are limited to 500 recipients per 24 hours and enterprise accounts are limited to 1500. That's a limitation of 500 recipients during a single day. And the limitation doesn't apply to unique recipients. It's not hard to imagine scenarios in which a small business can bump up against that number."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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XML Encryption Broken, Need To Fix W3C Standard
Posted: October 22nd, 2011, 8:50am CEST by timothy
Tags: security
gzipped_tar writes "Researchers from Ruhr University Bochum demonstrated the insecurity of XML encryption standard at ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security in Chicago this week. 'Everything is insecure,' is the uncomfortable message from Bochum. As pointed out by the Ars Technica article, XML Encryption is used widely as part of server-to-server Web services connections to transmit secure information mixed with non-sensitive data, based on cipher-block chaining. But it is apparently too weak, as demonstrated by Juraj Somorovsky and Tibor Jager. They were able to decrypt data by sending modified ciphertexts to the server by gathering information from the received error messages. The attack was tested against a popular open source implementation of XML Encryption, and against the implementations of companies that responded to the responsible disclosure — in all cases the result was the same: the attack worked. Fixing the vulnerability will require a revision of the W3C XML encryption standard, Somorovsky said. The researchers informed all possibly affected companies through the mailing list of W3C, following a clear responsible disclosure process."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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New JBOSS Worm Infecting Unpatched Servers
Posted: October 22nd, 2011, 3:58am CEST by timothy
Tags: security
Trailrunner7 writes "There is a new worm circulating right now that is compromising servers running older versions of the JBoss Application Server and then adding them to a botnet. The worm also attempts to install a remote access tool in order to give the attacker control over the newly infected server. The worm has been circulating for a couple of days at least, and it's not clear right now how many servers have been compromised or what the origins of it are. It apparently exploits an old vulnerability in the JBoss Application Server, which was patched in April 2010, in order to compromise new machines. Once that's accomplished, the worm begins a post-infection routine that includes a number of different steps."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Nasdaq Intrusion Spreads To Listed Companies
Posted: October 22nd, 2011, 12:06am CEST by Soulskill
Tags: security
New submitter SpzToid writes "Nasdaq's Directors Desk is a program sold to both listed and private companies, whose board members use it to share documents and communicate with executives. Apparently Directors Desk was infected during a breach widely publicized earlier this year. It has now become known that hackers were able to access confidential documents and communications of the corporate directors and board members who received this infected application, said Tom Kellermann, chief technology officer with security technology firm AirPatrol Corp. It is unclear how long the Directors Desk application was infected before the exchange identified the breach, according to Kellermann and another source."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Most Sophisticated Rootkit Getting an Overhaul
Posted: October 21st, 2011, 10:35pm CEST by Soulskill
Tags: botnet
jfruhlinger writes "TDL4, a rootkit that helps build a powerful botnet, is pegged by security vendor ESET as one of the most sophisticated pieces of malware in the world. But its creators aren't resting on their laurels; they're rewriting some of the code from the ground up to make it difficult for antimalware to detect it, creating a hidden boot partition that guarantees malware code will be loaded even before the operating system is. It's part of a plan to turn TDL4 into a turnkey product that can be sold to other criminal operations."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Researchers ID Skype, BitTorrent Users
Posted: October 21st, 2011, 7:45pm CEST by Soulskill
Tags: privacy
itwbennett writes "Researchers have figured out a way to link online Skype users to their activity on peer-to-peer networks like BitTorrent. The team was able to sift out the nodes through which Skype calls are routed and determine the user's real IP address by sniffing the packets. To correlate the identified Skype users with files shared on BitTorrent, the researchers built tools to collect BitTorrent file identifiers, a BitTorrent crawler to collect IP addresses on the network and a verifier to match an online Skype user with an online BitTorrent user (PDF). 'As soon as the BitTorrent crawler detects a matching IP address, it signals the verifier, which immediately calls the corresponding Skype user and, at the same time, initiates a handshake with the BitTorrent client,' they wrote."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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How To Stop the Next WikiLeaks
Posted: October 21st, 2011, 2:07pm CEST by samzenpus
Tags: security
Hugh Pickens writes "Eli Lake reports that the U.S.'s 16 intelligence agencies are using a program called SureView that makes it easier to spy on the spies and catch whistleblowers early in the act. SureView is a type of auditing software that specializes in 'behavior-based internal monitoring' that monitors the intelligence officer's computer activity. If the officer acts like a potential leaker, sending an encrypted email or using an unregistered thumb drive, the analyst might push a button and watch a screen video of the officer's last hour of work. Once a case is made that a leak might be imminent, it is checkmate: the agent is thwarted. 'Had SureView been on Bradley Manning's machine, no one would know who Bradley Manning is today,' says Ryan Szedelo, manager for Raytheon's SureView software. The intelligence community has had auditing software for years. SureView came on the market in 2002. But the programs were buggy and often prone to false positives, alerting a network administrator too often to routine behavior. 'The technology has gotten substantially better in the last year,' says Jeffrey Harris, a former head of the National Reconnaissance Office. 'The problem with audit files was it took an army of people to understand them. Now we have rule-driven systems and expert systems that help us reason through the data.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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TSA Doing Random Truck Searches On Tennessee Highway
Posted: October 21st, 2011, 12:49am CEST by samzenpus
Tags: security
OverTheGeicoE writes "TSA is expanding its presence to the American road system. As part of its Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response (VIPR) program, TSA agents are now working at 5 weigh stations and two bus stations in Tennessee. They are randomly checking trucks with 'drug and bomb sniffing dogs', and encouraging truck drivers to join their First Observer Highway Security Program and report anything suspicious that they see to authorities. VIPR is allegedly not a response to any particular threat."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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British Police Accused of Stealing Software
Posted: October 20th, 2011, 2:09pm CEST by samzenpus
Tags: crime
judgecorp writes "The West Yorkshire police force is in the British High court today, accused of stealing intellectual property from a firm whose software decodes forensic data from mobile phones. Forensic Telecoms Services claims the force illegally used and sold copyright data from a commercial mobile phone forensics application it had been using in high profile cases."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Entry-Level NAS Storage Servers Compared
Posted: October 20th, 2011, 1:37am CEST by samzenpus
Tags: storage
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Desmond Fuller provides an in-depth comparison of five entry-level NAS storage servers, including cabinets from Iomega, Netgear, QNAP, Synology, and Thecus. 'With so many use cases and potential buyers, the vendors too often try to be everything to everyone. The result is a class of products that suffers from an identity crisis — so-called business storage solutions that are overloaded with consumer features and missing the ease and simplicity that business users require,' Fuller writes. 'Filled with 10TB or 12TB of raw storage, my test systems ranged in price from $1,699 to $3,799. Despite that gap, they all had a great deal in common, from core storage services to performance. However, I found the richest sets of business features — straightforward setup, easy remote access, plentiful backup options — at the higher end of the scale.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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German Surveillance Trojan Spies On Fifteen Apps
Posted: October 19th, 2011, 7:05pm CEST by Unknown Lamer
Tags: government
itwbennett writes "Researchers from Kaspersky Lab have discovered that the R2D2 surveillance Trojan, which is used by German law enforcement to intercept Internet phone calls, is capable of monitoring traffic from popular browsers and instant messaging applications. 'Amongst the new things we found in there are two rather interesting ones: Firstly, this version is not only capable of running on 32 bit systems; it also includes support for 64 bit versions of Windows,' said Tillmann Werner, a security researcher with Kaspersky in Germany. 'Secondly, the list of target processes to monitor is longer than the one mentioned in the CCC report. The number of applications infected by the various components is 15 in total.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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iPhone Keylogger Can Snoop On Desktop Typing
Posted: October 19th, 2011, 3:12am CEST by Soulskill
Tags: cellphones
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at Georgia Tech demonstrate that a mobile phone located near a keyboard can use its accelerometers to recover text typed by a target. 'The technique works through probability and by detecting pairs of keystrokes, rather than individual keys (which still is too difficult to accomplish reliably, Traynor said). It models “keyboard events” in pairs, then determines whether the pair of keys pressed is on the left versus right side of the keyboard, and whether they are close together or far apart. After the system has determined these characteristics for each pair of keys depressed, it compares the results against a preloaded dictionary, each word of which has been broken down along similar measurements (i.e., are the letters left/right, near/far on a standard QWERTY keyboard).'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Precursor To the Next Stuxnet?
Posted: October 18th, 2011, 10:43pm CEST by Unknown Lamer
Tags: security
An anonymous reader writes "On Oct. 14, 2011 Symantec was alerted to a malware sample from some recovered computers that demonstrated code similar to Stuxnet. This code however appears to serve a different purpose, apparently laying the groundwork for a future Stuxnet type of attack." Quoting Symantec: "The threat was written by the same authors (or those that have access to the Stuxnet source code) and appears to have been created since the last Stuxnet file was recovered. Duqu's purpose is to gather intelligence data and assets from entities, such as industrial control system manufacturers, in order to more easily conduct a future attack against another third party. The attackers are looking for information such as design documents that could help them mount a future attack on an industrial control facility."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Flooding Takes Major Hard Drive Plant Offline; Shortages Predicted
Posted: October 18th, 2011, 7:55pm CEST by Unknown Lamer
Tags: Hardware
snydeq writes "Flooding near Bangkok has taken about 25 percent of the world's hard disk manufacturing capacity offline, InfoWorld reports. 'Disk manufacturing sites in Thailand — notably including the largest Western Digital plant — were shut down due to floods around Bangkok last week and are expected to remain shut for at least several more days. The end to flooding is not in sight, and Western Digital now says it could take five to eight months to bring its plants back online.' Toshiba's Thailand plants have also been affected, as have key disk component suppliers, including Nidec and Hutchinson Technologies."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Making Sensitive Data Location Aware
Posted: October 18th, 2011, 3:43pm CEST by timothy
Tags: cellphones
An anonymous reader writes "In a breakthrough that could aid spies, keepers of medical records, and parents who want to prevent their kids from 'sexting,' a team of Virginia Tech researchers has created software to remotely put smart phones under lockdown. The phones are given permission to access sensitive data while in a particular room, but when the devices leave the room, the data is completely wiped. A general, for example, could access secret intelligence while visiting a secure government facility without fear that his or her smart phone or tablet computer might later be lost or stolen, the team's lead researcher said. 'This system provides something that has never been available before. It puts physical boundaries around information in cyberspace.'" Unless the phone or other device can also take screenshots, or doesn't have that software installed.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Analysis of 250,000 Hacker Conversations
Posted: October 18th, 2011, 12:32am CEST by Soulskill
Tags: security
Orome1 writes "Imperva released a report (PDF) analyzing the content and activities of an online hacker forum with nearly 220,000 registered members, although many are dormant. The forum is used by hackers for training, communications, collaboration, recruitment, commerce and even social interaction. Commercially, this forum serves as a marketplace for selling of stolen data and attack software. The chat rooms are filled with technical subjects ranging from advice on attack planning to solicitations for help with specific campaigns."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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NoScript For Android Devices Released
Posted: October 17th, 2011, 9:42pm CEST by Soulskill
Tags: android
Trailrunner7 writes "The new version of NoScript, the popular browser add-on that blocks JavaScript and other embedded objects from running on Web pages, is out in alpha form. It can now run on Android-based smartphones, giving users protection against script-based attacks on their mobile devices. The release of NoScript Anywhere includes a variety of new features, but it's the support for Firefox Mobile that is the big attraction. The add-on for Android devices is meant to mimic the desktop version, giving users the ability to set permissions for each individual site and use a default policy for restricting content. NoScript also now includes an anti-clickjacking feature and an anti-XSS filter designed to protect users from cross-site scripting attacks. The new version also works on Maemo-based phones and tablets."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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How To Catch a Laptop Thief?
Posted: October 16th, 2011, 7:03pm CEST by samzenpus
Tags: security
First time accepted submitter otaku244 writes "I spent a day in Vancouver this week while working in Seattle. While I enjoyed the area, some Vancouver citizen decided to enjoy my Macbook Pro. Unfortunately, I didn't discover this until I was already back at my Seattle hotel. Needless to say, I am quite miffed at the whole experience. Fortunately, I have LogMeIn installed on that machine. I provided the IP address to the VPD, but they say that laws don't allow warrants solely on the physical address tied to an IP. It sounds like the silver bullet is to take a picture of the person using the laptop. The question becomes, how do I convince the guy to run a script that will take a picture of him and smtp it to me? I promise to post pics of the guy if this gets pulled off successfully!"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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NASA CTO Says Help Desks May Disappear
Posted: October 15th, 2011, 12:47am CEST by timothy
Tags: cloud
Lucas123 writes "NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has placed its data, from photos of Mars to top secret government information, in 10 different public or private clouds. JPL's 5,000 workers have access to that data with any mobile devices they want to use, as long as it has first been secured. Because JPL's and other workforces are becoming more mobile, a help desk as it's known today may soon become unnecessary, according to JPL's IT CTO Tom Soderstrom. 'Have you ever called a help desk for your mobile device? What do you do? Probably, the first you do is Google or Bing it,' he said. 'If you can't get your answer there, you ask your friends who are like you. For us, that's the workgroup.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Security Researcher Threatened With Vulnerability Repair Bill
Posted: October 15th, 2011, 12:03am CEST by Soulskill
Tags: security
mask.of.sanity writes "A security consultant who quietly tipped off an Australian superannuation fund about a web vulnerability that potentially put millions of customers at risk has been slapped with a legal threat demanding he allow the company access to his computer, and warned he may be forced to pay the cost of fixing the flaw. A legal document (PDF) sent from the company demanded that the researcher provide its technical staff with access to his computer. The company acknowledged the researcher's work was altruistic and thanked him for his efforts, but warned that the disclosure, which was not previously made public, may have breached Australian law. The researcher had run a batch file to access about 500 accounts, which was then handed to the company to demonstrate the direct object reference vulnerability."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Ask Slashdot: What To Do With Old Webcams?
Posted: October 14th, 2011, 11:18pm CEST by Soulskill
Tags: Education
An anonymous reader writes "I work as an IT administrator at a school. We have just upgraded our entire webcam inventory (about 45 webcams, model Logitech Quickcam Communicate STX) and have all the old ones sitting around. I would like to know what a neat project would be to make use of all the old ones. I was figuring there would be an open project somewhere that involved mass amounts of webcams."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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SEC Says Public Firms May Need To Disclose Cyberattacks
Posted: October 14th, 2011, 10:34pm CEST by Soulskill
Tags: business
Trailrunner7 writes "The Securities and Exchange Commission has issued new guidance to help public companies determine when they may need to disclose an attack — or even a potential attack — in order to make potential investors aware of possible risks to the company's business. The guidance, which does not constitute a rule or requirement for companies to disclose, is meant to help registrants in 'assessing what, if any, disclosures should be provided about cybersecurity matters.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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US Blocks Huawei From Building LTE Network
Posted: October 14th, 2011, 4:19pm CEST by Soulskill
Tags: china
An anonymous reader writes "The U.S. government has cited national security as a reason not to let Chinese company Huawei build an LTE public safety network. They're worried about Huawei's close ties to the Chinese government and the threat of any devices Huawei manufactures being bugged. Of course, whoever gets the contract is going to be manufacturing their devices in China anyway, but it looks like a Chinese company won't be allowed to deploy the infrastructure."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Air Force Comments On Drone Malware
Posted: October 14th, 2011, 7:01am CEST by samzenpus
Tags: security
wiredmikey writes "Air Force officials have revealed more details about a malware infection that impacted systems used to manage a fleet of drones at the Creech Air Force Base in Nevada as reported last week. The 24th Air Force first detected the malware – which they characterized as a 'credential stealer' as opposed to a keylogger as originally reported — and notified Creech Air Force Base officials Sept. 15 that malware was found on portable hard drives approved for transferring information between systems. The infected computers were part of the ground control system that supports remotely-piloted aircraft (RPA) operations. The malware is not designed to transmit data or video or corrupt any files, programs or data, according to the Air Force. The ground system is separate from the flight control system used by RPA pilots to fly the aircrafts."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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More Details On the German Government's Use of Malware
Posted: October 13th, 2011, 11:59pm CEST by timothy
Tags: government
Reader HnT writes with an update on the German government's malware, recently dissected by the CCC: "The German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung reports details on cases where the government malware was used so far — all of them actually unlawful and in violation of its initial intention to only be used against serious crime and threats of terrorism."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Gate One 0.9 Released, Brings SSH To the Web
Posted: October 13th, 2011, 9:20pm CEST by timothy
Tags: cloud
Riskable writes "Dan McDougall (full disclosure: That's me) just publicly released the source code to Gate One, which is an HTML5-powered terminal emulator and SSH client. It is unique in that it doesn't require any browser plugins (it uses WebSockets) and supports multiple simultaneous terminals/SSH sessions in a single browser tab. It can resume users' sessions after being disconnected, and supports both client and server-side session recording/playback (view as a log or like a video). Gate One can also be embedded into other web-based applications such as administration interfaces, serial port concentrators, virtual appliances, or whatever."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Dutch ISP Files Police Complaint Against Spamhaus
Posted: October 13th, 2011, 7:35pm CEST by timothy
Tags: spam
judgecorp writes "Dutch ISP A2B has filed police complaints against anti-spam project Spamhaus, calling its CEO 'nuts' and accusing him of blackmail. Spamhaus added all A2B's addresses to a spam blacklist, when A2B did not obey the letter of its demands in blocking a spammer."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Ask Slashdot: Is Reverse DNS a Worthy Standard For Fighting Spam?
Posted: October 13th, 2011, 7:11pm CEST by timothy
Tags: spam
drmartin66 makes it to the front page with this question: "Last weekend I installed a new spam filter server for a client, and enabled connection rejection if the sending server did not have a Reverse DNS record. Since then, I have had a number of emails rejected from regulator bodies that do not have a Reverse DNS record, and are refusing to have one created for their email server. What is your opinion of Reverse DNS records? Are they (or should they be) a standard, and required? Or are they useless for spam fighting?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Ubuntu 11.10 ('Oneiric Ocelot') Released
Posted: October 13th, 2011, 5:46pm CEST by timothy
Tags: ubuntu
Cue the Ubuntu release parties — Ubuntu 11.10 has arrived. Ars Technica has a very positive summary of the changes in 11.10; Joe Brockmeier's piece of a few weeks back explains the return to Xen to Ubuntu and the introduction of Juju (formerly Ensemble). Asks an anonymous reader: "Any outstanding reasons why I shouldn't upgrade?" YMMV, but as a long-time Ubuntu user, and like many other users, I have mixed feelings about the concerted (and now complete) move away from a conventional WIMP interface to the new Unity. With previous versions, it was possible to choose a "classic" look rather than the default of Unity; now, for good or ill, the left-hand vertical menu is a permanent desktop element. It looks great to me, in the way the Canonical developers intend: as a consistent, replicable, supportable interface to recommend to (for instance) my parents — but I'm used to (and prefer!) more traditional WIMP environments, so at least for now have switched to Linux Mint's Debian Edition.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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NATO Exercise Banned From Jamming GPS
Posted: October 13th, 2011, 4:06am CEST by samzenpus
Tags: security
judgecorp writes "A major NATO exercise off the coast of Scotland has been ordered to stop using GPS jamming technology after complaints that to do so would endanger the lives of fishermen and disrupt civilian mobile phones. The exercise — called 'Joint Warrior' -planned to disrupt GPS for 20 miles around each warship"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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NATO Exercise Banned From Jamming GPS
Posted: October 13th, 2011, 4:06am CEST by samzenpus
Tags: security
judgecorp writes "A major NATO exercise off the coast of Scotland has been ordered to stop using GPS jamming technology after complaints that to do so would endanger the lives of fishermen and disrupt civilian mobile phones. The exercise — called 'Joint Warrior' — planned to disrupt GPS for 20 miles around each warship"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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SEO Via DNS "Piggybacking"
Posted: October 12th, 2011, 10:03pm CEST by samzenpus
Tags: security
An anonymous reader writes "There is an interesting story over at the SANS Internet Storm Center that shows details on about 50 organizations that have had new machine names added to their DNS zone information. These were then pointed to sites used to boost the search engine cred of pharma, personals, and porn sites. If you outsource your DNS, how would you ever catch something like this?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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SEO Via DNS "Piggybacking"
Posted: October 12th, 2011, 10:03pm CEST by samzenpus
Tags: security
An anonymous reader writes "There is an interesting story over at the SANS Internet Storm Center that shows details on about 50 organizations that have had new machine names added to their DNS zone information. These were then pointed to sites used to boost the search engine cred of pharma, personals, and porn sites. If you outsource your DNS, how would you ever catch something like this?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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BlackBerry Outage Spreads To North America
Posted: October 12th, 2011, 5:43pm CEST by Unknown Lamer
Tags: blackberry
iONiUM writes "With increasing pressure on RIM to catch up to the new phones, and the upcoming release of the iPhone 4S, could this three day outage of BlackBerry's service be a nail in the coffin? From the article 'The service disruptions are the worst since an outage swept north America two years ago, and come as Apple prepares to put on sale its already sold-out iPhone 4S on Friday.'" This is the same outage as was reported Monday. RIM has released a few details on what's happened: a failed software upgrade brought the system down, and, after repairing the first issue, the backlog of traffic overwhelmed their network infrastructure taking things down a second time.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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BlackBerry Outage Spreads To North America
Posted: October 12th, 2011, 5:43pm CEST by Unknown Lamer
Tags: blackberry
iONiUM writes "With increasing pressure on RIM to catch up to the new phones, and the upcoming release of the iPhone 4S, could this three day outage of BlackBerry's service be a nail in the coffin? From the article 'The service disruptions are the worst since an outage swept north America two years ago, and come as Apple prepares to put on sale its already sold-out iPhone 4S on Friday.'" This is the same outage as was reported Monday. RIM has released a few details on what's happened: a failed software upgrade brought the system down, and, after repairing the first issue, the backlog of traffic overwhelmed their network infrastructure taking things down a second time.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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BlackBerry Outage Spreads To North America
Posted: October 12th, 2011, 5:43pm CEST by Unknown Lamer
Tags: blackberry
iONiUM writes "With increasing pressure on RIM to catch up to the new phones, and the upcoming release of the iPhone 4S, could this three day outage of BlackBerry's service be a nail in the coffin? From the article 'The service disruptions are the worst since an outage swept north America two years ago, and come as Apple prepares to put on sale its already sold-out iPhone 4S on Friday.'" This is the same outage as was reported Monday. RIM has released a few details on what's happened: a failed software upgrade brought the system down, and, after repairing the first issue, the backlog of traffic overwhelmed their network infrastructure taking things down a second time.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Sony Targeted Yet Again; Thwarts Attackers This Time
Posted: October 12th, 2011, 2:55pm CEST by Unknown Lamer
Tags: security
alphadogg writes with an excerpt from a Network World article: "Sony suspended 93,000 user accounts on several of its gaming and entertainment networks after unauthorized login attempts on those accounts. The attempts occurred on the PlayStation Network, Sony Entertainment Network, and Sony Online Entertainment, and the company says that login information likely acquired from other sources was tested en masse on the networks. Only a 'small number' of the attempts were successful, and no credit card information was leaked. ... Sony Chief Information Security Officer Philip Reitinger said that 'less than one tenth of one percent' of the networks' users may have been affected."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Sony Targeted Yet Again; Thwarts Attackers This Time
Posted: October 12th, 2011, 2:55pm CEST by Unknown Lamer
Tags: security
alphadogg writes with an excerpt from a Network World article: "Sony suspended 93,000 user accounts on several of its gaming and entertainment networks after unauthorized login attempts on those accounts. The attempts occurred on the PlayStation Network, Sony Entertainment Network, and Sony Online Entertainment, and the company says that login information likely acquired from other sources was tested en masse on the networks. Only a 'small number' of the attempts were successful, and no credit card information was leaked. ... Sony Chief Information Security Officer Philip Reitinger said that 'less than one tenth of one percent' of the networks' users may have been affected."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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RSA Blames Nation State For Cyber Attack
Posted: October 12th, 2011, 4:25am CEST by Soulskill
Tags: security
An anonymous reader writes "Security firm RSA has revealed that it believes two groups, working on behalf of a single nation state, hacked into its servers and stole information related to the company's SecurID two-factor authentication products. Speaking at the RSA Security Conference in London, RSA executive chairman Art Coviello described the high profile attack thus: 'There were two individual groups from one nation state, one supporting the other. One was very visible and one less so. We've not attributed it to a particular nation state although we're very confident that with the skill, sophistication and resources involved it could only have been a nation state.' Sophos security researcher Graham Cluley questions how RSA has concluded that a country was responsible for the attack — when RSA is unwilling to name who it suspects. Could it be that the firm is simply applying spin, describing the attack as a 'highly sophisticated Advanced Persistent Threat' to protect its image?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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RSA Blames Nation State For Cyber Attack
Posted: October 12th, 2011, 4:25am CEST by Soulskill
Tags: security
An anonymous reader writes "Security firm RSA has revealed that it believes two groups, working on behalf of a single nation state, hacked into its servers and stole information related to the company's SecurID two-factor authentication products. Speaking at the RSA Security Conference in London, RSA executive chairman Art Coviello described the high profile attack thus: 'There were two individual groups from one nation state, one supporting the other. One was very visible and one less so. We've not attributed it to a particular nation state although we're very confident that with the skill, sophistication and resources involved it could only have been a nation state.' Sophos security researcher Graham Cluley questions how RSA has concluded that a country was responsible for the attack — when RSA is unwilling to name who it suspects. Could it be that the firm is simply applying spin, describing the attack as a 'highly sophisticated Advanced Persistent Threat' to protect its image?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Air Force Network Admins Found Out About Drone Virus Through News Story
Posted: October 12th, 2011, 1:43am CEST by Soulskill
Tags: military
Nemesisghost writes "Wired's Danger Room reports that the network admins of the 24th Air Force found out about the virus infecting the drone cockpits at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada by reading the earlier news article. Quoting: 'Not only were officials in charge kept out of the loop about an infection in America’s weapon and surveillance system of choice, but the surprise surrounding that infection highlights a flaw in the way the U.S. military secures its information infrastructure: There’s no one in the Defense Department with his hand on the network switch. In fact, there is no one switch to speak of. The four branches of the U.S. armed forces each has a dedicated unit that, in theory, is supposed to handle cyber defense for the entire service. ... In practice, it’s not that simple. Unlike most big private enterprises, the 24th doesn’t have a centralized system for managing and monitoring its networks. There’s no place at the 24th’s San Antonio headquarters where someone could see all the digital traffic hurtling through the service’s pipes.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Air Force Network Admins Found Out About Drone Virus Through News Story
Posted: October 12th, 2011, 1:43am CEST by Soulskill
Tags: military
Nemesisghost writes "Wired's Danger Room reports that the network admins of the 24th Air Force found out about the virus infecting the drone cockpits at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada by reading the earlier news article. Quoting: 'Not only were officials in charge kept out of the loop about an infection in America’s weapon and surveillance system of choice, but the surprise surrounding that infection highlights a flaw in the way the U.S. military secures its information infrastructure: There’s no one in the Defense Department with his hand on the network switch. In fact, there is no one switch to speak of. The four branches of the U.S. armed forces each has a dedicated unit that, in theory, is supposed to handle cyber defense for the entire service. ... In practice, it’s not that simple. Unlike most big private enterprises, the 24th doesn’t have a centralized system for managing and monitoring its networks. There’s no place at the 24th’s San Antonio headquarters where someone could see all the digital traffic hurtling through the service’s pipes.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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AOL Creates Fully Automated Data Center
Posted: October 12th, 2011, 12:18am CEST by Unknown Lamer
Tags: aol
miller60 writes with an except from a Data Center Knowledge article: "AOL has begun operations at a new data center that will be completely unmanned, with all monitoring and management being handled remotely. The new 'lights out' facility is part of a broader updating of AOL infrastructure that leverages virtualization and modular design to quickly deploy and manage server capacity. 'These changes have not been easy,' AOL's Mike Manos writes in a blog post about the new facility. 'It's always culturally tough being open to fundamentally changing business as usual.'" Mike Manos's weblog post provides a look into AOL's internal infrastructure. It's easy to forget that AOL had to tackle scaling to tens of thousands of servers over a decade before the term Cloud was even coined.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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AOL Creates Fully Automated Data Center
Posted: October 12th, 2011, 12:18am CEST by Unknown Lamer
Tags: aol
miller60 writes with an except from a Data Center Knowledge article: "AOL has begun operations at a new data center that will be completely unmanned, with all monitoring and management being handled remotely. The new 'lights out' facility is part of a broader updating of AOL infrastructure that leverages virtualization and modular design to quickly deploy and manage server capacity. 'These changes have not been easy,' AOL's Mike Manos writes in a blog post about the new facility. 'It's always culturally tough being open to fundamentally changing business as usual.'" Mike Manos's weblog post provides a look into AOL's internal infrastructure. It's easy to forget that AOL had to tackle scaling to tens of thousands of servers over a decade before the term Cloud was even coined.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Wine HQ Password Database Compromised
Posted: October 12th, 2011, 12:00am CEST by Unknown Lamer
Tags: wine
With his first accepted submission, tyler.russell writes with a report that the WineHQ database systems were compromised. Quoting the official announcement: "We are sorry to report that recently our login database for the Wine HQ Application Database was compromised. We know that the entire contents of the login database was stolen by hackers. The password was encrypted, but with enough effort and depending on the quality of your old password, it could be cracked. We have closed the hole in our system that allowed read access to our database tables. To prevent further damage we have reset your password to what is shown below. We strongly suggest that if you shared your AppDB password on any other sites that you change that password as soon as possible.". He adds: "A new username and password were included with this email."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Wine HQ Password Database Compromised
Posted: October 12th, 2011, 12:00am CEST by Unknown Lamer
Tags: wine
With his first accepted submission, tyler.russell writes with a report that the WineHQ database systems were compromised. Quoting the official announcement: "We are sorry to report that recently our login database for the Wine HQ Application Database was compromised. We know that the entire contents of the login database was stolen by hackers. The password was encrypted, but with enough effort and depending on the quality of your old password, it could be cracked. We have closed the hole in our system that allowed read access to our database tables. To prevent further damage we have reset your password to what is shown below. We strongly suggest that if you shared your AppDB password on any other sites that you change that password as soon as possible.". He adds: "A new username and password were included with this email."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Microsoft Says IE9 Blocks More Malware Than Chrome
Posted: October 11th, 2011, 11:37pm CEST by Unknown Lamer
Tags: microsoft
CSHARP123 writes "In a move that's sure to raise some eyebrows, Microsoft today debuted a new web site designed to raise awareness of security issues in web browsers. When you visit the site, called Your Browser Matters, it allows you to see a score for the browser you're using. Only IE, Chrome, or Firefox are included — other browsers are excluded. Not surprisingly, Microsoft's latest release, Internet Explorer 9, gets a perfect 4 out of 4. Chrome or Firefox do not even come close to the score of 4. Even though the web site makes it easy for users to upgrade to the latest version of their choice of browser, Roger Capriotti hopes people will choose IE9, as it blocks more malware compared to Chrome or Firefox." Of note in the Windows Team post is that the latest Microsoft Security Intelligence Report discovered that 0-day exploits account for a mere tenth of a percent of all intrusions. Holes in outdated software and social engineering account for the majority of successful attacks.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Microsoft Says IE9 Blocks More Malware Than Chrome
Posted: October 11th, 2011, 11:37pm CEST by Unknown Lamer
Tags: microsoft
CSHARP123 writes "In a move that's sure to raise some eyebrows, Microsoft today debuted a new web site designed to raise awareness of security issues in web browsers. When you visit the site, called Your Browser Matters, it allows you to see a score for the browser you're using. Only IE, Chrome, or Firefox are included — other browsers are excluded. Not surprisingly, Microsoft's latest release, Internet Explorer 9, gets a perfect 4 out of 4. Chrome or Firefox do not even come close to the score of 4. Even though the web site makes it easy for users to upgrade to the latest version of their choice of browser, Roger Capriotti hopes people will choose IE9, as it blocks more malware compared to Chrome or Firefox." Of note in the Windows Team post is that the latest Microsoft Security Intelligence Report discovered that 0-day exploits account for a mere tenth of a percent of all intrusions. Holes in outdated software and social engineering account for the majority of successful attacks.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Linux Kernel Developer Declares VirtualBox Driver "Crap"
Posted: October 11th, 2011, 9:49pm CEST by Unknown Lamer
Tags: bug
An anonymous reader writes "Linux kernel developers have decided to mark the VirtualBox kernel driver as tainted crap for the significant number of problems this open-source driver has caused. The VirtualBox kernel driver reportedly causes memory corruption and other problems. With the driver being flagged as tainted crap, bug reports caused by the driver will be taken less seriously."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Linux Kernel Developer Declares VirtualBox Driver "Crap"
Posted: October 11th, 2011, 9:49pm CEST by Unknown Lamer
Tags: bug
An anonymous reader writes "Linux kernel developers have decided to mark the VirtualBox kernel driver as tainted crap for the significant number of problems this open-source driver has caused. The VirtualBox kernel driver reportedly causes memory corruption and other problems. With the driver being flagged as tainted crap, bug reports caused by the driver will be taken less seriously."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Father of SSL Talks Serious Security Turkey
Posted: October 11th, 2011, 9:27pm CEST by Unknown Lamer
Tags: security
coondoggie writes with an excerpt from a Network World article: "SSL/TLS, the protocol that protects security of e-commerce, has taken a beating lately, with news items ranging from the violation of certificate authorities to the discovery of an exploit that beats the protocol itself. But despite the exploit ... and the failures of certificate authorities such as Comodo and DigiNotar that are supposed to authenticate users, the protocol has a lot of life left in it if properly upgraded as it becomes necessary, says Taher Elgamal, CTO of Axway and one of the creators of SSL."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Father of SSL Talks Serious Security Turkey
Posted: October 11th, 2011, 9:27pm CEST by Unknown Lamer
Tags: security
coondoggie writes with an excerpt from a Network World article: "SSL/TLS, the protocol that protects security of e-commerce, has taken a beating lately, with news items ranging from the violation of certificate authorities to the discovery of an exploit that beats the protocol itself. But despite the exploit ... and the failures of certificate authorities such as Comodo and DigiNotar that are supposed to authenticate users, the protocol has a lot of life left in it if properly upgraded as it becomes necessary, says Taher Elgamal, CTO of Axway and one of the creators of SSL."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Blue Coat Denies Its Devices Helping Syrian Gov't
Posted: October 11th, 2011, 7:18pm CEST by timothy
Tags: government
First time accepted submitter drmemnoch writes with a follow-up to a report last week that Internet proxy / filtering / logging devices made by Sunnyvale, CA based Blue Coat Systems have been used by the Syrian government to monitor and censor Syrian's Internet usage. drmemnoch notes that "Sales to restricted countries can often occur through 3rd party resellers. Blue Coat has yet to provide any information other than denial." Specifically, the company denies direct sales, but in the linked ZDnet report kept mum on how third-party resellers might be involved. I requested comment from the company about how their products might have ended up in Syria; Steve Schick of Blue Coat has responded to that request with a more detailed denial (included below) of the company's involvement, and says that there is "no firm evidence" in the logs leaked by Telecomix that Syria has any Blue Coat equipment at all; dissection of that response is invited.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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German State Confesses To, Downplays Government Spyware
Posted: October 11th, 2011, 4:19pm CEST by timothy
Tags: privacy
First time accepted submitter clickforfreepizza writes with this news on the German 'state trojan' analyzed by the CCC: '[The] Bavarian Interior Minister [confirmed] that state officials had indeed used the software, but argued that the use had been conducted legally. [...] [A] lawyer said his client had had the software in question installed on his computer during a customs check. That software, which could be legally used for monitoring telecommunications, had been altered to allow it to grab screen shots.' The H's sister site heise.de reports this case involves nothing like terrorism, but legal substances which 'may become' illegal when exported. (German original) The Bavarian press release (German original) also says the code analyzed by the CCC might be an earlier test version."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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German Researchers Crack Mifare RFID Encryption
Posted: October 10th, 2011, 9:16pm CEST by Soulskill
Tags: security
jfruhlinger writes "The long-running security battle has seesawed against RFID cards, as German researchers revealed a way to clone one type of card currently used for a variety of purposes, from transit fares to opening doors in NASA facilities." According to the article, "NXP Semiconductors, which owns Mifare, put out an alert to customers warning that the security had been cracked on its MIFARE DESFire (MF3ICD40) smartcard but saying that model would be discontinued by the end of the year and encouraging customers to upgrade to the EV1 version of the card." This response may sound familiar.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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2-Year ID Theft Investigation Yields 86 Arrests; 25 More Sought
Posted: October 10th, 2011, 2:06am CEST by timothy
Tags: crime
angry tapir writes with this bit from TechWorld: "Prosecutors call it the biggest identity theft bust in U.S. history. 111 bank tellers, retail workers, waiters and alleged criminals were charged with running a credit-card-stealing organization that stole more than $US13 million in less than a year-and-a-half. 'This is by far the largest — and certainly among the most sophisticated — identity theft/credit card fraud cases that law enforcement has come across,' the Queens County District Attorney's office said in a statement announcing the arrests."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Incomplete PDF Redaction Leaks Data From UK MoD
Posted: October 9th, 2011, 11:55pm CEST by timothy
Tags: security
An anonymous reader writes "The UK Ministry of Defence has been left with egg on its face, after a supposedly redacted PDF detailing secrets related to air defence radar systems was published on a parliamentary website. The problem? Whoever did the redacting simply changed the sensitive text to black on a black background, making it possible for anyone to access the information simply by cutting-and-pasting. The incident is particularly embarrassing for the Ministry, as six months ago precisely the same security screw-up occurred — that time related to sensitive information about nuclear submarines."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Nexus Prime, And Ice Cream Sandwich, Go For a Video Tour
Posted: October 9th, 2011, 9:40pm CEST by timothy
Tags: android
An anonymous reader writes with this snippet from Examiner.com, citing a report at gagdet.ro, about Samsung's upcoming high-end Nexus Prime, the first phone to be delivered with Ice Cream Sandwich. "This version of the Nexus Series (Google's Android flag bearer) runs the next version of Android: Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. This version is meant to combine Honycomb (Android 3.0) with Gingerbread(Android 2.3) into one OS, that will run on all devices. In addition to the merger of the two OS's, it also changes the Android UI a bit. One major change, is that the icons and the UI is a lot more sophisticated and clean, making even iOS look old and clunky. Also, it removes the requirement for Android phones to have hard/soft-hard mixed buttons, in favor of allowing manufacturers to use whichever type of button they wish. Also, it adds a soft button on the lock screen, to go straight to the camera app."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Predator Drone 'Virus' Could Be Military's Own Monitoring
Posted: October 9th, 2011, 8:11am CEST by timothy
Tags: military
jjp9999 writes "The virus that hit Predator and Reaper UAVs could be an internal monitoring system employed by the military. According to security researcher Miles Fidelman, there are vendors that sell security monitoring packages to the Defense Department which are 'essentially rootkits that do, among other things, key logging.' The virus is a keylogger that was found at pilot stations, and could be keeping tabs on keystrokes used by pilots to control the UAVs, found Wired's Danger Room blog. Fidelman adds, 'I kind of wonder if the virus that folks are fighting is something that some other part of DoD deployed intentionally.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Extension To Chrome Brings Remote Desktop Abilities
Posted: October 9th, 2011, 12:47am CEST by timothy
Tags: chrome
CNET reports that as of yesterday, a new Chrome extension will "let a person on one computer remotely control another across the network." The new remote-desktop capability is in BETA (Google's all-caps version, for emphasis), but is said to work to control any OS from any other OS, so long as both sides are equipped with Chrome and the new extension. Related: Wired is running a profile of Rajen Sheth — "father of Gmail," and now in charge of Google's Chromebook project as well.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Facebook's URL Scanner Vulnerable To Cloaking Attack
Posted: October 8th, 2011, 11:45pm CEST by timothy
Tags: facebook
Facebook's recent move to scan for malicious URLs sounded like a pretty good idea, but itwbennett writes with word that it's already been bypassed.'Hatter,' a member of hacking think-tank Blackhat Academy, provided a live demonstration, which involved posting the URL to a JPEG file on a wall. Facebook crawled the URL and added a thumbnail image to the wall post, however, clicking on its corresponding link actually redirected users to YouTube. This happened because the destination page was able to identify Facebook's original request and served a JPEG file. Earlier this week, Facebook signed a partnership with Websense to use the security vendor's cloud-based, real-time Web scanner for malicious URL detection. Blackhat Academy has now provided proof-of-concept code, which, according to its advisory, can be used to bypass it."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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German Government's Malware Analyzed
Posted: October 8th, 2011, 10:31pm CEST by timothy
Tags: government
First time accepted submitter lennier1 writes "The German hacker group CCC (Chaos Computer Club) has analyzed a piece of malware the German government uses in criminal investigations to spy on a suspect's computer. I'm sure we're all surprised that it's opening security holes for third parties, and violates a related court verdict (and several laws in general)."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Windows 8 To Reduce Memory Footprint
Posted: October 8th, 2011, 3:21pm CEST by timothy
Tags: windows
bheer writes "Microsoft's Windows 8 blog has a good post about the work being done to reduce Windows 8's memory footprint. The OS will use multiple approaches to do this, including combining RAM pages, re-architecting old bits of code and adding new APIs for more granular memory management. Interestingly, it will also let services start on a trigger and stop when needed instead of running all the time."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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FBI Plans Nationwide Face-Recognition Trials In 2012
Posted: October 8th, 2011, 2:25pm CEST by timothy
Tags: privacy
hessian writes with this excerpt: "The FBI by mid-January will activate a nationwide facial recognition service in select states that will allow local police to identify unknown subjects in photos, bureau officials told Nextgov. The federal government is embarking on a multiyear, $1 billion overhaul of the FBI's existing fingerprint database to more quickly and accurately identify suspects, partly through applying other biometric markers, such as iris scans and voice recordings."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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US Drone Fleet Hit By Computer Virus
Posted: October 7th, 2011, 9:08pm CEST by Soulskill
Tags: security
New submitter Golgafrinchan passes along this quote from an article at Wired: "A computer virus has infected the cockpits of America's Predator and Reaper drones, logging pilots' every keystroke as they remotely fly missions over Afghanistan and other warzones. The virus, first detected nearly two weeks ago by the military's Host-Based Security System, has not prevented pilots at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada from flying their missions overseas. Nor have there been any confirmed incidents of classified information being lost or sent to an outside source. But the virus has resisted multiple efforts to remove it from Creech's computers, network security specialists say. And the infection underscores the ongoing security risks in what has become the U.S. military's most important weapons system.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Hackers Buying IPv4 Blocks To Evade Detection
Posted: October 7th, 2011, 7:05pm CEST by Soulskill
Tags: botnet
Trailrunner7 writes "The number of IP addresses required for large scale botnets to operate effectively can be considerable, and finding large IP blocks to use for them can be difficult. If the botnet operators do find them, the IP addresses often are blacklisted quickly by reputation systems and are then useless for the attackers. Now, in one effort to get around these systems, some attackers are taking advantage of the lack of IPv4 space by either purchasing or renting blocks of IP space with good reputations that have been built up over the course of several years. A number of legitimate trading and auction sites appeared as the IPv4 space became scarcer, and the attackers have gotten involved as well, getting their hands on known good IP blocks and using them for C&C or hosting malware."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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DHS Goes Ahead With 'Pre-Crime' Detection Project
Posted: October 7th, 2011, 5:40pm CEST by Soulskill
Tags: crime
suraj.sun tips news that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has begun testing its project to predict future crimes on members of the public. The Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST) project is "designed to track and monitor, among other inputs, body movements, voice pitch changes, prosody changes (alterations in the rhythm and intonation of speech), eye movements, body heat changes, and breathing patterns." A field test was performed at a large venue earlier this year, and documents recently obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request indicate that testing is proceeding on other members of the public as well. "It's not clear whether these people were informed that they're participating in a FAST study."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Ask Slashdot: Does Being 'Loyal' Pay As a Developer?
Posted: October 7th, 2011, 4:56pm CEST by Soulskill
Tags: business
An anonymous reader writes "As a senior developer for a small IT company based in the UK that is about to release their flagship project, I know that if I were to leave the company now, it would cause them some very big problems. I'm currently training the other two 'junior' developers, trying to bring them up to speed with our products. Unfortunately, they are still a long way from grasping the technologies used – not to mention the 'interesting' job the outsourced developers managed to make of the code. Usually, I would never have considered leaving at such a crucial time; I've been at the company for several years and consider many of my colleagues, including higher management, to be friends. However, I have been approached by another company that is much bigger, and they have offered me a pay rise of £7k to do the same job, plus their office is practically outside my front door (as opposed to my current 45 minute commute each way). This would make a massive difference to my life. That said, I can't help but feel that to leave now would be betraying my friends and colleagues. Some friends have told me that I'm just being 'soft' – however I think I'm being loyal. Any advice?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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The State of Hacked Accounts
Posted: October 7th, 2011, 12:28am CEST by samzenpus
Tags: facebook
Orome1 writes "Most users get hacked at high rates even when they do not think they are engaging in risky behavior, with 62% unaware of how their accounts had been compromised, The results of a Commtouch survey presenting statistics on the theft, abuse and eventual recovery of Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and Facebook accounts, shows that less than one-third of users noticed their accounts had been compromised, with over 50% relying on friends to point out their stolen accounts. Also, more than two-thirds of all compromised accounts are used to send spam and scams, which is not surprising, as cybercriminals can improve their email delivery rates by sending from trusted domains such as Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail, and enhance their open and click-through rates by sending from familiar senders."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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UBS: Our Risk Systems Did Detect $2bn Rogue Trader
Posted: October 6th, 2011, 8:01pm CEST by timothy
Tags: business
A few weeks ago, UBS employee Kweku Adoboli (universally described as a "rogue trader") ran up a $2 billion loss for his employer; many readers wondered how it is the systems which allow trades to happen at all aren't better tuned to catch such massive cash flows without triggering alerts. Now, reader DMandPenfold submits a report from Computerworld UK in which the bank claims that such triggers were in place — they were simply not acted on. From the article: "UBS has insisted its IT systems did detect unusual and unauthorised trading activity, Interim chief executive Sergio Ermotti, who is running the company following Oswald Grubel's resignation last month, sent a memo to employees saying the bank is aware that its systems did detect the rogue activity. In the memo, Ermotti wrote: 'Our internal investigation indicates that risk and operational systems did detect unauthorised or unexplained activity but this was not sufficiently investigated nor was appropriate action taken to ensure existing controls were enforced.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Android Malware Using Blog As C&C Server
Posted: October 6th, 2011, 4:12am CEST by samzenpus
Tags: android
wiredmikey writes "Security researchers have discovered a unique feature circulating in some Android-based malware. The malicious application is using a blog in China to act as a Command and Control (C&C) server. On Tuesday, Trend Micro discovered a malicious Android application out of China using the new trick to receive instructions, and appears to be the first time Android malware implemented this kind of technique to communicate with its server."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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After Six Days of Outages, BofA Claims It Hasn't Been Hacked
Posted: October 5th, 2011, 10:56pm CEST by samzenpus
Tags: security
Lucas123 writes "After six days of spotty service and outages with its online and mobile sites, Bank of America today said it has not been the victim of a denial of service attack, hacking or malware. Yet, the bank has set up a new homepage that it says will help customers navigate to the proper online service. Internet monitoring service Keynote said the outage is unprecedented in banking. 'I don't think we've seen as significant and as long an outage with any bank. And I've been with Keynote for 16 years now,' said Shawn White, vice president of operations for web monitoring service Keynote Systems. In the meantime, a BofA spokeswoman continued to divulge what might be happening, saying 'We're not going to get into the technical details. We're not going to comment on the technicalities of what we do.' Speculation among experts has been that the site is under attack."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Welcome Back Kernel.org
Posted: October 5th, 2011, 9:47pm CEST by samzenpus
Tags: security
Hummdis writes "After more than a month of being offline due to a security breach at Kernel.org, they're back! While they were down, they took the time to 're-architect' the site for developers and users. A statement reads: 'As noted previously, kernel.org suffered a security breach. Because of this, we have taken the time to re-architect the site in order to improve our systems for developers and users of kernel.org. To this end, we would like all developers who previously had access to kernel.org who wish to continue to use it to host their git and static content, to follow the instructions here. Right now, www.kernel.org and git.kernel.org have been brought back online. All developer git trees have been removed from git.kernel.org and will be added back as the relevant developers regain access to the system. Thanks to all for your patience and understanding during our outage and please bear with us as we bring up the different kernel.org systems over the next few weeks. We will be writing up a report on the incident in the future.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Fedora 16, OpenSuse 12.1 Betas With Gnome 3.2
Posted: October 5th, 2011, 7:32pm CEST by timothy
Tags: gnome
Andy Smith writes "Fedora 16 beta and OpenSuse 12.1 beta have been released. For most users the major change in each distro is Gnome 3.2. Fedora also adopts the new Linux 3 kernel and the GRUB2 bootloader."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Facebook Confirms New Cookie-Tracking Issue
Posted: October 5th, 2011, 7:15pm CEST by timothy
Tags: cloud
An anonymous reader writes "Facebook is once again setting its datr cookie via the Like button and other social plugins on third-party websites. The datr cookie can be used for tracking users whether you are logged in or logged out of the service. Facebook has confirmed this is indeed a bug, but says that it is limited in scope and that it will be fixed today. Talk about damage control."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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How Windows Gets Infected With Malware
Posted: October 5th, 2011, 5:04pm CEST by timothy
Tags: security
Orome1 writes "Since Up to 85 % of all virus infections occur as a result of drive-by attacks automated via commercial exploit kits, CSIS has actively collected real time data from them for a period of three months. The purpose of their study is to reveal precisely how Microsoft Windows machines are infected with malware and which browsers, versions of Windows and third party software that are at risk. They monitored more than 50 different exploit kits on 44 unique servers / IP addresses. The statistical material covers all in all more than half a million user exposures out of which as many as 31.3 % were infected with the virus/malware due to missing security updates."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Firefox Advises Users To Disable McAfee Plugin
Posted: October 5th, 2011, 4:01pm CEST by timothy
Tags: firefox
itwbennett writes "Mozilla is advising Firefox users to disable McAfee's ScriptScan software, saying that it could cause 'stability or security problems.' ScriptScan, which ships with McAfee's VirusScan antivirus program, is designed to keep Web surfers safe by scanning for any malicious scripting code that might be running in the browser. But according to Mozilla, it has an unintended side-effect: It can cause Firefox to crash ... a lot."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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SAIC Loses Data of 4.9 Million Patients
Posted: October 4th, 2011, 8:37pm CEST by Unknown Lamer
Tags: privacy
An anonymous reader writes "Government contractor SAIC just can't seem to get a break. Still fresh off of the Citytime scandal, they've now had a data breach in which backup tapes holding 4.9 million personal health records were stolen from an employee's car. To add insult to injury, evidently the tapes were not encrypted either: 'Tricare did not indicate whether SAIC encrypted the information on the stolen tapes, but Raley said, "It's very hard to encrypt a backup tape."'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Is Off-Shoring a National Security Threat?
Posted: October 4th, 2011, 5:05pm CEST by timothy
Tags: security
An anonymous reader writes "Should the U.S. government hold developers more responsible for the quality of their code? One top cyber security analyst says more regulations would be a mistake. 'Any attempt to regulate software quality and security simply drives the software industry off-shore for good,' he says. 'Similarly, requiring trusted on-shore production ensures two things: (1) falling behind world progress as we aren't the only smart people and we are a minority, and (2) costs rise in a way that makes on-shore-mandated software cost-uncompetitive on the world market.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Inside ICS-CERT's War Room
Posted: October 4th, 2011, 2:52pm CEST by timothy
Tags: government
itwbennett writes "When Stuxnet first appeared in July 2010, the U.S. response was gathered at the ICS-CERT facilities at Idaho National Labs (INL). 'This is the classified building where phones will start ringing should the next Stuxnet show up, and home to staffers who specialize in IT and industrial systems,' said Robert McMillan, who was invited to attend a training exercise run by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and INL. 'It's small — there were just four analysts there on Thursday — but it looks like the security operations centers you see big companies such as Cisco and Symantec: people sitting in front of computers, with a big screen showing a real time feed of any situations that need to be handled.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Wikimedia Foundation Enables HTTPS For All Projects
Posted: October 4th, 2011, 6:01am CEST by Soulskill
Tags: privacy
An anonymous reader writes "The Wikimedia Foundation has enabled HTTPS for all of its projects (Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, etc.), to enable secure log-in and browsing privacy. Their blog post goes into detail about how the service is configured, linking to configuration files and implementation documentation. It also mentions that HTTPS Everywhere will have updated rules for this change soon."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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The Nine Circles of IT Hell
Posted: October 3rd, 2011, 7:23pm CEST by Soulskill
Tags: IT
snydeq writes "Dan Tynan takes us on a tour of the nine circles of IT hell, a place 'not unlike the underworld described by Dante in his Divine Comedy.' 'But here, in the data centers, conference rooms, and cubicles, the IT version of this inferno is no allegory. It is a very real test of every IT pro's sanity and soul,' Tynan writes. From IT limbo, to tech lust, to stakeholder gluttony, to tech-pro treachery, the IT inferno is not buried deep within the earth, it's just down the hall. 'Thankfully, as in Dante's poetic universe, there are ways to escape the nine circles of IT hell. But IT pros beware: You may have to face your own devils to do it. Shall we descend?'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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HTC Android Backdoor Leaks Private User Data
Posted: October 3rd, 2011, 5:36pm CEST by samzenpus
Tags: android
Trailrunner7 writes "There is a serious security issue with a variety of HTC Android phones that enables any app with Internet permissions to access a huge amount of private data on the device, including call logs, email addresses, SMS messages, last known GPS location and more. The problem was introduced via an update to the HTC phones that installed a tool called HTCLogger that collects the data."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Facebook Adds Malicious Link Protection
Posted: October 3rd, 2011, 3:33pm CEST by samzenpus
Tags: facebook
wiredmikey writes "As any IT security department knows, social networks pose a significant threat to users across the board as they blindly click links which often lead to spam or other malicious sites that could result in malware infection. In a move to further protect users of the world's largest social networking site, Facebook is adding a new feature to help protect users from links to these malicious sites. Starting today, when a Facebook user clicks on a link it will be checked against a database from Websense in an attempt to determine if the link is malicious. If the link is determined to be risky, the user will be given the choice to continue at their own risk, return to the previous screen, or get more information on why it was flagged as suspicious."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Amazon Disables 3G Web Browsing For New 3G Kindle Touch
Posted: October 3rd, 2011, 12:02pm CEST by timothy
Tags: books
destinyland writes "Amazon's going to disable 3G web browsing on their upcoming 'Kindle Touch 3G' — even though it was a prominent feature of the last generation of Kindles. Amazon will still allow web browsing on the Kindle Touch 3G using a local Wi-Fi connection, but it's one of many unsettling details emerging from Amazon's announcement last week. Apparently Amazon's cloud will now also include a list of personal documents that you're mailing to your Kindle. And the on-screen keyboard for Amazon's bargain $79 Kindles won't be a touchscreen keyboard, so users will have to nudge the controller repeatedly to gradually navigate from one key to the next."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Tom's Hardware Pits Newest Firefox, Opera and Chrome Against Each Other
Posted: October 3rd, 2011, 1:47am CEST by timothy
Tags: chrome
An anonymous reader writes "Firefox 7 was released a couple days ago, and now the latest Web browser performance numbers are in. This article is the same series that ran benchmarks on Mac OS X Lion last month. This time around the new Mozilla release is going against Chrome 14 and Opera 11.51 in 40+ different tests on Windows 7. Testing comes from every category of Web browsing performance I can think of: startup time, page load time, JS, CSS, DOM, HTML5, Flash, hardware acceleration, WebGL, Java, Silverlight, reliable page loads, memory usage/management, and standards conformance. The article also has a little feature on the Futuremark Peacekeeper browser benchmark. An open beta of the next revision has just been made public. This new version adds HTML5, video codecs, and WebGL tests to the benchmark. It's also designed to run on any browser/OS/device combination — e.g. Windows desktop, iPad, Droid 2, MacBook, Linux flavors, etc. Another great read, a must for Web browser fanatics!"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Security Vulnerabilities On HTC Android Devices
Posted: October 2nd, 2011, 8:29pm CEST by timothy
Tags: android
revjtanton writes "In recent updates to some of its devices, HTC introduced a suite of logging tools that collected information. Lots of information. LOTS. Whatever the reason was, whether for better understanding problems on users' devices, easier remote analysis, or corporate evilness — it doesn't matter." That's because "any app on affected devices that requests a single android.permission.INTERNET (which is normal for any app that connects to the web or shows ads)" on one of these phones can now grab all sorts of interesting bits from the logged data.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Russian Software Company Says Its App Can Crack BlackBerry Security
Posted: October 2nd, 2011, 6:25pm CEST by timothy
Tags: blackberry
AZA43 leaps into the ranks of accepted submitters, writing "Russian security software vendor Elcomsoft has released an app that it claims can determine BlackBerry handheld passwords. The software supposedly hacks the BlackBerry password via an advanced handheld security setting that's meant to encrypt data stored on a user's memory card. And a hacker doesn't even need to have the BlackBerry to determine a password, just the media card."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Prototyping Boards Make It Easier To Find Flaws in Specialized Hardware
Posted: October 2nd, 2011, 3:20pm CEST by timothy
Tags: security
wiredmikey writes "Author Robert Vamosi writes an interesting piece on how security researchers are using open source 'prototyping boards' and other open source tools now available via the Internet for rapid prototyping of tools used in hardware analysis. 'The days of saying it would take the resources of a nation-state to discover or exploit vulnerabilities in a particular piece of hardware in an industrial control system or a healthcare environment are rapidly fading,' he writes. Vendors who do not test their products before selling them into the field are doomed to be targets of future research and, perhaps, attacks."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Security By Obscurity — a New Theory
Posted: October 2nd, 2011, 12:12am CEST by Soulskill
Tags: security
mikejuk writes "Kerckhoffs' Principle suggests that there is no security by obscurity — but perhaps there is. A recent paper by Dusko Pavlovic suggests that security is a game of incomplete information and the more you can do to keep your opponent in the dark, the better. In addition to considering the attacker's computing power limits, he also thinks it's worth considering limits on their logic or programming capabilities (PDF). He recommends obscurity plus a little reactive security in response to an attacker probing the system. In this case, instead of having to protect against every possible attack vector, you can just defend against the attack that has been or is about to be launched."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Web Hosts — One-Stop-Shops For Mass Hacking?
Posted: October 1st, 2011, 9:00pm CEST by Soulskill
Tags: security
jjp9999 writes "More than 70,000 websites were compromised in a recent breach of InMotion. Thousands of websites were defaced and others had alterations made to give users a hard time accessing their accounts and fixing the damage. A similar attack hit JustHost back in June, and in a breach of Australian Web host DistributeIT just prior to that, hackers completely deleted more than 4,800 websites that the company was unable to recover. The incidents raise concern that hacker groups are bypassing single targets and hitting Web hosts directly, giving them access to tens of thousands of websites, rather than single targets. While the attacks have caused damage, they weren't as malicious as they could have been. Rather than defacing and deleting, hackers could have quietly planted malware in the sites or stolen customer data. Web hosting companies could be one of the largest holes in non-government cybersecurity, since malicious hackers can gain access through openings left by the Web host, regardless of the security of a given site."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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The Cult of DevOps
Posted: October 1st, 2011, 2:31pm CEST by Unknown Lamer
Tags: google
packetrat writes "I was at OmniTI's Surge conference today, which turned out to be, among other things, a meeting of the cult of DevOps. Ars Technica covered the keynote and some of the presentations, but some of the best stuff is in the comments. Google CIO Ben Fried told the tale of a really poorly engineered trading application at Morgan Stanley that he was associated with, and how the way IT was structured there contributed to that engineering and to its spectacular failure, costing the bank untold millions in stock trade processing fees from its institutional customers. He said what he learned from cleaning up the mess has informed how Google runs its IT operations, and a culture that promotes generalist skills. A lot of how he describes Google's approach sounds like the DevOps kool-aid a lot of the other speakers were serving, but it also sounds like common sense — are most IT organizations really that poorly run that developers are totally unaware their software is sending messages that are generating network storms, or network engineers are clueless enough about QoS to route leased lines into their data center through their public-facing Internet?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.