Week in review: Reactions to VeriSign hack, Anonymous leaks FBI conference call, and the new issue of (IN)SECURE Magazine
Here’s an overview of some of last week’s most interesting news, podcasts, reviews and articles:
The F-BOMB: A tiny $50 spying computer for DARPA
As ShmooCon’s visitors have witnessed on Friday when one of the winners of the agency’s Cyber Fast Track program took the stage, it is possible to create an effective spying gadget for less than $50.
The ABCs of security and compliance
Understanding Security and Compliance is as easy as ABC: Access, Breaches and Changes. At a distance security and compliance share many similarities. As you get into the details, what you’ll find is that their implementation differs though the steps to achieve end result (Secure and Compliant) may achieve both.
Keeping on top of financial malware
In this podcast recorded at RSA Conference Europe 2011, Trusteer’s Jack Blockley talks about new developments in financial malware and new attack vectors – especially the different variations on phishing.
Bogus “browser update” pages deliver malware
The pages are not able to detect what browser the users use and serve either a Firefox or Chrome themed fake update warning.
Compromised WordPress sites lead to Phoenix exploit kit
Several hundred compromised websites that at first glance don’t appear to be malicious have been discovered by M86 researchers.
The state of global cyber-readiness
McAfee and the Security and Defence Agenda (SDA) revealed the findings from a report that paints a global snapshot of current thinking about the cyber-threat and the measures that should be taken to defend against them, and assesses the way ahead.
Law firms get hacked for deal data
A successful cooperation between a law firm and its clients depends on the firm’s ability of keeping the details of these relationships confidential – something that becomes harder and harder as cyber spies hired by big companies and, occasionally, governments probe their networks.
Romanian hacker TinKode allegedly arrested
A 20-year old Romanian believed to be “TinKode”, the infamous hacker that has breached the systems and defaced the pages of several government organizations, has been apprehended by the Romanian Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorism (DIICOT) on Tuesday.
(IN)SECURE Magazine issue 33 released
(IN)SECURE Magazine is a free digital security publication discussing some of the hottest information security topics. Issue 33 has been released today.
Defense companies persistently targeted by cyber spies
Researchers from security companies Zscaler and Seculert have issued a warning about bogus emails targeting employees of defense-related organizations around the world in order to trick them into installing malware.
Detecting the DNS Changer malware
Ever since a multi-national task force dismantled the gang in Operation Ghost Click in early November of 2011, the DCWG has been in charge of running the servers at the heart of the botnet in order to keep the infected machines that depend on these servers. But the DCWG’s mission is time-limited. They will shutdown the servers in March and anybody who is still using those servers will then lose access to the Internet.
Network Warrior, 2nd Edition
If you are interested in knowing everything that you can possibly know about networking, chances are you were already urged to read Gary Donahue’s Network Warrior. Four years have passed since the first edition was published and found a place on the shelf of every serious network administrator, and this second edition has been modified somewhat to keep pace with newer technologies and to cover additional subjects.
Facebook survey scam bundled with phishing attempt
Facebook survey scammers have lately become great fans of browser add-ons that force scammy messages onto the victims’ Wall and News feed, but in a recent campaign they went even further and are trying to fool the users into sharing their Facebook login credentials.
HTC Android phones allow apps to harvest users’ Wi-Fi password
A bug in the way some Android-running HTC smartphones handle requests for password allows some applications to send the user’s Wi-Fi network username, password and SSID information to a remote server, researcher Bret Jordan warned on Wednesday.
Google reveals it is already scanning Android apps for malware
Security experts have been wondering for a long time why Google hasn’t copied Apple’s rather successful app vetting process but, as it turns out, the company has already made a move in the right direction by adding an automated app scanning service to the market.
Kelihos botnet rises up again
Kelihos – the botnet whose operation was disrupted last September by Microsoft and Kaspersky Lab by shutting down its C&C servers and making its bots contact a sinkhole instead – is back.
VeriSign hack: Reactions from the security community
VeriSign admitted it was hacked in 2010 and cannot identify what data was stolen. Here are comments on the situation that Help Net Security received from industry veterans.
Attackers use fake friends to blend into Facebook
A new Barracuda Labs study analyzed a random sampling of 2,884 active Facebook accounts to identify key differences between average real user accounts and fake accounts created by attackers and spammers.
Server-side polymorphic Android apps
Server-side polymorphism as a technique to serve unique malware versions that evade signature-based detection to Windows users is used by many malware peddlers on a regular basis, but Symantec researchers have only recently begun spotting the same approach being used for pushing out malicious Android apps.
Anonymous leaks FBI conference call on hacking investigations
Anonymous resumed its F**k FBI Friday campaign by publishing a 16-minute-long mp3 recoding of a confidential conference call between representatives of the FBI and the Scotland Yard. The subject of the call? Anonymous itself.