23:57 Virus Center: FBI vs FacebookAnother round of malware is being spammed with a subject "F.B.I. wants instant access to Facebook" and a link to a page hosting a malicious .exe file.
E-mail:
Web site:
Web site sourc... >>>
23:40 Defcon Podcaster (and Blogger) meetupMubix has issued an update to the Podcaster’s meetup for Defcon 16. He’s arranged for a couple of sponsors (thanks I-hacked.com and Astaro) for the event and might even get a couple more. The skybox will be open all day as a ‘quiet space’ for podcasting, which is something that’s usually pretty hard [...] >>>
A researcher from Argentina has released an exploit package that can install malware on end user machines that run iTunes, Mac OS X, Winzip and a host of other popular software.
23:15 Article: Q&A: SSL VPN SecurityMax Huang is the founder and Executive Vice President of O2Micro and President for O2Security, a subsidiary company of O2Micro. In this interview he discusses the importance of SSL VPNs in the overall... >>>
21:07 Evilgrade: Exploit toolkit pwns insecure online updatesA security research outfit in Argentina has released a malcode distribution toolkit capable of launching man-in-the-middle attacks against popular products that use insecure update mechanisms.
The toolkit, called Evilgrade, works in conjunction with man-in-the-middle techniques (DNS, ARP and DHCP spoofing) to exploit a wide range of applications, according to a post on the Metasploit blog.
The first [...] >>>
It gets very ugly when someone owns both, the botnet, and the portfolio of parked domains actively participating in PPC (pay per click) advertising programs, where the junk content, or the typosquatted domain names is aiming to attract high value and expensive keywords in order for the scammer to year higher on per click percentage. This is among the very latest tactics applied by those engaging in click fraud. Hypothetically, the cost to rent the botnet and commit click fraud would be cheaper than sharing revenue on per click basis with "human clickers" who earn money based on how many ads they click given a set of scammer's owned sites, where the customer supports represents a DIY proxy switching application changing their IP on the fly.
"Despite indication that some of the clicks from parked domains were invalid, Google failed to disclose to the plaintiff specific domain names in which these ads were clicked on, making detection of invalid clicks difficult and even worse concealing any evidence of invalid clicks," the lawsuit alleges. RK West eventually went through its server logs and discovered the source of the clicks, said Alfredo Torrijos, one of the company's attorneys."
"Rise in pay-per-click advertising where cybersquatters link the domain name they have registered with a website containing ads promoting a variety of competing brands. The cybersquatter receives money every time internet users access this website and click on one of the ads."
However, the "internet users who are supposed to click on one of the ads on the parked domains owned by the scammers" will get clicked by a botnet owned or cost-effectively rented by the scammer. Here's a sample of currently parked domains attracting Symantec ads :
What's most disturbing is that instead of having cybersquatting taken care take of a long time ago, so that scammers would need to emphasize on the junk content in order to attract the relevant ads on the bogus domains, cybersquatting still does the magic by including the targeted word in the domain name itself, so that no junk content generation courtesy of a blackhat SEO tool is needed.
17:47 Airport security part 6: Skimming at airport kiosksWe’ve talked a lot about airport security here (see other links at the bottom of this article), but one thing we haven’t covered yet is airport kiosks. Not that they haven’t caught my attention, there’s just so much wrong at the airport, it takes time to cover it all. Richard Stiennon posted a story yesterday [...] >>>
17:18 Responding to the DNS vulnerability and attacksThe DNS vulnerability, which has completely dominated the news in the security world the last two weeks, has been a concern for so many. On the front of good news and getting things protected, the IBM ISS has team has published some great information.
The Frequency X Blog, run by IBM ISS, had an interesting article [...] >>>
UK-based net security firm Sophos has launched a 217m ($342m) bid to buy data loss prevention firm Utimaco. Sophos intends to offer 14.75 per Utimaco share, a premium of 92 per cent on its closing price of 7.68 on Friday.
San Francisco prosecutors have put the city's network at further risk by placing access passwords and usernames on the public record as part of their case against Terry Childs, the sysadmin alleged to have hijacked the city's wide area network.
13:51 Smells Like a Copycat SQL Injection In the WildIn between the massive SQL injections, that as a matter of fact remain ongoing, copycats taking advantage of the very same SQL injection tools using public search engine's indexes as a reconnaissance tools, are also starting to take advantage of localized and targeted attacks, attacking specific online communities. Among these is mx.content-type.cn /day.js using day.js to attempt multiple exploitation using publicly obtainlable exploits such as Adodb.Stream, MPS.StormPlayer, DPClient.Vod, IERPCtl.IERPCtl.1, GLIEDown.IEDown.1, and targeting primarily Chinese web communities.
09:00 Fraudulent spamKaspersky Lab experts refer to spam as anonymous unsolicited mass mailings. Most of these mailings are adverts, although several categories of spam serve other purposes. "Non-advertising" spam includes one of the most dangerous types of spam – fraudulent messages. >>>
Whenever I writeaboutsoftwareliabilities, many people ask about free and open source software. If people who write free software, like PasswordSafe, are forced to assume liabilities, they will simply not be able to and free software would disappear.
Don't worry, they won't be.
The key to understanding this is that this sort of contractual liability is part of a contract, and with free software -- or free anything -- there's no contract. Free software wouldn't fall under a liability regime because the writer and the user have no business relationship; they are not seller and buyer. I would hope the courts would realize this without any prompting, but we could always pass a Good Samaritan-like law that would protect people who distribute free software. (The opposite would be an Attractive Nuisance-like law -- that would be bad.)
There would be an industry of companies who provide liabilities for free software. If Red Hat, for example, sold free Linux, they would have to provide some liability protection. Yes, this would mean that they would charge more for Linux; that extra would go to the insurance premiums. That same sort of insurance protection would be available to companies who use other free software packages.
The insurance industry is key to making this work. Luckily, they're good at protecting people against liabilities. There's no reason to think they won't be able to do it here.
I've written more about liabilities and the insurance industry here.
