Why are PCs hacked?
May 27, 2009 Security News
Reporter Brian Krebs from the Washington Post has made a Mind Map/Chart of the reasons why cyber criminals use exploits to infect and control personal computers.
The next time somebody asks you why people would be interested in pwning their PC, point them to this.
Upcoming Articles about Kylin OS
May 19, 2009 Review, Security News
I just wanted to announce that I have obtained the ISOs of the Chinese secure OS known as “Kylin” and will be installing it as a virtual machine to do some analysis. There seems to be some FUD and confusion on this subject lately, and I wanted to illuminate our readers with some facts instead of paranoid visions of cyberwar against an invulnerable advisary. Let’s take a peek under the covers together…..
Stay tuned.
Total Google Outage
May 14, 2009 Security News
Wow.
It is 16:19 UTC and Google has been completely down for more than 30 minutes. A quick Twitter search (http://search.twitter.com/search?q=google+down) shows that many people from all over the world have been experiencing the same thing.
Here is what the SANS Internet Storm Center says:
We’ve received several reports in the past few minutes about Gmail being down. Don’t have a timeframe on how long it will be down, but it looks like Gmail has been unresponsive for about the past 10 minutes. I’ll update this diary if it continues.
Update: According to people sending in reports via Twitter, it’s been down for about since about 10:45 EDT.
Update 2: Receiving reports of a total fail of Google Applications. Gmail, Reader, Docs, News, Apps..etc. Thanks for those reports via Twitter.
It should be interesting finding out what could have brought a massively redundant, global behemoth like Google to its knees.
Bogus versions of Microsoft Windows 7 infected with malware
May 12, 2009 Security News
The final release candidate for Microsoft’s newest version of Windows was made available Tuesday, and already infected pirated versions of the software are making the rounds.
On Thursday, Microsoft said that cybercriminals are distributing versions of Windows 7 release candidate (RC) that contain malware designed to infect a customer’s PC.
In an interview posted at the company’s official website, Joe Williams, general manager, Worldwide Genuine Windows at Microsoft, said that users should be wary. He pointed out that consumers face potential identity theft, system failures and unrecoverable data loss if they become victims.
Read all about it here.
Taking over the Torpig botnet
May 4, 2009 Security News
Security researchers at the University of California at Santa Barbara have reported on their experiences with taking over the Torpig botnet:
Botnets, networks of malware-infected machines that are controlled by an adversary, are the root cause of a large number of security threats on the Internet. A particularly sophisticated and insidious type of bot is Torpig, a malware program that is designed to harvest sensitive information (such as bank account and credit card data) from its victims.
At the beginning of 2009, we took control of the Torpig botnet for ten days. Over this period, we observed more than 180 thousand infections and recorded more than 70 GB of data that the bots collected.
The PDF can be downloaded here.
