Friday News Feed

Presidential campaigns clueless about Net threats The 2008 presidential campaigns are apparently clueless about cyberthreats that could harm the candidates' reputations and fund-raising or disclose sensitive information, a security researcher said Friday. Read more...





Bot breaks Hotmail's CAPTCHA in 6 seconds





Research fingers ActiveX, QuickTime as buggiest browser plug-ins





Attacks begin against critical Patch Tuesday bug





DHS offers first take on Cyber Storm exercise





Server problems, not hack, blacked out Lieberman site in '06, says FBI





Three different hackers found 'Pwn To Own' bug






IBM: The Security Business 'Has No Future' - 4/10/2008 4:30:00 PM IBM executive tells RSA attendees that the security business is dead – and sustainable business is the future






The Sleaze Still Found Its Way Through - 4/9/2008 8:20:00 PM Untangle's test of five filtering vendors results in lots of porn sites that were missed and many false positives






SecureWorks Unveils Research on Spamming Botnets - 4/9/2008 4:00:00 PM Research firm contends that newly revealed 'Kraken' bot army is actually an older botnet






Top Botnets Control One Million Hijacked Computers
Storm is a shadow of its former self, Kraken is just another name for Bobax and the biggest botnet goes by the mouthful of... 09-Apr-2008






RSA Conference: Web Page Can Take Over Your Router
Researcher Dan Kaminsky to show attendees of the RSA security conference how a Web-based attack could be used to seize control of certain routers. 07-Apr-2008






In Pictures: How to Spot an E-Mail Scam
Wonder whether the message announcing that you've received an e-card is legit? Or whether PayPal is really trying to contact you? Here's a visual guide to spotting malware, fraud, and other dirty tricks in your inbox.







Washington, D.C., Police to Connect 5,000 Surveillance Cameras
D.C. officials are giving police access to more than 5,000 closed-circuit TV cameras citywide that monitor traffic, schools and public housing — a move that will give the District one of the largest surveillance networks in the country. "The primary benefit of what we're doing is for public health and safety," said Darrell Darnell, director of the city's Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency. But camera opponents counter that the devices are not an effective crime deterrent and can result in an intrusion on citizens' privacy. "When you look at [police] statistics, the first thing you noticed was that they don't account for displacement, where you put a camera up on one street and the drug dealer goes to the next street," said Melissa Ngo, senior counsel and director of the Identification and Surveillance Project at the District-based Electronic Privacy Information Center. "That is not cutting down on crime so much as moving it."
D.C. police set to monitor 5,000 cameras, Washington Times, April 9, 2008.
Posted by EPIC on April 11, 2008.Permanent link to this item.







EMC DiskXtender Multiple Vulnerabilities - Moderately critical - From local networkIssued 1 day ago. Some vulnerabilities have been reported in EMC DiskXtender, which can be exploited by malicious people to bypass certain security restrictions or by malicious users to compromise a vulnerable system.







U.S. still worries over hacker havensNews Brief, 2008-04-11In cybercrime prosecutions, attempts to follow the money run afoul of nations with lax rules.






"At the 2008 RSA security conference, Microsoft's David Cross was quoted as saying, 'The reason we put UAC into the platform was 'to annoy users. I'm serious.' The logic behind this statement is that it should encourage application vendors to eliminate as many unnecessary privilege escalations as possible by causing users to complain about all the UAC 'Cancel or Allow' prompts. Of course, they probably didn't expect that Microsoft would instead get most of the complaints for training users to ignore meaningless security warnings."






Adobe Flash Pwn2Own details released by ZDI...







McAfee discovers malware that targets Tibet supporters
Sue Marquette Poremba April 11, 2008
Two pro-Tibet websites were attacked with a malware that can attack local or remote databases linked to the user's computer, McAfee discovered.






IBM's Faster, Denser Memory
By Kate GreeneFriday, April 11, 2008
Researchers led by Stuart Parkin are developing a new type of memory chip that combines the benefits of magnetic hard drives and flash.






Music Label's Copyright Argument is Rubbish
Tossing it like a Frisbee is OK. The kids, cat and dog scratching the hell out of it is just fine.
But throwing away that CD is copyright infringement.