Friday 01/02/09

With Gaza conflict, cyberattacks come too The conflict raging in Gaza between Israel and Palestine has spilled over to the Internet. Read more...





About 90 percent of all email is spam: Cisco






The State of Spam: What to Expect in 2009
A look at the scourge of spam in 2008 and some predictions for spam in 2009.







Four Threats For '09 That You've Probably Never Heard Of (Or Thought About)Dec 31,2008 What could keep you up at night in the new year may not be what you expect -- a look at some of the lesser-known threats predicted for 2009






SANS' predictions for 2009:
Donald Smith, a fellow handler, provided these thoughts:
"Watch for a LARGE rise in work from home scams.With a large unemployment base of professionals many will want to try one of the various work from home schemes. While a few of those are legitimate most are MULE or sell our work from home plans.

Disgruntled employees may increase slightly however most people with a job won't want to do anything to jeopardize it or make future employment difficult.

Now disgruntled EX-employees may rise with the unemployment rate. They can do a lot of damage even if they are no longer an "insider" especially if they know how things work at their old company;)Tax and refund scams will rise due to the "homeowner" bailout plan. Since it is new it will be ripe for abuse esp social engineering.

I expect to see lots of network and network element vulnerabilities (such as the DNS one or the PKI md5 certs one just announced). Tools to discover these types of things have been getting better and better AND the market for such things had developed into a fairly solid model (there is money in finding things like this:)

I expect old school defacements (for bragging rights) to dwindle further as that has become a useful skill for the drive by install and scareware industry. (antivirus 2009 and similar stuff)."






MS08-067 Worm on the Loose







Schneier: Declassified comsec documents worth a read






Not directly related to security:
The 5 Most Badass Presidents of All-Time
http://www.cracked.com/article_15895_p5.html






The year in IPv4 addresses: almost 200 million served
The world used 197 million new IPv4 addresses in 2008, leaving 926 million addresses still available. The US remains the biggest user of new addresses, but China is catching up quick.
January 02, 2009 - 12:31PM CT - by Iljitsch van Beijnum






30GB Zune apocalypse arrives as devices enter digital coma (Updated 4x, now with more explanation)
Judgment day has arrived for owners of 30GB Zunes. The music player inexplicably entered a worldwide coma last night, and players are completely nonresponsive. Whoops.
December 31, 2008 - 10:05AM CT - by David Chartier






Sex Offenders In Georgia Required To Hand Over Passwords... To Protect The Children






Defense Contractors See $$$ in Cyber Security
The profits of (conventional) war must not be as good as they used to be.

Lockheed Martin and Boeing have decided the next cash cow is cyber defense.

According to Bloomberg, both companies, "eager to capture a share of a market that may reach $11 billion in 2013," have formed new business units to attract money that the U.S. government will be spending to secure U.S. government computers and, no doubt, to break the security of enemy computer systems.

The companies awoke to the money-making opportunity after President Bush signed a National Security Directive in January, which is commonly known as the Comprehensive National Cyber Security Initiative and is estimated will cost $30 billion or more to implement.






25C3: Many RFID cards poorly encrypted
Karsten Nohl, the security investigator who had a big hand in cracking NXP's Mifare Classic chips, says many RFID smartcards from other manufacturers are also vulnerable to a simple hacker attack more…