Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Wednesday 02/04/09

Obama health care plan said to boost security, privacy controls
Privacy advocates say President Obama's e-health plans answer many of their complaints about current HIPAA security and privacy controls. Read more...

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Google offers tool to let you track your friends' movements
The tracking feature, called Latitude, will appear on compatible mobile devices in a new version of Google Maps, Version 3.0.0. It can also be added as a gadget on iGoogle, the company's personalizable home page service.
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The service will indicate users' locations with a small photo icon superimposed on a map. It is initially available for the BlackBerry and devices running Nokia's S60 or Microsoft's Windows Mobile software. An Android version will follow in a few days, said Gundotra, and he expects an iPhone version will follow "very soon."

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Removing admin rights stymies 92% of Microsoft's bugs
The vast majority of critical Microsoft vulnerabilities -- 92% of them -- could have been mitigated by stripping users of administrative rights, said John Moyer, the CEO of BeyondTrust. "This speaks to what enterprises should be doing," Moyer said. "Clearly, eliminating administrative rights can close the window of opportunity of attack."

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Google privacy trial opens in Milan
Google privacy execs to face criminal charges in Italian court
The trial of four Google Inc. executives charged with privacy violations opened in Milan today in a groundbreaking test of European Internet law.

None of the suspects, who each risk a maximum penalty of three years in prison, was present in court, and the hearing lasted only five minutes, according to one of the lawyers present.

The Google executives are accused of defamation and failure to exercise control over personal data following the posting of a cell-phone video showing a teenage boy with Down Syndrome being harassed by four classmates.

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Federal workers notified after virus breach at tech consulting firm
Employees at federal security agencies are being notified that their personal information may have been compromised after hackers planted a virus on computer networks of government contractor SRA International.

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Gears of War maker says bug caused by anticheat technology, not DRM
The bug in Gears of War that locked out players starting last Thursday was caused by flaws in the game's anticheating software, not antipiracy technology, said an executive at maker Epic Games Inc.

The bug had only locked out players with legitimate versions of Gears, not the many users with pirated copies of the popular game, say multiple reports.

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Experts question fallout from new Monster hackAP - 2 hours, 29 minutes ago
SAN FRANCISCO - For the second time in less than 18 months, the job-search Web site Monster.com was breached, along with USAJobs.gov, which Monster's parent company runs for the federal government. And yet Monster might suffer little fallout — because the overall state of computer security is so bad anyway.

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Google Glitch Labels Internet as Malware PC Magazine - Sat Jan 31, 8:42 PM ET
An alarming glitch that plagued Google's search engine Saturday morning was blamed on human error, Google said in a blog post.

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A New Internet Attack: Parking Tickets Crooks in North Dakota are attempting to lure victims into installing malware by starting with fake parking tickets on cars.

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MySpace Evicts 90,000 Sex Offenders The social networking site cleans house, but keeping cyberspace safe for kids is a challenge on several levels.

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Unauthorized Web Use On The Rise, Sneaking By ITFeb 04,2009
New data shows businesses may be clueless about proxy abuse in their organizations

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January 30, 2009 VMSA-2009-0001
ESX patches address an issue loading corrupt virtual disks and update Service Console packages
[more]

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Nearly 83 percent of all Web sites advertised through spam can be traced back to just 10 domain name registrars, according to a study to be released this week.

The data come from millions of junk messages collected over the past year by Knujon ("no junk" spelled backwards and pronounced "new john"), an anti-spam outfit that tries to convince registrars to dismantle spam sites.

While there are roughly 900 accredited domain name registrars, spammers appear to register the Web sites they advertise in junk e-mail through just one percent of those registrars.

Continue reading this post »»

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Vulnerabilities in UltraVNC and TightVNC
Bugs in the clients could lead to a system compromise. An update for UltraVNC is available, but TightVNC users will have to wait a little while more…

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IBM study says many security vulnerabilities remain unpatched
According to IBM, no patches were issued for 53 per cent of the vulnerabilities discovered in 2008. Most of those affected Apple's Mac OS X more…

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New style of DNS amplification can yield powerful DDoS attacks
Angela Moscaritolo February 04, 2009
The coming wave of distributed denial-of-service attacks will leverage non-recursive DNS name servers to overwhelm targets, and many ISPs likely are vulnerable, a researcher said this week.

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China’s zombies are down but they lead the U.S.
China’s use of zombies for spam is down, but the country now leads the United States in McAfee’s February Spam Report, available here for download.

The United States has long been the leading supplier spam, but with the overall amount of spam decreasing, China is catching up. It’s not clear what China is doing, but the vast amount of computers that have been controlled by zombies, are no longer being used for that purpose. One certainly has to wonder what they are being used for.

Additionally, in Switzerland (owner of the .ch domain), we have seen is big increase in the amount of spam offering “cheap” software.

Clearly, money and profit are still the driving forces for malware and spam these day.