The computer security landscape today is such that pretty much ALL software, whether it’s Operating System, Office Suite, Web browser or device driver is at any given time “the weakest link”. One of my dreams as someone that does IT is “what IF there were an easy way to keep track of updates for software?” In fact, I would LOVE to see some sort of open source, rss based way of distributing news of updates. The way I see it working is as follows… The software writer has an rss feed reserved for product updates (one feed per product possibly?) This isn’t cluttered up with anything else, only things like…. Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.6 – stability update – download link. Nice and simple, so that you could setup your feed reader to check the feeds of software that you use in your situation.
Tag: IT
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Sober virus watch…
Well, antivirus vendors and IT security folks are waiting now for the expected activation of the sober.y worm searching for a new downloads and a new revision of the pest. kaspersky’s log indicates the expected activation time is 00:00 GMT January 6th, which means here in the EST zone that would be 7PM EST… Of course many of the expected sites have been shut down. It appears that the virus will look periodically for sites to “upgrade” from for some time.
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WMF Exploit — it’s worse…
This is going to be a rough start to the new year for IT staff and computer users….
There’s coverage at Incidents.org, the sunbeltblog and f-secure of the latest twist in what will likely be a BIG mess to clean up. It looks like there’s a someone spamming emails to tons of addresses with a specially crafted image (uses the WMF exploit.) It’s also a slightly different variant of the exploit.
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How embarrasing… Computer security firms database hacked
The Washington Times, has a story from Brian Krebs of their Security Fix blog about …
Guidance Software — the leading provider of software used to diagnose hacker break-ins — has itself been hacked, resulting in the exposure of financial and personal data connected to thousands of law enforcement officials and network-security professionals.
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Network Security guide for the home or small business network – Part 8 – Don’t be afraid to ask for help
Deep breath time. We’ve covered a lot of good topics and it’s important at this point to take a close look at what we’ve talked about and think. “Am I overwhelmed?” If so that’s fine. Maybe you don’t have enough time to think about all of this network security stuff. Maybe, no matter how hard you try it doesn’t make sense.
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Network Security guide for the home or small business network – preface
OK, this is an ambitious idea, but the two articles on Titan Rain and the lack of IT security training has planted a bug under the saddle so to speak…. I don’t know how many parts will be in this series. In fact, I may add to it from time to time even after an initial series. This is intended as a “crash course” in the essentials of network security. It’s aimed at the home users and managers of small networks (small business owners?) that haven’t thought about network security before and maybe will be a reference of some value even to those that are more intermediate. The essentials of network security will be covered in the first few posts.
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More information on Titan Rain (“Hack attacks”)
Earlier this year there was an article or two about a rumored “hack attack” that was ongoing against US Government (and contractor) computer systems. The stories claimed that the attacks seemed to be coming from China. Today I’m seeing a couple of articles on the topic. First up is an AFP story on the problem it sounds as though little attention has been paid to hardening systems. There is speculation that the Chinese military is involved in the breakins. One incident was very neatly and methodically done, planting a backdoor in 30 minutes.
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Pakistan/India hacker skirmishes.
The Hindustan times has an article on the latest round of India vs. Pakistani hacker/IT online skirmishes. It sounds as though there has been a recent rash of back and forth with Pakistani cracker groups trying to break into and deface Indian web sites and India trying to get word out to help secure the sites against the attacks. This is not a new thing….
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ZDNET.uk takes a look at linux on the business desktop
It was nice to see linux on the business desktop getting a serious look at zdnet.uk It looks like they give a fair run down of the main business class applications (Office Suite/email/etc.) While pointing out that the installers were something that in a business environment IT staff would be dealing with. They seem to favor the GNOME desktop over KDE as being able to sit down and get right to work in.
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How effective is the MediaMax copy protection?
One of the sub-stories in all the Sony DRM mess of the last month with the XCP copy protection was that it was really an ineffective way of preventing copying of music anyway. In other words, you could press shift while inserting the cd to avoid the installer, then other programs could access the cd/allow copying without the software installed, other OS’s could access the disc and rip the tracks. In other words it wasn’t very useful toward it’s objective of preventing copying…