http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2007/07/23/spammers_switch_to_pdf/ – A lot of you might have experienced a rise in random e-mail spam containing Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF) document attachments. It seems as though attaching a spam message via a .PDF document is the latest trend in circumventing anti-spam servers and client utilities, since very few of them currently employ countermeasures against [...]
Archive for the ‘Security’ Category
Voting machine competition yields open-source winner
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/07/us-team-wins-vo.html – An evolution in voting machines came about today as a competition for open-source based voting machines yielded a winner – A team composed of researchers from two U.S. universities and a Canadian university. The winning team was composed of Aleks Essex and Jeremy Clark from the University of Ottawa, Stefan Popoveniuc from George [...]
Adobe Flash exploit could log keystrokes
http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/security/0,39044215,62028443,00.htm – Adobe has issued three critical security updates, one of which is designed to stop a problem in the way the Flash player interacts with browsers, which could result in users’ keystrokes being transmitted to attackers.
Red Hat Linux Gets Top Govt. Security Rating
http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;306842912;fp;4194304;fpid;1 – Earlier this month IBM was able to achieve EAL4 Augmented with ALC_FLR.3 certification for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, putting it on a par with Sun Microsystems Inc.’s Trusted Solaris operating system, said Dan Frye, vice president of open systems with IBM. This should make the software more appealing to some government agencies requiring [...]
Symantec Antivirus knocks out thousands of Chinese PCs
http://tinyurl.com/2s6wow – According to Computerworld, a signature update to Symantec’s anti-virus software has knocked out thousands of Chinese PCs. Apparently the latest update for the AV component of the various Norton packages mistook two system files in the Chinese edition of Windows XP SP2 for the ‘Backdoor.Haxdoor’ trojan. Piracy issues may complicate recovery, since once [...]
Man gets up to 101 years in prison for e-mail ‘phishing’
http://tinyurl.com/yufywy – The first man convicted under the 2003 CAN-SPAM act faces up to 101 years in federal prison after sending misleading e-mails to innocent Internet users and misusing credit card information, among other charges. From the article: ‘The law forbids e-mail marketers from sending false or misleading messages and requires them to provide recipients [...]
Windows Vista to allow alternate security vendors in
It has been a rocky road between Microsoft and security software vendors such as McAfee and Symantec lately. As the new version of Windows (named Windows Vista) was originally planned, Microsoft barred any and all access to it’s kernel (the piece of software that communicates with computer hardware), including security. Microsoft created its own security [...]
Best Buy “Destroyed” Hard Drive Found at Flea Market
According to news.yahoo.com, Henry and Roma Gerbus received a phone call from a man named Ed claiming he had purchased their old hard drive at a flea market. They had previously taken their computer to Best Buy to have the hard drive replaced and were told that the store would destroy it. Now it has [...]
Mafia boss captured due to weak cryptography
According to the Discovery Channel’s website ( http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20060417/mafiaboss_tec.html?source=rss ), the Sicilian Mafia’s “Boss of bosses”, Bernardo Provenzano, has been arrested. Police were able to capture him by deciphering a simple encryption scheme he used when typing letters on a typewriter. The scheme used was a modified version of the “Ceaser Cypher”, where each letter of [...]
McAfee Antivirus ALERT: Latest update causes file damage
As featured on Slashdot today, the latest anti virus definition files McAfee Antivirus offers (which are automatically downloaded to your computer if the automatic update feature is enabled, which is on many default installations) contain an “anomaly”. This anomaly will apparently mark many valid program file executable and dynamic link library (DLL) files, such as [...]