“Shadows in the Cloud” hang over the otherwise sunny PRC A spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign ministry has tried to minimize a report from investigators in Toronto that hackers based in China breached computers of the Indian Government and others and downloaded classified material. The Information Warfare Monitor and the Shadowserver Foundation extensively documented an…
A blog contributor who goes by the name of “jeremy” has continued to research the possibilities inherent in the recently discovered .pdf-file weakness that could enable the execution of code. Jeremy posted earlier this week that he had created a proof of concept .pdf file that could spread to other .pdf files on a system…
I could talk about how The Matrix was a pretty big deal for me back in the day, or how The Matrix Online is (to date) the only MMORPG I ever liked enough to pay a monthly subscription for, or how I think people doing Kung Fu in bullet time is still the best thing…
If you like downloading or installing programs on your PC related to XBox gaming, you might want to take heed of this writeup. There’s a fake application kit in circulation that allows an attacker to create a website claiming to be an XBox Live application that takes the form of a Java install. Upon visiting…
Rob VandenBrink has written a piece on the SANS web site Diary (“The Many Paths to Security Awareness”) with an interesting take on the very large topic of computer security awareness. “Security Awareness does not mean the same thing to everyone in a company,” sums up his point. “From a Security Awareness perspective the blanket…
Though it is true that malware is getting more and more sophisticated I am sometimes surprised by the lack of skills coming from wannabe botnet operators. Today, I stumbled upon a hacker’s forum which nicely demonstrates just how low is the technical knowledge level of the forum members. A search for “Zeus” produces several hundred…
Our good friends at Hanoi, Viet Nam, -based security firm Bkis have written about an interesting malcode lure: Trojans masquerading as updates for popular applications such as Adobe, Java or Windows. The fake updates are distributed with icons of the application they’re impersonating. Analyst Nguyen Cong Cuong wrote: “In addition, on being executed, they immediately…
Well, this is unfortunate. In the UK, they have something called “The Big Issue”, which is a magazine designed to help the homeless get back into society via a legitimate income. It sells around 300,000 copies a week and is listed as the third-favourite newspaper of young British people aged 15 to 24, according to…
Malware authors use numerous unconventional techniques in their attempts to create malicious code that is not detected by antivirus software. As malicious code analysts, though, it is our job to analyze their creations, and as such we have to be constantly vigilant for the latest tricks that the malware authors employ. While looking at some…
A friend of mine forwarded a suspicious email message recently. I’ve replaced the domain, order number, etc. below: I validated for my friend that the email was bogus. The domain was not held by Domain Registry of America (DROA), and never had been. The domain was not expiring in the next 90 days. Later he received a…