Monthly Archives: February 2008

Vista SP1 with altered WGA Strategy, Nag instead of Disable

Posted on February 10, 2008 by robertm2

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes has a new blog posting over at ZDNet reviewing the changes  Microsoft made to its Vista WGA (Windows Genuine Advantage – its authenticity check for pirated software) with the SP1 update.  In a nutshell, it appears Microsoft has decided to … Continue reading →

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Local Root Exploit for Linux 2.6 Discovered

Posted on February 10, 2008 by Brian

A new vulnerability has been discovered in the 2.6 Linux kernel that allows a local user to obtain a root shell. The bug description was posted within the last 24 hours, and includes exploit code that works on a large … Continue reading →

Posted in Current Events | 5 Comments

Toshiba’s New Random Number Generator

Posted on February 10, 2008 by dschen

Toshiba has recently unveiled a new IC which is capable of generating 2 megabits/second of random bits. The IC utilizes analog noise generated by electrons trapped on a silicon nitride (SiN) layer of a transistor. The electrons randomly are bound … Continue reading →

Posted in Current Events | 2 Comments

Security Review: Smart pillboxes, maybe too smart?

Posted on February 10, 2008 by dschen

Recently an MIT research team has developed a smart pillbox to help combat the problem of patients failing to take their medication at prescribed intervals. This problem of over/underdosing of the drug by the patient accounts for ~10% of hospital … Continue reading →

Posted in Current Events, Security Reviews | 2 Comments

Firefox “View-Source” Vulnerability

Posted on February 9, 2008 by imv

I thought that since most of us use Firefox people might care – apparently the default installation/settings of Firefox’s latest release allow all scripts written on websites to be executed.  I don’t know with what privileges the code executes, but … Continue reading →

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Hackers Declare War On Scientology

Posted on February 9, 2008 by jerins

In the past couple of weeks, a loosely organized group of people have come together to attack the church of Scientology in a variety of technological related ways. The core group that has headed up these attacks calls themselves “Anonymous”, … Continue reading →

Posted in Current Events | 2 Comments

Security Review: Tor

Posted on February 9, 2008 by jkivligh

Tor (http://www.torproject.org/) is a service and application to enable anonymous access to the Internet.  It works by relaying network requests through a number of peers before ultimately accessing the resources requested.  In this way, those listening on your connection will … Continue reading →

Posted in Security Reviews | 1 Comment

Anti-Virus Vendor Hacked

Posted on February 8, 2008 by imv

I just read an article about an Indian security company AvSoft whose website got hacked and distributed malicious code rather than their own when users tried to download software. The attack used was iFrame injection on the vulnerable site. From … Continue reading →

Posted in Security Reviews | 3 Comments

Diebold/Premier Voting Machine Key Copied

Posted on February 7, 2008 by esoteric

Adding to the current furor of news surrounding the issue of electronic voting machines, an egregious mistake by American voting machine producer Diebold (now known as Premier Election Systems) has lead to heightened doubts concerning the integrity of electronic voting. … Continue reading →

Posted in Current Events, Integrity, Physical Security | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Just for fun

Posted on February 7, 2008 by jessicaf

I came across this on xkcd.com.  Thought you all might enjoy it! For more fun, check out  http://xkcd.com/341/ and read through  http://xkcd.com/345/.

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