Category Archives: Current Events
Current Event: ITunes vulnerability leak user credentials
The recently released ITunes 8.1 closed two major security gaps from the previous version. According to Apple, until the latest release, maliciously crafted podcasts could cause ITunes to ask user for credentials but send the username and password to a … Continue reading
Current Event: Kremlin loyalist admits to launching DDoS attack on Estonia
According to an article from Rueters (http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSTRE52B4D820090313?pageNumber=1&virtualBrandChannel=0), Konstantin Goloskokov, a member of a Russian youth movement recently claimed responsibility to organizing a group of fellow supporters and executing a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on Estonian internet sites, causing … Continue reading
Current Event: Telegraph website hacked
The Telegraph, a famous daily newspaper in the UK, was hacked into by a Romanian hacking group last week. The group exposed a weakness in the way the website queried its database for property searches and was able to obtain … Continue reading
Subverting SSL with SSLstrip
At the recent Black Hat security conference, independent hacker Moxie Marlinspike gave a speech about his new tool sslstrip and the techniques that it uses to subvert SSL on a network (a write up can be found at http://www.itpro.co.uk/609932/website-danger-as-hacker-breaks-ssl-encryption and … Continue reading
Current Event: Air Force Engineers develop BitTorrent sniffer
Original article: http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2009/02/airforce-engineers-develop-bittorrent-sniffer.ars The Air Force Institute of Technology has a new method for passive BitTorrent tracking. The system attempts to read the header of BitTorrent packets, and compare the hash in the packet to a known set of bad … Continue reading
Democratized DDoS attacks
Distributed Denial of Service attacks are becoming less the tool of centralized attackers Continue reading
Face Recognition System: Clever or Creepy?
Photo programs that could organize, recognize, and cluster people’s photos are neat because it allows the user to search for pictures. The face recognition technology has also been used to identify people. The way the system works is that the … Continue reading
The BBC Borrows a Botnet
In an effort to make the public aware of the threat of botnets, the BBC comes very close to violating the UK’s Computer Misuse Act. The BCC technology program Click acquired a botnet of about 22,000 computers and used them … Continue reading
Second most dangerous virus?
Romanian firm SOFTWIN has released an update to their BitDefender security suite claiming to have created a vaccination for Conficker. So what is Conficker? Fast Stats: Release Date: October 2008 Target Platform: Windows >= Windows 2000 (including Windows 7 Beta) … Continue reading
DDoS attack on Time Warner Cable’s DNS Servers
At the end of February, a distributed denial of service attack on Time Warner Cable’s DNS Servers severely impacted subscribers connections for over a week. The problems were supposedly localized to Southern California, according to TWC. Although DDoS attacks are … Continue reading