Archive by Author

According to media reports, the Japanese Defense Ministry has awarded Fujitsu a contract to develop a computer virus. Source Japan finds that it has been victim to computer break ins much the same as the US with someone seeking to discover trade secrets from industry, of seeking military secrets and equipment specs, and trying to obtain political information from government offices through their computers. How nice, what could possibly go wrong with such a tool? I keep getting these images in my [...]

Freedom to install free software When done correctly, “Secure Boot” is designed to protect against malware by preventing computers from loading unauthorized binary programs when booting. In practice, this means that computers implementing it won’t boot unauthorized operating systems — including initially authorized systems that have been modified without being re-approved. Source The above is a place trying to get signatures for a petition not to have it mandatory to install [...]

QR Code Malware Picks Up Steam As mobile marketers have latched onto the convenience and cool-factor of QR codes, hackers are starting to take advantage of these square, scannable bar codes as a new way to distribute malware. Like all mobile attack vectors, it is a new frontier that security researchers say is not extremely prevalent but which has a lot of potential to wreak havoc if mobile developers and users stand by unaware. Source QR code for the URL of the English Wikipedia Mobile main page, [...]

In today’s world it is common for the hacker to find flaws that can be exploited in software allowing access where there should be none. Those being found for the first time and not already known are rare but are called zero day because there is no defense against it until it is understood how it is done and therefor how to block that method. Those that hack for bad (known as black hat), when getting a hold of such knowledge as unknown methods to access computers by weakness in code, will often [...]

American Corporate Software Can No Longer Be Trusted For Anything The discussions around SOPA have shown a very unfortunate side of United States policy making — that its policymakers are not the slightest afraid of legislatively ordering American-run corporations to sabotage their customers in order to further United States foreign policy. I have no idea if the article is from a reputable website or not. The issue it raises is valid even if it is a trash think tank for one of the political parties [...]

A group of researchers from the U.S. Naval Academy has developed a technique for analyzing email traffic in real-time to identify spam messages as they come across the wire, simply using information from the TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) packets that carry the messages. http://www.itworld.com/networking/235527/naval-researchers-pioneer-tcp-based-spam-detection ———- So this begs the query of what do you do about spam? Spam has been with us so long that it literally became the [...]

I have no answers for the question, just examples and other questions. If you’ve been living under a rock the last year, malware writers have been finding holes to use digital certificates to slip in to computers. What are digital certificates? From Webopedia: An attachment to an electronic message used for security purposes. The most common use of a digital certificate is to verify that a user sending a message is who he or she claims to be, and to provide the receiver with the means to encode [...]