Category Archives: Thoughts
Israel vows to retaliate
Israel vows to retaliate after credit cards are hacked “Israel has active capabilities for striking at those who are trying to harm it, and no agency or hacker will be immune from retaliatory action,” he added, without giving further details. Source Interesting. Hacking started as a sort of way to see what was out there. It evolved to what it is today as a way to attempt to get money from people as a criminal activity. It’s been the driving force behind a lot of the malware. Until spyware came along, sponsored by the advertising industry, malware remained one of those items you had to click and install something in …
Japan’s search-and-destroy cyber weapon
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 mind from the movie Johnnie Menomic. A villain in a virtual world. One that could hop from computer to computer at will. The idea is great. Take a …
Freedom to install free software
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 Windows 8 with no other choice. I put this in not because I support the petition but because this is where I got the idea for writing this article. I would like to take you back a few years …
QR Code Malware Picks Up Steam
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, “hxxp://en.m.wikipedia.org” I was reading the recent article posted by John Barrett here at Cleanbytes regarding Windows 8 security improvements The thought hit me …
Windows 8 security improvements
Microsoft Windows was never meant to be an operating system dedicated to tech-savvy users, a proof of this is the lack of the processes details in the default Task Manager. We can see only the running processes including services and we have as options only to kill a certain process or to set its priority to the CPU. How many of you were able to kill a malicious process for example a computer trojan from Task Manager in the recent days? I bet nobody. That’s because the real computer trojans does not appear in the Task Manager with a name as trojan.exe allowing you to simply kill its process, instead the …
A Little Hacking History
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 sell the knowledge to others who will actually make use of it. It will compromise the security …
American Corporate Software Can No Longer Be Trusted For Anything
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 or someone with an axe to grind against Microsoft. Let me run a few items by to set up the discussion. The TSA (Transportation Security …
