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Obama: Cyber Security is a National Security Priority
http://feeds.voices.washingtonpost.com/click.phdo?i=e47a743f8525a62fd954f27253bcdd22
President Barack Obama today pledged to make securing the nation's most vital computer networks a top economic and national security priority, broadly detailing the results of 60-day cyber security review that calls for a range of responses to help improve the security of information networks that power the government and the U.S. economy. Speaking at the White House this morning, the president said he would work to make sure the nation's core digital infrastructure is treated as a national asset. "Protecting this infrastructure will be a national security priority. We will ensure that these networks are secure, trustworthy and resilient." Obama said. "We will deter, prevent, detect, and defend against attacks and recover quickly from any disruptions or damage." As expected, Obama said he plans to create a new office at the White House to be led by a cyber security coordinator "responsible for orchestrating and integrating all cyber security
Sat, 30 May 09
Microsoft Update Quietly Installs Firefox Extension
http://feeds.voices.washingtonpost.com/click.phdo?i=49c9b11b6439a1d1b3c41f10fadc8a58
A routine security update for a Microsoft Windows component installed on tens of millions of computers has quietly installed an extra add-on for an untold number of users surfing the Web with Mozilla's Firefox Web browser. Earlier this year, Microsoft shipped a bundle of updates known as a "service pack" for a programming platform called the Microsoft .NET Framework, which Microsoft and plenty of third-party developers use to run a variety of interactive programs on Windows. The service pack for the .NET Framework, like other updates, was pushed out to users through the Windows Update Web site. A number of readers had never heard of this platform before Windows Update started offering the service pack for it, and many of you wanted to know whether it was okay to go ahead and install this thing. Having earlier checked to see whether the service pack had caused any widespread problems or
Wed, 27 May 09
The Scrap Value of a Hacked PC
http://feeds.voices.washingtonpost.com/click.phdo?i=a0331a1be3b8925147e673f9bd9b9dac
Computer users often dismiss Internet security best practices because they find them inconvenient, or because they think the rules don't apply to them. Many cling to the misguided belief that because they don't bank or shop online, that bad guys won't target them. The next time you hear this claim, please refer the misguided person to this blog post, which attempts to examine some of the more common -- yet often overlooked -- ways that cyber crooks can put your PC to criminal use. The graphic above (click it for a larger version) shows the different reasons criminals may want access to your system. I've explained each category in more detail below: Illicit Web Hosting Cyber criminals commonly use hacked PCs as a host for a variety of dodgy Web hosting schemes, including: - Spam Web sites - Phishing Web sites - Malware download sites - "Warez" servers, or hosts
Fri, 22 May 09
Apple Slow To Fix Java Flaws
http://feeds.voices.washingtonpost.com/click.phdo?i=0a9e1776f4cd18d80d9408636d812b11
Instructions showing wannabe Mac-hackers a way to remotely take control over OS X systems through an unpatched security hole have been posted online. The researcher who published the blueprints said he did so to nudge Apple into fixing the problem, which the company has known about for more than six months. But Security Fix has found that half a year is about the average time it takes Cupertino to plug these types of holes. On Tuesday, renowned Apple researcher Landon Fuller published a proof-of-concept exploit for a particularly dangerous bug in Java that Sun Microsystems fixed in a patch released Dec. 3, 2008. However, Apple -- which ships its own version of Sun's Java with OS X -- has yet to push out an update to fix that particular flaw. "Unfortunately, it seems that many Mac OS X security issues are ignored if the severity of the issue is not
Fri, 22 May 09
Report: IRS Created Dumpster-Diver Swimming Holes
http://feeds.voices.washingtonpost.com/click.phdo?i=92e4df29efb744c0e3daa3a153a2d83b
The Internal Revenue Service has long advised consumers to shred old tax returns and other documents that contain sensitive data, as a way to thwart identity thieves who sometimes root through trash bins in search of identity information. But it seems the IRS doesn't take its own advice: a recent investigation of more than a dozen IRS document disposal facilities found that -- at each location -- old taxpayer records were being tossed out in regular waste containers and dumpsters. The audit by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration also found that IRS officials failed to consistently verify whether contract employees who have access to taxpayer documents had passed background checks. In addition, investigators also had trouble finding anyone responsible for overseeing most of the facilities that the IRS contracted with to burn or shred sensitive taxpayer documents. "We found evidence of only 2 instances where IRS personnel conducted
Fri, 22 May 09
Investment Firms Report Increased Credit & Debit Card Fraud
http://feeds.voices.washingtonpost.com/click.phdo?i=49e51406569f61e3685fa940aab159ea
Financial institutions in the securities and futures industries last year reported a large increase in the number of suspicious transactions attributed to debit and credit card fraud -- nearly double the number reported in 2007, new statistics released by the federal government show. The numbers come from an annual report released by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), a division of the U.S. Treasury Department. The report tracks so-called "suspicious activity reports" (SARs), which financial institutions are required to file when they spot customer transactions of $5,000 or more that set off various red flags most commonly associated with money laundering or other fraudulent activity. Originally, these filings were required only of traditional financial institutions, but in 2003, the government began requiring the reports from trading firms and mutual fund providers, too. According to FinCEN, the number of SARs that investment firms attributed to credit and debit card fraud jumped
Thu, 21 May 09
Adobe Adopts Microsoft's Patch Tuesday Approach
http://feeds.voices.washingtonpost.com/click.phdo?i=b9c0e5c9c3dd0768d75b039757bbd7f5
Following a series of high-profile attacks that leveraged security vulnerabilities in its PDF Reader and Acrobat applications, Adobe Systems Inc. is making a major push to revamp its approach to security. The company said today that it plans to ship security updates more regularly and push out emergency updates more speedily, and that it will be continually stress-testing those products to find and close security holes before hackers can exploit them. In announcing the changes, Adobe is borrowing several pages from Microsoft's security playbook. Redmond ships updates on the second Tuesday of each month and regularly fixes vulnerabilities that its in-house researchers have uncovered. Sometime this summer, Adobe will begin shipping patches on a quarterly basis -- on the second Tuesday of every third month. Brad Arkin, Adobe's director for product security and privacy, said that day was picked to help lighten the load on businesses, most of which already
Tue, 19 May 09
MyIDscore.com Offers Free ID Theft Risk Score
http://feeds.voices.washingtonpost.com/click.phdo?i=2823ea2a1efe6c6dd2464f2c7cfaa40d
Consumers trying to determine their risk of becoming an identity theft victim typically are told to check their credit report for signs of unauthorized or suspicious activity. But a new Web-based service aims to give users a view into tricks ID thieves use that credit reports often miss, such as when crooks use only parts of a victim's identity to fabricate a new one. The new service, www.myidscore.com, is a free offering by ID Analytics, a company that sells anti-fraud software to banks and other creditors. After providing some personal information and answering a handful of questions, visitors to the site are presented with a score from 1 to 999. Unlike credit scores, where a higher score signifies a favorable credit history, with myidscore.com, a higher score means a greater risk of identity theft. Avivah Litan, a fraud analyst with Gartner Inc., said the difference between a credit report and
Fri, 15 May 09
Heartland Breach Blamed for Failed Membership Renewals
http://feeds.voices.washingtonpost.com/click.phdo?i=8d1db8767a11d0e4d84b90f896bf2dc2
In February, Bill Oesterle began seeing nearly twice the normal number of transactions being declined for customers who had set up auto-billing on their accounts. The co-founder of Angie's List -- a service that aggregates consumer reviews of local contractors and physicians -- said he originally assumed more customers were simply having trouble making ends meet in a down economy. But as that trend continued into March and April, the company shifted its suspicions to another probable culprit: credit card processing giant Heartland Payment Systems. The data breach last year at Heartland -- a company that processes roughly 100 million card transactions a month for more than 175,000 businesses, has forced at least 600 banks to re-issue untold thousands of new cards in a bid to stave off fraud. For consumers, receiving a new credit or debit card number means contacting companies that have those credentials on file to charge
Wed, 13 May 09
Adobe, Apple and Microsoft Issue Security Updates
http://feeds.voices.washingtonpost.com/click.phdo?i=6353ae2330c76d1957827cc5b9657f4a
This turned out to be one of the busiest Patch Tuesdays in a long while: Adobe, Apple and Microsoft all independently released software security updates today. Adobe patched two vulnerabilities in its PDF Reader and Acrobat software. The update applies to all supported versions of both programs on Windows, Mac and Linux systems. Adobe vulnerabilities are some of the most heavily used in targeted attacks, and they show up quite a bit in exploit kits that are sewn into hacked and malicious Web sites. So, if you use Reader or Acrobat, try not to let too much time elapse before you apply this update. Redmond issued a single update to plug at least 16 security holes in its PowerPoint software. The Microsoft Office PowerPoint update is rated critical and applies to all supported versions of PowerPoint, including Office for Mac, Microsoft Works 8.5 and 9.0, as well as various Office
Wed, 13 May 09
Pirated Version of Windows 7 Has Malware Built-in
http://feeds.voices.washingtonpost.com/click.phdo?i=6211920bc4bf7b8666cd026efe7fa48b
Security researchers are warning that Internet users who install pirated versions of Microsoft's latest Windows 7 operating system may also be installing malicious software, too. Experts at Atlanta-based security firm Damballa say they first noticed hacked versions of the Windows 7 release candidate available on peer-to-peer file-sharing networks and newsgroups last week, shortly after the OS was released to developers. Damballa found that computers with the tainted versions of Windows 7 were programmed to silently reach out to an Internet server to check for further updates, which in this case is a piece of malware that Kaspersky Antivirus calls Win32.Banload.cdk. "The first thing this does is phone home and get a list of additional malware to install," said Tripp Cox, vice president of engineering at Damballa. Damballa managed to grab control over the server that's contacted by the pirated Windows 7 versions -- codecs.systes.net -- which is how it knows
Tue, 12 May 09
Oprah, KFC and the Great PC Cleanup?
http://feeds.voices.washingtonpost.com/click.phdo?i=6846410846039d80307587d1b1f0d14d
Last week, Kentucky Fried Chicken stores around the nation struggled to accommodate a surge of roughly 4 million new customers, after Oprah Winfrey told viewers of her show that they could get a free meal at KFC by printing out an Internet coupon. By most accounts, the marketing gimmick was a disaster, but it got me thinking about Oprah's sheer ability to mobilize the masses. I wondered: How much badness on the Internet would disappear overnight if Oprah suggested that her devotees download, install and run a set of free PC security scanning tools? Probably quite a bit, or at least enough to register a notable drop in global spam volumes, malicious software attacks and other activity that depends largely on remotely compromised PCs or "bots" to do most of the grunt work. Estimates of just how many systems are infected by bot programs vary widely, but even by the
Fri, 8 May 09
ZeusTracker and the Nuclear Option
http://feeds.voices.washingtonpost.com/click.phdo?i=a9201666abd5b01d381383860cda368c
One of the scarier realities about malicious software is that these programs leave ultimate control over victim machines in the hands of the attacker, who could simply decide to order all of the infected machines to self-destruct. Most security experts will tell you that while this so-called "nuclear option" is an available feature in some malware, it is hardly ever used. Disabling infected systems is counterproductive for attackers, who generally focus on hoovering as much personal and financial data as they can from the PCs they control. But try telling that to Roman Hüssy, a 21-year-old Swiss information technology expert, who last month witnessed a collection of more than 100,000 hacked Microsoft Windows systems tearing themselves apart at the command of their cyber criminal overlords. Hüssy oversees Zeustracker, a Web site listing Internet servers that uses Zeus, a kit sold for about $700 on shadowy cyber criminal forums to harvest
Thu, 7 May 09
Windows 7 Security Fail: File Extensions Still Hidden
http://feeds.voices.washingtonpost.com/click.phdo?i=9dabada9841d5870b05a0ecf9d9824e6
The release candidate for Windows 7 is now available for download, and techies everywhere are busy kicking the tires on the new operating system. But as the folks over at Finnish anti-virus firm F-Secure observe, Microsoft persists in misleading users on the true nature of file types, by hiding file extensions of known file types in Windows 7. The default behavior of Windows Explorer in every version of Windows from Windows 2000 through Windows Vista is to represent files using icons, and to hide each file's extension type, such as ".txt" for text files, ".doc" for Microsoft Word files, and so on. But as Security Fix has noted before, this is a usability vs. security decision that Microsoft should have reversed long ago, and it's disheartening to see this behavior persist in Windows 7. That means that our average Windows user -- when he or she opens up their "My
Wed, 6 May 09
Safari, Opera Users Lag Behind in Security Updates
http://feeds.voices.washingtonpost.com/click.phdo?i=fd25321dd3d94fad4582422249378c5f
Users of the Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox Web browsers are far more likely to be cruising the Web with the latest, most secure versions of the browsers than users of either Opera or Safari, a study released today found. The analysis, from researchers at Google Switzerland and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, pored through anonymized logs from Google's Web servers. The results were somewhat unsurprising, but still interesting: 97 percent of Chrome users were browsing with the latest version within 21 days of that version's release date. By comparison, 85 percent of Firefox users were surfing with the latest version within three weeks of a major new release (this is a marginal improvement over the results from a similar study released last summer, which showed roughly 83 percent of Firefox users browsing with the latest version). The study's conclusion extols the virtues of auto-update features, functionality that is
Wed, 6 May 09
Hackers Break Into Virginia Health Professions Database, Demand Ransom
http://feeds.voices.washingtonpost.com/click.phdo?i=148402ffdab87dc8987153ac04540204
Hackers last week broke into a Virginia state Web site used by pharmacists to track prescription drug abuse. They deleted records on more than 8 million patients and replaced the site's homepage with a ransom note demanding $10 million for the return of the records, according to a posting on Wikileaks.org, an online clearinghouse for leaked documents. Wikileaks reports that the Web site for the Virginia Prescription Monitoring Program was defaced last week with a message claiming that the database of prescriptions had been bundled into an encrypted, password-protected file. Wikileaks has published a copy of the ransom note left in place of the PMP home page, a message that claims the state of Virginia would need to pay the demand in order to gain access to a password needed to unlock those records: "I have your [expletive] In *my* possession, right now, are 8,257,378 patient records and a total
Mon, 4 May 09
Microsoft Pushing Out IE8 Through Auto Update
http://feeds.voices.washingtonpost.com/click.phdo?i=a9384698e1ec11c68ef5b8750e6225d6
Microsoft has begun pushing out Internet Explorer 8, the latest version of its Web browser, to Windows users who are signed up for automatic software updates. If your system has Automatic Updates turned on, you may have already been prompted to install the software. Whether you use IE on a regular basis or not, it's probably a good idea to accept this update, for a couple of reasons. One is speed, both in startup and in normal browsing. From my own, unscientific testing, IE8 simply runs quite a bit faster and smoother than IE7. Various Web sites and blogs have sought to pit IE8's speed against those of other browsers; I won't attempt that here. My take: If you must have any version of IE installed, this is the one you want. The other is improved security. IE8 ships with a feature called SmartScreen Filter, which is designed to block
Mon, 4 May 09
Facebook Among Top Phished Web Sites
http://feeds.voices.washingtonpost.com/click.phdo?i=b7aeed96adffd0528d6efb725ccda8bf
A washingtonpost.com colleague today called my attention to a phishing scam targeting Facebook users that is apparently getting some digital ink from Twitter users and various blogs. I figured this was as good a time as any to note that Facebook is and has been for some time one of the brands most frequently targeted by scam artists, right up there with some of the world's largest banks. According to phishtank.com, a community-based site that tracks phishing Web sites, Facebook.com was the seventh most-phished brand in March -- even ahead of the Internal Revenue Service, and that was during tax month! In fact, Phishtank found at least 104 phishing Web sites targeting Facebook users, or an average of three different Facebook phishing campaigns each day. Why on Earth would cyber crooks want to hijack your Facebook profile? Why, to trick your friends into visiting sites that try to download malicious
Mon, 4 May 09
Spam From Hijacked Webmail Accounts
http://feeds.voices.washingtonpost.com/click.phdo?i=e07985345196f7e426b3426233d3c863
A family member called last night, upset and embarrassed that his yahoo.com account was used to blast out spam to all of his contacts. A quick examination of the message headers indicated the spam was indeed sent through his yahoo.com account, and that someone had hijacked his Webmail account password. Upon closer inspection, I noticed that whoever had sent the message had also done the following: deleted the last 30 days worth of messages in the "Sent" folder; added the same message they had spammed out to his e-mail signature, so that the message would be tacked onto each subsequent e-mail he sent; and the perpetrators even signed his first name at the bottom of the message. An Internet search for the domain advertised in the spam -- easylifeing.com -- shows that spammers have advertised this site by hijacking accounts at other free Web mail providers as well, including Hotmail