Stolen or easily-guessed passwords have long been the weakest link in security, leaving many Webmail accounts subject to hijacking by identity thieves, spammers and extortionist. To combat this threat on its platform, Google is announcing that starting today, users of Google’s Gmail service and other applications will have the option to beef up the security around these accounts by adding one-time pass codes sent to their mobile or land line phones.
Talk about Patch Tuesday on steroids! Adobe, Microsoft and WordPress all issued security updates for their products yesterday. In addition, security vendor Tipping Point released advisories detailing 21 unpatched vulnerabilities in products made by CA, EMC, HP, Novell and SCO.… Read More »
A company that is helping the federal government track down cyberactivists who have been attacking business that refused to support Wikileaks has itself been hacked by the very same activists it is investigating.
At the center of the storm is a leaderless and anarchic Internet group called Anonymous, which more recently has been coordinating attacks against Egyptian government Web sites. Late last month, authorities in the U.K. and the U.S. moved against at least 45 suspected Anonymous activists. Then, on Saturday, the Financial Times ran a story quoting Aaron Barr, the head of security services firm HBGary Federal, saying he had uncovered the identities of Anonymous’ leaders using social networking sites and planned to release his findings at a security conference in San Francisco next week.
Late last year, online crime forums were abuzz with talk that development of the world’s most notorious banking Trojan — ZeuS — was being retired, after its maker handed the malware’s secret blueprints to a rival developer. The recipient of those plans — the author of the SpyEye Trojan– has been hard at work on a malware strain that blends the two malware families. But new evidence suggests that the source code for the latest ZeuS version may have been given to a third party and is now up for sale in the criminal underground, a development that could soon guarantee the production of a whole new ZeuS lineage.
In October 2010, I discovered that the authors of the SpyEye and ZeuS banking Trojans — once competitors in the market for botnet creation and management kits — were killing further development of ZeuS and planning to fuse the two malware families into one supertrojan. Initially, I heard some skepticism from folks in the security community about this. But three months later, security experts are now starting to catch glimpses of this new hybrid Trojan in the wild, as the author(s) begins shipping a series of beta releases that include updated features on a nearly-daily basis.
Egyptian citizens calling for besieged President Hosni Mubarak to step down may have been cut off from using the Web, but spammers have been busy cutting the government off from its own Internet address space: Earlier this month, junk e-mail artists hijacked a swath of Internet addresses assigned to Mubarak’s wife.
