The same miscreants responsible for breaking into the networks of America’s top consumer and business data brokers appear to have also infiltrated and stolen huge amounts of data from the National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C), a congressionally-funded non-profit organization that provides training, investigative support and research to agencies and entities involved in the prevention, investigation and prosecution of cybercrime.
Many anti-virus products — particularly the “Internet security suite” variety — now ship with various Web browser toolbars, plug-ins and add-ons designed to help protect the customer’s personal information and to detect malicious Web sites. Unfortunately, if designed poorly, these browser extras can actually lower the security posture of the user’s system by introducing security and stability issues.
This past week, I was reminded of a conversation I had with an ethical hacker I met at the annual Defcon security conference in Las Vegas, who showed me what may have been (and still remains) the shortest and most elegant trick I’ve seen to crash Internet Explorer 6 Web browser. I was reminded because the guy who told me about it said it still worked, even though he alerted Microsoft to the flaw back in 2004.
