Privacy, Security Archive

Researchers at security firm Finjan have uncovered a massive botnet of Windows machines. The botnet is 1.9 million machines strong, with many of the machines located in the United States: 45% of them are located in the US. The researchers detailed their findings at the RSA Conference in San Fransisco.

As he had already predicted, cracker Charlie Miller has won the PWN2OWN contest by cracking Safari and Mac OS X within seconds of the start of the competition. "It took a couple of seconds. They clicked on the link and I took control of the machine," Miller said after his accomplishment. He took home the USD 10000 prize, as well as the MacBook he performed the exploit on. Internet Explorer 8 fell a while later by cracker Nils, who also cracked Safari and Firefox after being done with IE8.

It's time for another security report. You know, those reports that tally vulnerabilities, and then plot or graph them in such a way that their benefactors or clients come out most favourably. Ok, that might be a bit cynical, but fact remains that there is usually something wrong with such reports. The one that's making its rounds across the internet today is certainly one of them. According to IBM, AIX is the most secure operating system, and Mac OS X the least secure. Not only is the report rather slim on details when it comes to operating system vulnerabilities, it seems like most websites reporting on this story have misunderstood what it was about.

"Intego has discovered a new Trojan horse, OSX.Trojan.iServices.A, which is currently circulating in copies of Apple's iWork 09 found on BitTorrent trackers and other sites containing links to pirated software. The version of iWork 09, Apple's productivity suite, are complete and functional, but the installer contains an additional package called iWorkServices.pkg." Update: A new variant has been discovered in a pirated version of Adobe Photoshop CS4, also information about one target of a DDOS attack coming from the trojan.

"If you want to make sure your computer or server is not tricked into undertaking malicious or undesirable behavior, it's not enough to keep bad code out of the system. Return-oriented programming exploits start out like more familiar attacks on computers. The attacker takes advantage of a programming error in the target system to overwrite the runtime stack and divert program execution away from the path intended by the system's designers. But instead of injecting outside code - the approach used in traditional malicious exploits - return-oriented programming enables attackers to create any kind of nasty computation or program by using just the existing code."

This week Cisco released twelve sets of security patches, eleven of which were to address security vulnerabilities in the Cisco Internetwork Operating System (IOS), the OS that runs on most of its networking hardware.