Week in review: Leaked Symantec code, the grayware problem, and securing Android for the enterprise
Here’s an overview of some of last week’s most interesting news, podcasts, reviews and articles:
Hackers aim to fight Internet censorship with own communication satellites
Communication satellites are usually put into orbit by governmental agencies or big corporations, but a group of hackers is planning to do some satellite-launching of their own, all with the aim of “saving” the Internet from being censored by various governments.
Stuxnet and Duqu created on same platform, say researchers
Stuxnet and Duqu have made quite an impact on the security community when they were discovered, and are still considered to be two of the most sophisticated pieces of malware known to the greater public.
Tips to manage top IT trends
ISACA shared recommendations today for managing three of the trends widely cited to dominate the IT landscape in 2012: Big Data, the consumerisation of information technology (BYOD) and the growing dominance of mobile devices.
New Facebook clickjacking scam spreads like fire
It hooks them with links to titillating, disgusting or “amazing” videos that their friends apparently “liked”, but once they click on the link, they are redirected to a splash page where they are asked to jump through some hoops in order to watch the video.
Defensive search-and-destroy “virus” delivered to Japanese government
It took three years and 178.5 million yen (around $2.3 m) to develop a defensive cyber weapon that can track down the sources of cyber attacks and disable them, but Fujitsu apparently did it.
Securing Android for the enterprise
The numbers speak for themselves – Android’s share of the worldwide smartphone market is 52.5 percent, more than double compared to a year ago, according to recent research from Gartner. With such rapid adoption, it’s no surprise that Android smartphones and tablet PCs are increasingly making their way into the enterprise.
Israeli credit card hack creates more opportunities
In a recent data breach incident, a Saudi hacker defaced a prominent sports news web site in Israel and linked its front page to a file exposing the details of many credit card numbers of Israeli citizens.
Online scam susceptibility of American consumers
The results of the survey show a clear difference between respondents’ attitudes and predicted behaviors when presented with real-world online scenarios.
100M users exposed in hacks of popular Chinese sites
A number of internet forums, social networking and online gaming sites and others have apparently had their databases containing customers’ information compromised through a series of attacks and leaked online.
BackTrack 5 Wireless Penetration Testing
If you’re considering a career in penetration testing, you probably already know that BackTrack is the Linux distribution favored by most pentesters due to it being preloaded with hundreds of handy security tools. So, how about a peak into the concrete actions you can carry out when effecting wireless pentesting with BackTrack 5?
SpyEye Trojan post transaction fraud schemes attack banks
Many of us tend to spend a little more than we intend during the holiday season and, with all the transactions hitting our accounts, it can be hard to keep track. During the final few weeks of 2011, Trusteer saw fraudsters take advantage of this trend with their latest fraud scheme.
Good device and online safety behavior
McAfee recommends parents start the New Year off fresh with resolutions that address their own behavior so they can model best practices for kids and teens.
A look ahead at healthcare law, privacy and security
Industry experts representing healthcare law, privacy, security, regulatory and data breach were asked to forecast healthcare data trends for 2012. The overall forecast? Protecting patients’ protected health information (PHI) should be viewed as a patient safety issue.
Over 1M pages compromised in massive SQL injection attack
At the beginning of December researchers from the Internet Storm Center spotted a relatively limited SQL attack – about 80 affected pages – redirecting visitors of legitimate websites to malicious ones serving fake AV and fake Adobe Flash. Now, little over a month later, the number of affected websites surpassed one million and became officially large enough for sounding the alarm again.
The antivirus industry and the grayware problem
In this podcast recorded at Virus Bulletin 2011, malware researcher Robert Lipovsky talks about how security companies view the subject on grayware and the latest developments regarding the distribution and anti-detection techniques used by its propagators.
Ramnit worm goes social, steals Facebook passwords
Ramnit – the file-infecting, financial-data-stealing worm that has been around since April 2010 – has been modified again and is now bent on stealing Facebook login credentials.
Scammy Facebook Timeline deactivation pages target users
As more and more Facebook users choose to try out the new Timeline view of their profiles, some are disappointed and want to revert back to the old view. Unfortunately for them, Facebook doesn’t offer the option – in fact, Timeline will be the default view for profiles very soon – but that doesn’t stop them from trying to do it.
Leaked Symantec source code is five years old
Following claims made by a Indian hacker group that they are in possession of source code for Symantec’s Norton Antivirus solution and that they plan to post in online, the security company has initiated an investigation into the matter.