Pages Tagged “Computer Security”
Tech Tips
- Keep Your System Updated! Most drive-by computer infections use old vulnerabilities for which patches are already available.
- WGA False Positive Experience The time Windows mistakenly told me I was running a pirated copy…because Norton Internet Security had blocked its validation attempt.
Les Misérables
- Barricade Day and Reset the Net Today is the anniversary of the day the barricades went up in Les Misérables (an actual, historical event). It's also a day to reclaim your online privacy.
Blog Posts
- Striking the Crowd
Today I found myself thinking of Terminator 3, specifically the plotline in which all kinds of random computer crashes are spreading across the internet. For obvious reasons. In today’s real world incident, it’s a bug in an auto-pushed update for widely-used security software by CrowdStrike, ironically used to protect mission-critical systems. In the two-decade-old movie […]
- SubdoMailing
Interesting spam/phish technique: Look for subdomains with CNAMEs or SPF records that point to abandoned domains that you can then register…and effectively take control of the subdomain or SPF. They haven’t seen any cases where it’s been used to host a phishing site at, say, an msn.com subdomain, but they’ve seen thousands of cases where […]
- Phish Training
The year is 2006. I’m complaining on my blog about businesses training their customers to fall for phishing attacks. The year is 2011. I’m complaining on my blog about businesses training their customers to fall for phishing attacks. The year is 2022. I’m complaining on my blog about businesses training their customers to fall for […]
- It’s Crop!
Just cropping an image isn’t always enough to remove the data. Watch out for display-only crops, thumbnails in metadata, and even broken file saving!
- Hi, We’re Your Bank! (Yeah, SURE you are.)
Phishers: Hi, we’re your bank, please click on this attachment for important information. Security experts: Never click on an unexpected attachment in an email even if you think you know who it’s from. It’s likely to be malware or a scam to steal your login credentials. Actual banks: Hi, we’re your bank, please click on […]
- Don’t Disable Paste!
App and website developers: please do not disable paste on your login forms. Let people use password managers so they can keep a unique password for your site that’s resistant to both password-guessing and password-sharing attacks. Thank you.
- Taking the Safety Off
Purism’s explanations for removing various safety features from Librem One’s social network sound like someone explaining why they removed the mirrors, brakes, horns, seat belts, airbags and signals from the cars they’re reselling, because they know those cars are only ever going to be driven on a track where they’ll never have to change lanes […]
- Treat Passwords Like Driving: Separate Your Hazards.
The last time I set up a new computer, I was surprised to find that installing a password manager has become a critical part of getting the system ready to use. It used to be that you could pick a few unique passwords for critical services like your primary email and banking sites, and reuse […]
- It’s amazing more email accounts weren’t hacked back in the 2000s
We’d walk into an internet cafe and rent time on one of their computers. Then we’d log into our primary email account over plain, unsecured HTTP.
- Rogue One (Star Wars) and Imperial IT (SPOILERS!)
Spoilery thoughts on Star Wars’ IT practices and where the Rogue One characters actually find the Death Star plans.
- Pingback Problem: 162K WordPress Sites Tricked into DDoS
It’s always annoying when someone figures out a way to exploit intentional behavior, especially when it’s a key part of the design.
- Somebody Hears You
Every time I listen to Vienna Teng’s “The Hymn of Acxiom,” it gets creepier. It’s beautiful, it’s haunting…and it’s all about how big data is tracking…
- Wrong Number (Email Edition)
Have you ever abandoned an email address? Did you make sure everyone switched to your new one? If your old provider has reissued the address to someone new, your old contacts could still be sending mail to someone else with your personal information. This shouldn’t be a surprise, but InformationWeek reports that Yahoo! users who’ve […]
- What’s Wrong With Facebook Updating Itself on Android?
Imagine a car recall, except instead of getting a notice from the manufacturer, you hear a noise in your garage and find someone messing with your car.
- Backup Lesson from the Emerald City Comicon Hack
An attacker deleted not just their site, but their backups. Lesson learned: make sure that an attack on your server doesn’t have access to your backups as well.
- Recent Links: Moon and More
Linkblogging: SMBC, XKCD, space pics, Flash Forward, mobile web usability and more.
- Links: Clouds, the Blue ‘e’, and Bobby Tables
Incredible photo from APOD: Clouds, Birds, Moon, Venus. I’ve finally replaced my Woodbridge Snow photo as my desktop wallpaper at home. Microsoft provides an interesting look back at the evolution of the Internet Explorer logo over the past fifteen (yes, fifteen) years. 100-year data preservation. A 350-year-old copy of Shakespeare is still readable. But what […]
- 1…2…3…4…5.
Security researchers examine a list of 32 million passwords stolen from RockYou, and the 20 most common are…well…pathetic.
- Amazon Annoyance, ATM Stupidity
Grr. Amazon wants to stop paying me because they think I’ve been buying search keywords to link to them. No, I haven’t. Update: Two days later, they responded: it’s a bad form letter, and even if I were buying keywords, they’d only stop paying referral fees on those links. More concerned than usual about person […]
- PayPal Asks: What Makes a Safe Browser?
Last month, eWeek reported that PayPal intends to block unsafe browsersfrom accessing their site. They’ve focused on phishing detection and support for Extended Validation SSL Certificates. So what are these features, and why does PayPal think they’re critical? And just which browsers are they likely to block? Phishing protection has an obvious appeal for a […]
- Flagging (Non)-Spoofed Mail
Following up on the PayPal anti-phishing discussion of a few weeks ago, I see that PayPal is promoting a service called Iconix. You install the program on your system, and it looks at your inbox for messages that claim to be from one of its customers. It tries to verify them “using industry-standard authentication technologies […]
- Blocking IE6: You, Me and…PayPal?
On Thursday I stumbled across a campaign to Trash All IE Hacks. The idea is that people only stay on the ancient, buggy, feature-lacking, PITA web browser, Internet Explorer 6, because we web developers coddle them. We make the extra effort to work around those bugs, so they can actually use the sites without upgrading. Well, […]
- Links: Safety Last
Forklift Driver Klaus (a.k.a. Staplerfahrer Klaus)- a parody of work safety films in which a forklift driver blunders through his first day on the job, maiming fellow employees left and right. German with English subtitles. (via TV Tropes: Scare Em Straight) And, on a more serious note, the Internet Storm Center is reporting on people […]
- Firefox, Kindle(ing) and more
Firefox 3 Beta 1 is out. Nice so far. Oddly enough, it runs better than the current Opera 9.5 previews on my old Linux box at work, though that mostly seems to be the fault of the find-in-history option. I usually avoid any sort of shopping on the day after Thanksgiving, online included, but I’ve […]
- The Danger of Saving Passwords
ISC is reporting a new type of vulnerability in web browsers that the discoverer has termed as “Reverse Cross-Site Request,” or RCSR. Basically, on a site with user-generated content—like a hosted blog—it’s possible to add a form that looks like the site’s login form. If the victim has an account on the same site, and […]
- Assault via Battery?
Received the replacement battery for the PowerBook yesterday. It was shipped out via DHL, with a prepaid return label for shipping the old battery back via regular mail. Last night I drained the old battery, plugged the new one in, and packaged up the recalled one in the box. At lunch today I went to […]
- Back to Basics: Phish by Phone
I just spotted a rather disturbing phishing message in (of all places) our abuse contact mailbox: Subject: Fraud Prevention Measures Dear customer! Due to high fraud activity we constantly increasing security level both for online banking and card transactions. In order to update our records you are required to call MBNA Card Service number at […]
- Blue vs. 6A
Remember how LiveJournal, TypePad, and related sites were down the other day? The official line was that “Six Apart has been the victim of a sophisticated distributed denial of service attack.” It turns out that the DDOS wasn’t aimed at 6A, LJ, or any other part of their network. It was aimed at Blue Security, […]
- Symantec Issues
Last week I received a message offering a 30% discount on Norton Internet Security 2006. It claimed to be from Symantec, but the email address was at digitalriver.com, and all the links—including the ones that claimed to be at symantec.com—went to bluehornet.com. Now 5 minutes of research turns up the facts that Symantec does work […]
- Rummy Caption Contest
The BBC has posted an interesting article on the US Military’s plans for Internet operations. But that’s not what I want to write about here. What I want to write about is this accompanying photo of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld: The article mentions that messages put out for psychological operations in foreign markets are […]
- Ahead of their time
Remember when the web was young, and email was just gaining popularity in the mainstream, and there was a slew of virus hoaxes like the Good Times Virus, or It Takes Guts to Say Jesus, or Elf Bowling? Remember painstakingly explaining to people that no, your computer couldn’t get a virus just by reading an […]
- Web worm in MySpace
Worms of the future: someone on MySpace *ptui!* came up with an actual JavaScript worm using cross-site scripting exploits and XMLHTTPRequest. In 24 hours, the worm had forced 1 million users to add him to their friends lists. Personally, MySpace bugs the heck out of me because it seems to have a culture that encourages […]
- Viruses: They’re not just annoyances anymore
If you’ve been paying attention to computer security, you already know that spam, viruses, and organized crime have been in bed together for at least a year. The recently-discovered theft of 40 million credit card numbers [edit: originally linked to Yahoo News] illustrates this point clearly: CardSystems was hit by a virus-like computer script that […]
- Sometimes viruses can’t read either
Over the last few days, one of the viruses going around (probably a Mytob variant) has been trying to send its “Your account is being suspended! Open this file now!” come-ons. It forges the return address as support@example.net, admin@example.net, etc. We block any incoming mail using these addresses before it even gets to our virus […]
- Setting up Windows
We finally replaced our 4-year-old Windows Me computer with a new Dell (I’d had enough of building computers a few weeks ago) and it arrived yesterday. Katie had already asked me to upgrade her Mac while she made pizza for an office party. I had planned to finish installing Tiger first, but once you get past […]
- No Free Lunch
Some potentially nasty browser security vulnerabilities found this weekend in Mozilla and in Safari. Both involve software update mechanisms. The Firefox one tricks the browser into thinking it’s installing from a trusted update site (the maintainers of updates.mozilla.org and addons.mozilla.org—the only trusted sites by default—have made some changes on their server to prevent the exploit […]
- At least it’s pricier than a candy bar
Maybe it’s the housing costs, but people in San Francisco need a little extra incentive to give out their computer password than people in Liverpool. Last year a survey found that 71% would reveal their password for a chocolate bar. A similar survey this month in San Francisco found that 66% would give it up […]
- Perspective on the browser wars
At the end of a post on SSL/TLS and just how much security a “secure” site really gives you, Eric Lawrence of IEBlog posted an interesting thought: The so-called “browser wars” have fundamentally changed. It’s no longer Microsoft vs. Mozilla vs. Opera et all. Now it’s the “good guys” vs. the “bad guys.” The “bad […]
- Cross-browser Java Spyware
Talk about convoluted. Someone has developed a Java applet that will use one browser to install spyware on another. The applet runs in any browser using the Sun Java Runtime Environment—Firefox, Opera, Mozilla, etc.—and if it can convince you to run the installer, it will install spyware on Internet Explorer. And since you can’t remove […]
- Random Links
AKA stuff I wanted to write about earlier this week but need to just slam out while they’re still topical. Judge slams SCO’s lack of evidence against IBM. After all the wild claims they’ve made without providing evidence, it’s nice to see even the judge is getting sick of it. Beware the unexpected attack vector […]
- Subtle Update Hint
Something that could help with the ever-shrinking window between turning on a new (Windows) computer and getting hacked by some automatic probe is to just make downloading security updates part of the setup process. I installed two Linux distributions this weekend, Mandrake 10.1 and SuSE 9.2, and both did this. What I liked about the […]
- WordPad?!?
Today’s Microsoft security patches include one for a potential remote exploit in… Wordpad? Yes, according to Security Bulletin MS04-041, there are two problems in the Word 6 converter that could be used to take control of your system. In addition to fixing those holes, they’ve disabled the converter. I could understand if this were something […]
- Spyware and Spoofing and Spam, Oh My!
CAN-SPAM one year later: more spam than ever. Spam has more than doubled from 15 billion messages in 2003 to an estimated 35 billion in 2004. Is anyone really surprised? From the article: “The FTC says the goal of the act was never to cut down on spam but to give recipients control via the […]
- Stealing pop-ups from your bank
Here’s an online security story to freak you out: Security firm Secunia has found a loophole [Edit: originally linked to Yahoo! News] in basic browser window handling that can let any site plug its code into a pop-up window generated by any other site. That’s not just ads, that includes pop-up help files, password dialogs, […]
- Outlook Viruses Trash Non-Outlook Mailboxes
Mozilla developer Ben Goodger writes about losing his inbox to the latest virus… despite not using any vulnerable software. Apparently he’s been getting over 10,000 virus-laced messages every day, and with the four-day weekend they built up to the point that Thunderbird wasn’t able to handle the influx. (Imagine having to filter out 770 megabytes […]
- Internet Explorer: Unsafe at any speed
Netcraft reports on a series of malicious banner ads using a vulnerability in Internet Explorer 6 to spread the Bofra virus. Clicking on the banners sends you to a website that uses the recently-discovered IFRAME vulnerability to infect your computer. Of note are the facts that there is no patch for this yet, and XP […]
- 91% of PCs infected with spyware?
This has got to be a typo: About 91 percent of PCs today are infected with spyware programs that send information from your PC to an unauthorized third party. NCSA (National Cyber Security Alliance, not the National Center for Supercomputing Applications of Mosaic fame) Chairman Ken Watson quoted by CNET in Study: Consumers take cyberattacks […]
- Another bogus warning
Here’s another one. First the notice they sent me: Subject: VIRUS (Worm.SomeFool.P) IN MAIL FROM YOU VIRUS ALERT Our content checker found virus: Worm.SomeFool.P in your email to the following recipient: -> ADDRESS REMOVED Please check your system for viruses, or ask your system administrator to do so. Delivery of the email was stopped! And […]
- Out in the open
Just what we need. Netcraft reports a worm that installs a network sniffer. What’s that? It’s a program that listens in on traffic going across your network, looking for things like, oh, login names and passwords, credit card numbers, etc. They’re the reason online commerce requires SSL encryption. Sniffers work because of the way ethernet […]
- Warspamming
Via Email Battles: First ‘warspamming’ case reaches court. Basically the guy (allegedly) drove around LA with a laptop looking for insecure wireless networks, then connected to them and sent spam using people’s home accounts. The term comes from wardriving — driving around looking for unsecured networks — and warchalking — marking walls or sidewalks to […]
- Go away or I shall taunt you a second time!
Now this is interesting: the Amus worm will verbally taunt the user using Windows XP’s speech-generating features. F-Secure has posted a .wav, and McAfee’s writeup has an MP3. Oddly, Symantec’s entry says nothing about the speech. Maybe they don’t have speakers on their test boxes.
- Check the wording!
Oh, this is good! You may have heard a few days ago that the latest MyDoom variant includes a request for work in the antivirus industry. Well, the comic strip User Friendly has come up with the perfect solution!
- Government computers hijacked for spam.
Via The War on Spam and The Spam Weblog: Hackers hijack federal computers. Apparently the DOJ discovered, during their crackdown on cybercrime, that hundreds of Department of Defense and Senate computers had been turned into zombies. Nice. Can we really be sure they were only used to send spam? After all, zombies are generally the […]
- Internet Security Perspectives
When I worked at a computer lab in college, the main security focus was preventing lab visitors from screwing around too much with the computers. We just ran Windows NT and locked it down as hard as possible. The worst network-based threat I remember facing was WinNuke, and that was just as likely to be […]
- Giving virus writers honest work
By way of Justin Mason and the SpamAssassin mailing list comes this post about writing add-ons for Outlook. Seth Goodman writes of Outlook’s contact list: This feature was apparently added for the convenience of virus writers, who it appears were one of the key groups that set the design requirements for this product Ronald F. […]
- Wolf Cry
More “You sent a virus!” garbage going around. It’s gotten to the point where I don’t even look at most delivery failure notices, which means I could easily miss errors about mail I really did send. I got ticked off enough this time that I wrote back to the return address on the warning, matching […]
- Total Waste of Bandwidth
I regularly get bogus bounces from clueless virus scanners that don’t realize the sending address is fake 99% of the time, but this takes the cake: Sometime last night I received three copies of the same notice from some system in Brazil. They had written their virus warning in Microsoft Word, saved it as HTML […]
- Interesting Combination
This morning I recieved both a bogus “Out of Office” reply from someone at Halliburton (presumably from a virus that spoofed my address as the sender) and a new 419 scam variant, this one claiming to be someone in Iraq. (I still think of them as Nigerian scams, but they’ve gone seriously international over the […]
- Now that’s just sad.
I just came across an article on non-password authentication that refers back to an April 2004 survey of office workers which found that “71% were willing to part with their password for a chocolate bar.” Wow. I know they say everyone has their price, but this is ridiculous. It reminds me of the comic book […]
- Interesting omission
CNET posted an article today, Concern grows over browser security, about the rise in browser-based attacks (mostly spoofed sites for phishing, but also attempts to install viruses and other malware through web browser security holes). What’s interesting about the article is that nowhere does it mention Mozilla, Opera or Safari. Could it be that attacks […]
- Insecurity updates
Last month I finally got around to installing antivirus software on the one Windows computer we have at home. While I’ve found Norton Anti-Virus has worked well on my system at work, I ended up choosing McAfee Internet Security Suite for two reasons: (1) unlike Symantec, they don’t use a product activation scheme, and (2) […]
- One Degree
Anyone whose email address is posted on a web site probably doesn’t bother to identify who sent them viruses anymore. With faked return addresses and the high probability that your only connection to the sender is the fact that they visited your web page sometime in the last month, there really isn’t much point. Every […]
- Viral degrees of separation
With the new crop of email viruses – the ones that fake the return address based on the same sources (address books, web caches, etc.) as the target list – you get a few interesting effects. The first is that there is a good chance you’ll recieve many copies of the virus from the same […]
- Harry Potter computer viruses
Inspired by finding a list of Babylon 5 viruses earlier this week. Harry Potter virus: Looks like the last file of a virus you just wiped out, until you try to erase it–then it wipes your drive. Voldemort virus: You can’t get rid of it, only make it dormant. It can be reactivated by the […]
- Sobig PITA
The world of email viruses has changed. In the old days, they would piggyback on the messages you sent, or make your regular mail program send them out while you weren’t looking. These days they send the messages themselves, so they pick a fake return address from the same source as its list of victims: […]
- Who’s REALLY responsible for spreading viruses? (UPDATED)
My dad forwarded me an opinion piece from the eWeek newsletter called Idiocy Imperils the Web. Jim Rapoza argues that – especially by now – people should really have figured out not to click on unknown attachments. My favorite quote: “Most people figure out that if they keep grabbing the electric fence, they’ll get a […]
- Random Rent
Someone’s virus-generated email message sent me an attachment: the complete lyrics to the stage musical RENT. Um, okay…