In researching today’s SC Magazine Cybercrime Corner article “From sci-fi to Stuxnet: Exploding gas pipelines and the Farewell Dossier”, I came across this ‘Damn Interesting’ article which showcases the successful cyberwarfare compromise of a SCADA / pipeline control system nearly thirty years ago, an event which I had heard stories about in Navy circles but

The short answer is the media wants a cyberwar. Cyberwar is a dark, sexy, mysterious headline that sells and so each time something nefarious happens on the internet that potentially involves two or more countries, security experts are besieged with the question “Is this cyberwar”? Let’s look back to the 1989 book by Clifford Stoll

So what we really have is a file with a filename extension that looks like a jpg image, but which really acts as a container for a file with a deceptive double extension.

The difference is that there have been reported sightings of Bigfoot. The keynote address at the Virus Bulletin conference today was given by Nick Bilogorskiy, a member of the security team at Facebook. To start with, I have known Nick for several years and I can tell you that he is very intelligent and a

Just in case you haven’t heard enough from me on the topic of Stuxnet, the Security Week article I mentioned in a previous blog is now up at http://www.securityweek.com/stuxnet-sux-or-stuxnet-success-story. ;-) David Harley CITP FBCS CISSP ESET Senior Research Fellow

An Associated Press release http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100927/ap_on_hi_te/us_internet_wiretaps today indicates that the Obama administration is drafting legislation that would require companies to make it technically possible to intercept all electronic communications in the US. This would affect all of the US telephone companies, Skype, and also companies, such a RIM (Blackberry) that are based outside of the US.

While the defining research on the Stuxnet topic doesn’t go this far, Forbes writer Trevor Butterworth went out on a limb to name names along with detailing the warfare aspects: As I noted last week – and as the news media have only begun to grasp – Stuxnet represents  a conceptual change in the history

I guess I wasn’t forceful, or controversial, or sensationalist, or ungeek enough to rate any column inches. So I’m going to give you a sneak preview … in the light of all the speculation today on whether Stuxnet is an attack by Israel on Iran.

Recently a lawsuit was filed against Walt Disney’s internet subsidiary and some of its partners as well. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/08/17/flash_cookie_lawsuit/ At issue is the use of a special kind of cookie that is used in conjunction with Adobe Flash. These “supercookies” are called Local Shared Objects or LSOs for short. LSOs are not deleted when you use

…we have just published a lengthy analysis that considers many of these questions, as well as discussing some of the characteristics of this fascinating and multi-faceted malicious code. The report is already available here, and will shortly be available on the ESET white papers page.