A teenager who broke into the Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 gameservers last month, has been hired by Microsoft. According to the article, Microsoft confirmed that they will work with the 14 year old to "develop his talent for legitimate purposes".
Introduction As the sun is setting and I breathe some of the night time air I am inspired to write about Facebook. Yes, *the* Facebook, the third largest country if it were a physical place with boundaries under a common rule of law and government. When many people use a service such as this, it
... I haven't recently posted any pointers to our content on SC Magazine's Cybercrime Corner, and now might be a good time to recap on what Randy and I have been posting there this month (so far...) ...
Well, the EICAR conference earlier this month was in Krems, in Austria, where I hear that they're not averse to the occasional brandy, but I was actually perfectly sober when I delivered my paper on Security Software & Rogue Economics: New Technology or New Marketing? (The full abstract is available at the same URL.) To conform with EICAR's
The March Threatsense report at http://www.eset.com/us/resources/threat-trends/Global_Threat_Trends_March_2011.pdf includes, apart from the Top Ten threats: a feature article on Japanese-disaster-related scamming by Urban Schrott and myself news of the Infosec Europe expo in London on the 19th-21st April, the AMTSO and CARO workshops in Prague in May, and the EICAR Conference in Austria that follows the story of
After the release of FireSheep, Facebook took an important step to help protect Facebook user accounts by allowing users to choose to keep an encrypted connection as long as they used just Facebook and intelligently designed apps. Savvy users immediately discovered that if they tried to use grossly insecure apps such as Farmville, 21 Questions,
… albeit more slowly than previously. Added to the resources page at https://www.welivesecurity.com/2011/01/23/stuxnet-information-and-resources-3 today: A nice article by Mark Russinovich on Analyzing a Stuxnet Infection with the Sysinternals Tools, Part 1. Though I don't think Stuxnet is universally acknowledged as the most sophisticated malware ever. See, for instance, http://gcn.com/articles/2011/01/18/black-hat-stuxnet-not-superworm.aspx. (Hat tip to Security Garden for the pointer.)
Many parents are rightfully concerned about their kid’s participation in social networks. There are a number of areas to be concerned with. Who are the kids talking to? Is there a pedophile stalking them? Parents might worry about the friends their kids are making online and what kind of people, even their kid's own age,
Facebook is really, really good at coming up with new ideas, but reasonably well thought out ideas from Facebook seem a bit harder to come by. This is an issue that recently came up when Facebook decided that they would start allowing third party developers to gather address and phone number information and share it
You may not be aware that ESET writers have been supplying blogs to SC Magazine for a while now. Recently, Randy Abrams and I were drafted in after the original contributors moved on, and we started contributing this week: Poachers and Gamekeepers considers whether there is a conflict of interest when AV companies work with
As the number of apps for smartphones continues to grow, perhaps your paranoia about such apps should be growing as well. In an unusual statement, the former director of the CIA has warned that the government isn’t sharing enough information about cyber security. In an article at http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/03/hayden-cyber/, retired four-star Gen. Michael Hayden is quoted
This is the 3rd volume of an ongoing Stuxnet resources blog article, supplementing our paper "Stuxnet Under the Microscope".
Picture from https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/File:Casino_slots.jpg This is a really bizarre computer crimes case. A man knows of a bug in a gambling machine at casinos. He goes into the casinos, uses the machines with complete authorization, at least in some cases, if not all, asks casino staff to modify the machines and they willingly do so. The
...one interesting trend in blog comment spam that I’ve noticed in recent months is that a number of comments are obviously intended to push a product or site, but contain content that is actually relevant...
...poachers turned gamekeeper are not uncommon in the security industry as a whole, and it's all too common for aspirant virus-writers whose notoriety is not necessarily matched by their technical skill to be hired by companies on the remote borders of malware detection and filtering, but the "real" AV industry goes out of its way to avoid hiring the ethically challenged....
My colleague Urban Schrott, from ESET Ireland, wrote a nice feature article for our monthly ThreatSense report (which should be available shortly on the Threat Center page at http://www.eset.com/threat-center) on seasonal scams. As the scam season is starting to get into full swing, we thought it might be good to give it a wider audience here.
...ESET's October ThreatSense report is available on the Threat Center page ...
In response to my recent cookie theft blog a reader asked the following questions: What is VPN, what is SSL and what is the significance of https? What precautions can we take if we need to do Internet banking from a public computer, Internet café for example? VPN, SSL and https are all about encryption.
[C. Nicholas Burnett, the manager for ESET LLC’s tier three technical support, contributed the following guest blog article on the FireSheep plugin for Firefox. Thank you very much, Carl! Aryeh Goretsky] The past several days have seen the security community abuzz about a program presented in San Diego at ToorCon 12 this last weekend called
Now that cyberwarfare is out of the bottle, will anyone agree to not use it? In the summer of 1945 in New Mexico, the Trinity test gave rise to the term ground zero. Could Stuxnet may be measured as a definitive ground zero in cyberwarfare comparable to Trinity? Concerning Stuxnet’s latest rise in China, David
