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In medieval times, attackers would use a bell-shaped metal grenade or "petard" to break enemy defenses. These unreliable devices frequently went off unexpectedly, destroying not only the enemy, but the attacker. As Shakespeare noted, "'tis the sport to have the enginer Hoist with his owne petar." That's what I thought of when the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) recently announced their plans to charge an FBI agent with hacking -- a crime that the agent committed while investigating Russian hackers. In November 2000, Vasily Gorshkov, 26, and Alexei Ivanov, 21, hackers from Chelyabinsk, Russia, broke into various U.S. computers, stole...

<p>SEATTLE, Washington (Reuters) -- Microsoft Corp. said Thursday that "critical" security lapses in its Office software and Internet Explorer Web browser put tens of millions of users at risk of having their files read and altered by online attackers.</p> <p>The world's No. 1 software maker said that an attacker, using e-mail or a Web page, could use Internet related parts of Office to run programs, alter data and wipe out the hard drive as well as view file and clipboard contents on a user's system.</p>

Introduction This paper presents a new generation of attacks against Microsoft Windows, and possibly other message-based windowing systems. The flaws presented in this paper are, at the time of writing, unfixable. The only reliable solution to these attacks requires functionality that is not present in Windows, as well as efforts on the part of every single Windows software vendor. Microsoft has known about these flaws for some time; when I alerted them to this attack, their response was that they do not class it as a flaw - the email can be found here. This research was sparked by comments...