Free Republic

Some useful citizen has created an installer that will nail IE with spyware, even if a surfer is using Firefox (or another alternative browser) or has blocked access to the malicious site in IE beforehand. The technique allows a raft of spyware to be served up to Windows users in spite of any security measures that might be in place. Christopher Boyd, a security researchers at Vitalsecurity.org, said the malware installer was capable of working on a range of browsers with native Java support. "The spyware installer is a Java applet powered by the Sun Java Runtime Environment, which allows...

COLUMNCustomer vs. Bank of America: Who's to blame? By Donald Smith 25 Feb 2005 | SearchSecurity.com Who will win a landmark case on customer data protection? Who decides whether a business is responsible for your data, or if you yourself are? Now it may be a judge and jury. According to a report in The Register, Joe Lopez, a small businessman from Florida, alleges that Bank of America was negligent because it failed to protect his account from compromise through known risks. He regularly used the bank's online services to send and receive money from the U.S. and Latin America,...

New worms spreading through MSN Messenger -- and its bundled-with-Windows Windows Messenger version -- via links to a malicious site are infecting users and leaving their PCs open to hacker hijack, security vendors reported Monday. The new worms, tagged as Kelvir.a and Kelvir.b, appeared over the weekend and on Monday, respectively, anti-virus vendors said. Both use the same mechanism to attract users and infect Windows-based PCs: they include a link in the instant message. That link, in turn, downloads a malicious file -- the actual worm, a variant of the long-running Spybot -- which opens a backdoor to the compromised...

Symantec Granted Patent For Key Information Security TechnologyNewly Patented Technology Is Fundamental Throughout Industry-Leading Symantec SolutionsCUPERTINO, Calif. - March 2, 2005 - Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC), the global leader in information security, today announced that it has been granted a new patent for antivirus technology by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Symantec has been granted U.S. patent number 6,851,057 for a system that enables the detection of complex viruses, worms, and spyware. The technology, "data driven detection of viruses," is employed throughout Symantec's portfolio of industry-leading information security solutions at the desktop, server, and gateway for both consumers...

The Denver Post How secure is your computer? “Honey pot” experiment shows unprotected Windows SP 1 at risk By Ross Wehner Denver Post Staff Writer Monday, February 28, 2005 - A Windows computer without the latest security patches is in big trouble. That's the conclusion from a "honey pot" experiment conducted by StillSecure, a Louisville network security firm. StillSecure attached six computers - loaded with different versions of the Windows, Linux and Apple's Macintosh operating systems - earlier this month to the Internet without anti-virus software. The results show the Internet is a very rough place. Over the course of...

Many Microsoft Windows users who downloaded the recently released AntiSpyware program from Microsoft, or had it installed through an automatic Windows update, woke up to a surprise. Unintentionally, the heuristics of the software detected Internet Explorer as spyware, and removed the program from their systems. AntiSpywareMicrosoft has pulled the program from its website until the problem can be corrected. Elias Weatherbee, a Microsoft representative, said the program was "only in beta" and that "a fix was forthcoming." "It shows how powerful our AntiSpyware program is," said Weatherbee. "Not only is it able to remove spyware from the system, but also...

Microsoft RC4 Flaw One of the most important rules of stream ciphers is to never use the same keystream to encrypt two different documents. If someone does, you can break the encryption by XORing the two ciphertext streams together. The keystream drops out, and you end up with plaintext XORed with plaintext -- and you can easily recover the two plaintexts using letter frequency analysis and other basic techniques. It's an amateur crypto mistake. The easy way to prevent this attack is to use a unique initialization vector (IV) in addition to the key whenever you encrypt a document. Microsoft...

Microsoft, eBay, PayPal and Visa have joined a new antiphishing initiative spearheaded by WholeSecurity, the companies said Monday. Dubbed the Phish Report Network, the effort will attempt to slow the spread of phishing attacks by reporting deceptive Web sites to a central database operated by WholeSecurity, an IT security company based in Austin, Texas. Once a site has been reported to the network and confirmed as fraudulent, the organization notifies all of its members about the URL, allowing companies to block the suspect site and encourage their customers to follow suit. Phishing schemes typically consist of e-mail messages that appear...

Windows worm weaves its way with search engines A new worm that uses Internet search engines to spread rapidly was detected Thursday, according to antivirus software maker Panda Software, a private company based in Bilbao, Spain, which operates in the U.S. as PandaLabs of Glendale, in Southern California. Called "MydoomAO," the worm uses Mountain View-based Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), Altavista, Sunnyvale-based Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) and Lycos to search for e-mail addresses to which to send itself. In order to trick users, the worm pretends to be a mail delivery error message. In this way, a single infected computer can distribute thousands...

SAN FRANCISCO — Believe it or not, a Windows Web server is more secure than a similarly set-up Linux server, according to a study presented yesterday by two Florida researchers. The researchers, appearing at the RSA Conference of computer-security professionals, discussed the findings in an event, "Security Showdown: Windows vs. Linux." One of them, a Linux fan, runs an open-source server at home; the other is a Microsoft enthusiast. They wanted to cut through the near-religious arguments about which system is better from a security standpoint. "I actually was wrong. The results are very surprising, and there are going to...

The party's over. In the past year, the little browser that could, Firefox, became the people's hero, an underdog warrior that took a huge swipe at its enemy, Internet Explorer. IE dipped below 90 percent market share for the first time in years, while Firefox lured users like the Pied Piper, blowing past its own fundraising goals and reigniting the browser wars. Meanwhile, the bad news continued to mount for Microsoft. An IE exploit put even Windows XP SP2 users at risk from phishing schemes, even as Microsoft touted SP2 as the most secure version of Windows yet. Worse, major...

The robots.txt file is supposed to be a tool for keeping search engines away from directories on your web site you don't want spidered or indexed. The major search engines all claim the obey them, but warn that there may be a delay between when a robots.txt file is changed and the spider reads, and follows it. All nice and good in print, but the reality is scary.To cut down on bandwidth use I recently listed two directories containing seldom used message boards in my robots.txt as disallowed. Almost immediately Google began hitting those directories with the fervor of a...

Microsoft to offer free anti-spyware, anti-virus software34 minutes ago WASHINGTON (AFP) - Microsoft Corp. will offer consumers who use its Windows operating system free software to battle so-called spyware and eventually antivirus software, chairman Bill Gates (news - web sites) said. Photo AFP/HO Photo Speaking at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, the high-tech security industry's largest annual gathering, Gates said that Microsoft is on track to deliver a broad antivirus product to consumers by the end of the year following its acquisition of Sybari Software, announced last week. Gates, who also serves as chief software architect of the world's...

Gates speech to crown RSA show Analysts: Microsoft chairman may unveil antivirus push LOS ANGELES (MarketWatch) -- As a host of information-technology security experts and professionals descend upon the RSA Conference, the industry sector's largest annual gathering, many are awaiting with bated breath a scheduled keynote speech by Microsoft's Bill Gates. Gates, who also serves as chairman and chief software architect of the world's biggest software firm, is set to officially kick off the conference in San Francisco with a keynote speech Tuesday morning. Analysts widely expect Gates will use his speech, entitled "Security: Raising the Bar," as an...

Hackers have found a handy tool to take control of bank accounts, tap into corporate computer networks and dig up sensitive government documents. It's called Google. The Internet's most popular search engine can find everything from goldfish-care tips to old classmates in the blink of an eye, but it's equally adept at finding caches of credit-card numbers and back doors into protected databases. Google Inc. and other search providers create an inventory of the World Wide Web through an automated process that can uncover obscure Web pages not meant for the public. "If you don't want the world to see...

Core Security Technologies, has published a vulnerability in Microsoft's MSN Messenger, an instant messaging program currently used by over 130 million people worldwide. A patch for this had been issued on Tuesday. Core Security is a Boston, U.S.-based information security solutions company. Core researchers discovered that by selecting a specially-crafted graphic as the user's display picture in MSN Messenger, an attacker could trigger a buffer overflow vulnerability on the chat partner's computer and covertly take over machines running instant messaging software. The attack would travel through the established chat session and would pass unnoticed by firewalls, network intrusion detection systems...

Security experts are advising that spyware that targets browsers from the Mozilla Foundation has been spotted--a threat that could worsen as its Firefox browser takes market share from Microsoft. Stu Sjouwerman, the founder of Sunbelt Software, said on Tuesday that the anti-spyware company has discovered what it believes is the first spyware to take aim at surfers using Mozilla browsers. Richard Stiennon, the vice president of threat research at Webroot Software, which also develops anti-spyware tools, said that the malicious software does not target Firefox specifically. "According to my research team, this site does not target Firefox, but it does...

It hasn't been a good week for Firefox and its fans. First, the Danish security company Secunia warned that it had uncovered a vulnerability in Firefox and other browsers that can allow the URL displayed in the address bar and the SSL certificate to be spoofed, which means the browser and others are vulnerable to phishing attacks. The flaw affects all browsers built using the open-source Gecko browser kernel. And this time around, Internet Explorer is not vulnerable to the attack. Making matters worse, a few days after that, a security researcher found a trio of security bugs that affect...

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Daily computer security headaches such as viruses and spam threaten to spread to a far wider range of devices -- from phones to car engines, a survey to be published by IBM on Wednesday has found. The report, published by IBM Security Intelligence Services, a consulting arm of the world's largest computer company, paints a picture of rampant, albeit controllable, security dangers. The survey combines data from big business customers, government security statistics and observations from some 2,000 IBM security consultants, detailing the proliferation of computer security threats in 2004 and likely next moves. Watch out...

Security flaws affect Windows, Internet Explorer, others Feb. 8, 2005 SEATTLE - Microsoft Corp. released eight security fixes Tuesday that carry its highest threat rating and urged computer users to install them quickly because all the vulnerabilities they address could let attackers take complete control of systems. Seven of the security vulnerabilities Microsoft marked "critical" affect the Windows operating system and related software, including the Internet Explorer browser, media player and instant messaging program. The eighth is with the Redmond software maker's Office XP business software. The patches can be downloaded at....