To paraphrase a quote attributed to the great American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald: ‘Rich countries aren’t like you and me. They have less malware.’ That’s the conclusion of a special Security Intelligence Report released by Microsoft on Wednesday, which found that the rate of malware infections was relatively lower in countries that were wealthy than those with lower gross income per capita. The study, “Linking Cybersecurity Policy and Performance” investigated the links between rates of computer infections and a range of national characteristics including the relative wealth of a nation, observance of the rule of law and the rate of software piracy. The conclusion: wealthier nations, especially in Europe, do a better job preventing malware infections than poorer and developing nations. The report marks an effort by Microsoft to dig into some of the underlying causes of cyber insecurity globally. Using data gathered from its Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT) […]
Tag: data privacy
New Malware Takes ‘Extended Naps’ To Avoid Detection
It’s a truism that even the bleakest circumstances look a bit brighter after a good nap. Well, that wisdom isn’t lost on malware authors either. A newly discovered Trojan Horse program, dubbed Trojan Nap, is programmed to use extended sleep cycles to fool behavior based anti-malware tools, according to a report from the firm FireEye. In a blog post Tuesday, researchers Abhishek Singh and Ali Islam said the new malware has a function, dubbed SleepEx() that can be used to configure long “naps” that the malware takes after it is installed on a compromised system. The default value, 600,000 milliseconds – or 10 minutes – seems designed to fool automated analysis systems that are programmed to capture a sample of behavior for a set time frame. “By executing a sleep call with a long timeout, Nap can prevent an automated analysis system from capturing its malicious behavior,” FireEye said. Like other […]
Researchers: Hole In TLS Encryption Could Expose Secure Web Sessions
Researchers at the University of London are going public with a paper that claims to have found a flaw in the specification for Transport Layer Security (TLS) that could leave supposedly secure Web, IM, VoIP and other online sessions exposed to prying eyes. The researchers, Nadhem Al Fardan and Kenny Patterson of the Information Security Group at Royal Holloway, University of London said that the security hole stem from a flaw in the TLS specification, rather than a bug in how TLS is implemented. The two researchers have developed proof of concept attacks that take advantage of the flaw, and that could be used to recover a complete block of TLS-encrypted plaintext, the researchers said. Al Fardan is a Ph.D student in the Information Security Group. Patterson is a professor of Information Security there. The two have discovered other, serious holes in TLS before. Notably: the two discovered a critical […]
Friday Night Massacre: Twitter Hacked, Info on 250k Exposed
What better time to drop some really bad and embarrassing news than late on a Friday afternoon, as everyone is heading out the door? So it was with social media giant Twitter, which dropped a bombshell late Friday: revealing that it had been compromised in an “extremely sophisticated” attack that yielded the account credentials for around 250,000 users. A blog post by Twitter Security Team member Bob Lord on Friday said that the company has been investigating the breach all week long, after detecting unusual patterns of account access across its network. After stopping an attack that was in progress, the company’s investigation revealed that the attackers “may have had access to limited user information – usernames, email addresses, session tokens and encrypted/saltedversions of passwords – for approximately 250,000 users,” Lord wrote. Twitter did not discuss the circumstances of the breach, but reiterated guidance from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for users to disable Java […]
Update: Student’s Expulsion Exposes Computer Science Culture Gap
Editor’s Note: Updated to include comment from Dawson CS Professor Simonelis. – PFR 1/22/2013 The expulsion of a 20 year-old computer science major at Dawson College in Quebec, Canada has laid bare what one expert says is a culture gap between academic computer science departments and the ‘real world’ of application development. In the wake of news stories that have drawn attention to the case, Dawson’s faculty and administration have stood by their decision, saying that “hacking” of the type Ahmed Al-Khabaz was engaged in was an example of “unprofessional conduct” by a computer sciences engineer. This, even as private sector firms – including the company whose software Al-Khabaz exposed – have come forward with job offers and scholarships. Al-Khabaz was expelled in November by a school administration that looked askance at his security audits of a student portal web site dubbed “Omnivox,” accusing him of launching “SQL injection” attacks […]
