Archive for the ‘security news’ Category

Security researcher warns of new clickjacking threat

Tuesday, April 27th, 2010

Clickjacking is a hacking technique first seen in 2008 that fools users in to clicking on elements hidden in a iframe. It seems not to be so dangerous hacking technique as the cross-site scripting and cross-site request forgery but it is expected to extend to a powerfool tool for hacking web applications. For this reason a tool has been introduced at the Black Hat security conference in Barcelona by Context developer Paul Stone which will be helpful to improve clickjacking defences.

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Mobile network hack reveals sensitive cellphone data

Saturday, April 24th, 2010

Researchers have shown how easy is to find the number of most US-based mobile phone structural cracks in GSM mobile networks and to track practically any GSM-enabled handset through the world.

In the end of 2008 Tobias Engel demonstrated how to find the whereabouts of mobile phones by tapping into mobile network databases. An independent researcher Nick DePetrillo from the Source Conference in Boston Wednesday, and Don Bailey of iSec Partners proved how with related techniques it is possible to find a person’s spot even when his number is unknown and to gather other details which most users assume are undetectable.

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Malware threatens victims using copyright laws

Monday, April 19th, 2010

A trojan ,which spreads itself through a peer to peer network called Winni, commonly used by Japanese people, is responsible for gathering personal data from the victims and publish them into the web, according to BBC’s artice.

The Kenzero Trojan is included in a fake adult anime game which is shared through Winni P2P network. When a victim downloads and executes the file, the malware scans victim’s computer for personal information, such us Computer name, browsing history, downloaded files, favourite pages, OS version and clipboard dump while it opens a registration installation window demanding personal information. After gathering all posible information, it publishes them on a public web page and sends an email from a company “Romancing, Inc.” which accuse victims for downloading copyrighted material. The mail includes a law threat to the victims to settle the copyright violation and offers to resolve it for a 1500 yen (~16$) fee. Also, as noted in Trend Micro’s Blog article, it also downloads ,in victim’s computer, 3 copyrighted MP3 files, possibly to extend the threat.

More than 1500 people reported that fell victims of the malware, according to local paper Yomiuri Shimbun, however its unknown how many payed the copyright infringement fee.

That’s the second similar issue this week as earlier was reported, here, a fake ICCP Foundation which demanded 400$ for copyright issues.

Exploiting PDF files, without a vulnerability

Thursday, April 8th, 2010

Portable Document Format (PDF) files can be used to execute an embedded executable without exploiting any security vulnerabilities. These proof-of-concept PDF files targeting computers running Adobe Acrobat Reader or Foxit Reader PDF software, as Didier Stevens a security researcher warned, runs the embedded executable by launching a command that ultimately runs an executable.

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Opening spam e-mails is still in fashion

Friday, April 2nd, 2010

According to Ipsos Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG), nearly half of a recently surveyed audience opened junk e-mail intentionally, in spite of the fact that many of them(about 44%) consider that they have the basic knowledge on online security. They claimed, that the reasons of opening these kind of messages are complaining to the sender, unsubscribing, interesting in the offered products and services or just curiosity of what is going to happen.

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Pwn2Own 2010 “exploit the iPhone”

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

The Pwn2Own contest took place for this year at the CanSecWest security conference held on March 24th 2010. The aim of this contest is to call hackers looking for vulnerabilities in browsers and operating systems and exploit them.  Τhis year  is more interest due to the fact that has increased the pecuniary rewards for hacking computers and smart-phones. Last year were not given the rewards for smart-phones while no-one it could not attack them.

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FIFA World Cup – themed malware

Saturday, March 27th, 2010

Major events often used by spammers to fuel their scams.

While the World Cup soccer tournament is still more than two months away, researchers from Symantec are reporting on a targeted malware campaign using a FIFA World Cup theme. Attackers changed Greenlife’s PDF document to include malicious code. Emails contain this attached PDF file claiming to provide a guide to the first African edition of football’s most prestigious tournament.

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Facebook warns about password reset scam

Friday, March 26th, 2010

One of the most prevalent piece of malware targeting consumers in the last week is an e-mail that supposed to be sent from facebook. This e-mail says that your password has been reset and you need to open the attachment in order to retrieve your password. The attachment contains a password stealer that can potentially access any username and password combination used on the computer, not just the login credentials for Facebook.

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Skipfish: A new web application security tool from Google

Monday, March 22nd, 2010

Last Friday, Google released a new security tool known as Skipfish, written by Michal Zalewski, a Polish security researcher and author of various tools and books, with contributions and feedback from Google’s information security engineering team. Skipfish aims to help web application developers secure and reveal various possible security flaws of their applications. Since web applications become more and more complex, developers need similar tools to check and validate the security of their code. Michal Zalewski wrote in a blog article, “The safety of the Internet is of paramount importance to Google, and helping web developers build secure, reliable web applications is an important part of the equation.”

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Security System “Legic Prime” hacked

Wednesday, January 27th, 2010

The security researchers Karsten Nohl and Henryk Plötz cloned RFID-cards from the “Prime” product line of the Swiss manufacturer Legic. These RFID-cards are widely used in access control to nuclear power plants or airports in spite of the age of the system. According to Plötz the system is not encrypted and therefore unsecure. The developer of the system had attempted to create the impression of a secure system by various methods of “Code Obfuscation”.

The researchers are able to emulate the card reader, change commands and to emulate cards. They recommend all firms using the RFID-cards based on the “Prime” product line to replace as fast as possible to the newer product line “Advant”.