Chinese hackers resume attacks on U.S. targets
For the last three months or so, the U.S. government and some of its defense contractors have engaged in a war of shame on China to pressure it to cool its cyber attacks on U.S. targets. The campaign appeared to be yielding results, but it seems that Chinese hackers were only catching their breath.
The notorious Unit 61398, also known as the "Comment Crew," -- an elite cyber unit linked by U.S. security firms to the China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) -- has renewed its raids on U.S. entities using different techniques, the New York Times has reported.
Cyber security firm Mandiant told the Times that the attacks had been renewed, but would not identify the targets -- although it did acknowledge that many of them were the same ones assaulted earlier by the Chinese cyber unit.
Mandiant did not respond to a request for comment for this story. Read more...
How to keep the feds from snooping on your cloud data
A cottage industry is growing up around virtual padlocks that consumers can place on cloud services so that the vendors themselves can't get to the information -- even if the government requests access.
And in recent years there have been a lot of those government requests for access from storage-as-a-service providers.
For example, Google regularly receives requests from governments and courts around the world to hand over user data. Last year, it received 21,389 government requests for information affecting 33,634 user accounts. Sixty-six percent of the time, Google said it provided at least some data in response. Read more...
China’s internet security giant Qihoo planning global domination
Controversial Chinese software vendor Qihoo 360 has its eyes on world domination after controversial founder Zhou Hongyi told the local press he wants to turn the firm into the planet’s biggest web security biz.
Qihoo made its name flogging free AV to bargain-seeking Chinese punters and has since gone on to build a successful business around products in several related areas including web browsing, search and internet portals.
Never one to resist an opportunity to engage in some blatant self promotion, Zhou was quoted in the Changjiang Daily News late last week arguing that just as products made in China are now sold throughout the world, so his firm should take the freemium web security model global. Read more...
Microsoft admits zero-day bug in IE8, pledges patch
Microsoft late Friday confirmed that a "zero-day," or unpatched, vulnerability exists in Internet Explorer 8 (IE8), the company's most popular browser.
According to multiple security firms, the vulnerability has been used in active exploits, including "watering hole"-style attacks against the U.S. Department of Labor and U.S. Department of Energy, targeting workers at the latter agency involved in nuclear weapons research.
On Friday, Microsoft published a security advisory that acknowledged the bug. In the advisory, the company also said that other versions of Internet Explorer, including the newer IE9 and IE10, are not affected, and that the firm is working on an update to patch the problem. Read more...
Opera sues designer for leaking trade secrets to Mozilla
Norwegian browser maker Opera Software has filed suit against Trond Werner Hansen, one of its former developers, alleging that Hansen took trade secrets with him when he went to work with Opera rival Mozilla.
As first reported by The Next Web, Hansen worked at Opera from 1999 through 2006. There he led design and UI development, first for the Windows version of the Opera browser, then for the cross-platform Desktop version. He later returned as an independent consultant from 2009 to 2010, at Opera's request.
Then in 2012, Hansen began to work with the Mozilla Foundation, makers of the open source Firefox browser – and that's when things got dicey. Read more...
D-Link firmware flaws could allow IP video stream spying
If you run a bank and use an IP video camera from D-Link, you may want to pay attention to this.
A number of IP-based surveillance video cameras made by D-Link have firmware vulnerabilities that could allow an attacker to intercept the video stream, according to security researchers.
Core Security, a company based in Boston that specializes in vulnerability detection and research, published on Monday details of five vulnerabilities in D-Link's firmware, which is wrapped into at least 14 of its products. Read more...
New Google Play terms ban non-store app updates
Google has amended the policies of its Play app store for Android to prohibit third-party app update mechanisms, in a move seemingly designed to put the kibosh on a contentious feature being tested by Facebook.
As of Friday, the "Dangerous Products" section of the Chocolate Factory's Google Play Developer Program Policies - which prohibits such things as Trojans, viruses, and spyware - now includes an additional sentence:
An app downloaded from Google Play may not modify, replace or update its own APK binary code using any method other than Google Play's update mechanism. Read more...
DDoS suspect used a van as a mobile office, Spanish police say
The man suspected of participating in a large DDoS attack on an antispam organization that caused intermittent Internet hiccups drove around Spain in a van he used as a mobile office, Spain's Interior Ministry said Sunday.
The van was equipped with "various antennas" that were used to scan frequencies, the ministry said in a news release. On Thursday, Spanish police arrested a 35-year-old Dutch man in Barcelona suspected of conducting cyberattacks against Spamhaus, a nonprofit group that develops widely used lists of networks identified as sending spam. Read more...
McAfee spots Adobe Reader PDF-tracking flaw
McAfee said it has found a vulnerability in Adobe Systems' Reader program that reveals when and where a PDF document is opened.
The issue is not a serious problem and does not allow for remote code execution, wrote McAfee's Haifei Li in a blog post. But McAfee does consider it a security problem and has notified Adobe. It affects every version of Adobe Reader, including the latest version, 11.0.2, Li wrote.
McAfee recently detected some "unusual" PDF samples, Li wrote. McAfee withheld some key details of the vulnerability, but did generally describe it. Read more...
Australia charges man claiming to be LulzSec leader
Australia has charged a 24-year-old man who allegedly defaced a government website earlier this month and claims to be the leader of LulzSec, a rogue inactive hacking group.
The man, from Point Clare about 50 miles north of Sydney, was charged with two counts of unauthorized modification of data and one count of unauthorized access. He could face up to 12 years in prison if convicted, according to the Australian Federal Police (AFP). Read more...
AP Twitter hack prompts fresh look at cyber security needs
Getting hacked on Twitter is fast becoming a rite of passage for big corporations, but Tuesday's attack on the Associated Press could be a tipping point and shows that social networks must do more to keep their users safe, security experts said.
Wider use of two-factor authentication, which can involve an access code being sent to a user on a second device such as a smartphone, is one possible solution. Such a mechanism could be introduced selectively, some experts said, for high profile accounts such as celebrities and large corporations. Read more...
Facebook: We’ll show you our PUE, now you show us yours
The data center industry has come a long way from the days when organizations closely guarded their efficiency secrets. Facebook is now the poster child for green-data center openness: Not only has the company shared details about its data center equipment and designs through its Open Compute Project, it is now providing the public with a near-real-time view of its data centers' energy efficiency via online dashboards. Beyond that, Facebook is offering the code to let other companies create dashboards of their own to make public their data centers' ongoing efficiency metrics. Read more...