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Security

Submission + - AT&T Invents Surveillance Programming Language (wired.com)

Anonymous Coward writes: "From the company that brought you the C programming language comes Hancock, a C variant developed by AT&T researchers to mine gigabytes of the company's telephone and internet records for surveillance purposes. The language powers AT&T's nightly tally of who its customers routinely call and can be used to compute maps of where cell phone users roam and parse TCPDUMP logs. AT&T secured patents for the data-mining techniques. The manual for the language includes a Hello World variant that shows you how to write a program that will parse logs of IP addresses and record them into permanent hashes. The program for parsing millions of records as they flow into permanent data farms sounds oddly close to the data mining the NSA performed after 9/11 to find targets for its warrantless spying on American citizens calls and emails."
Internet Explorer

Submission + - AntiVirus Products fail to find Simple IE malware (beskerming.com) 4

SkiifGeek writes: "Didier Stevens recently took a closer look at some Internet Explorer malware that he had uncovered and found that most antivirus products that it was tested against (courtesy of VirusTotals) failed to identify the malware through one of the most basic and straight forward obfuscation techniques — the null-byte. With enough null-bytes between each character of code, it is possible to fool all antivirus products (though additional software will trap it), yet Internet Explorer was quite happy to render the code.

Whose responsibility is it to fix this behaviour? Both the antivirus / antimalware companies and Microsoft's IE team have something to answer for."

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