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Microsoft

Submission + - The coming onslaught of iPad competitors (technologizer.com)

Submitted by harrymcc
harrymcc writes: The iPad is selling as well as it is in part because no large manufacturer has had a direct rival out yet. But boy, is that going to change in the next few months. Over at Technologizer, I rounded up known information on 32 current and future tablet computing devices, from potentially worthy iPad competitors to wannabees to interesting specialty devices. By early 2011 these things are going to be everywhere, and it'll be fascinating to see how they fare.

Submission + - Artificial life forms evolve basic intelligence (newscientist.com)

Submitted by Calopteryx
Calopteryx writes: New Scientist has a story on how Avidians — digital organisms in a computer world called Avida — replicate, mutate and have evolved a rudimentary form of memory. They — or things like them — might eventually evolve to become artificially intelligent life forms.
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft Says No to Paying Bug Bounties (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: Microsoft has no plans to follow in the footsteps of Mozilla and Google and pay researchers cash rewards for the bugs that they find in Microsoft's products.

In the wake of both Mozilla and Google significantly increasing their bug bounties to the $3,000 range, there have been persistent rumors in the security community that Microsoft soon would follow suit and start paying bounties as well. However, a company official said on Thursday that Microsoft was not interested in paying bounties.

"We value the researcher ecosystem, and show that in a variety of ways, but we don’t think paying a per-vuln bounty is the best way. Especially when across the researcher community the motivations aren’t always financial. It is well-known that we acknowledge researcher’s contributions in our bulletins when a researcher has coordinated the release of vulnerability details with the release of a security update," Microsoft's Jerry Bryant said.
Security

Submission + - Attackers Using Social Networks for C&C (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: Bot herders and the crimeware gangs behind banker Trojans have had a lot of success in the last few years with using bulletproof hosting providers as their main base of operations. But more and more, they're finding that social networks such as Twitter and Facebook are offering even more fertile and convenient grounds for controlling their malicious creations.

New research from RSA shows that the gangs behind some of the targeted banker Trojans that are such a huge problem in some countries, especially Brazil and other South American nations, are moving quietly and quickly to using social networks as the command-and-control mechanisms for their malware. The company's anti-fraud researchers recently stumbled upon one such attack in progress and watched as it unfolded.
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft Has No Plans to Patch New Flaw (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: Microsoft has acknowledged the vulnerability that the new malware Stuxnet uses to launch itself with .lnk files, but said it has no plans to patch the flaw right now. The company said the flaw affects most current versions of Windows, including Vista, Server 2008 and Windows 7 32 and 64 bit.
Meanwhile, the digital certificate that belonging to Realtek Semiconductor that was used to sign a pair of drivers for the new Stuxnet rootkit has been revoked by VeriSign. The certificate was revoked Friday, several days after news broke about the existence of the new malware and the troubling existence of the signed drivers. Stuxnet is an odd case. It is spread via infected USB thumb drives, which contain the rootkit code, along with two drivers that researchers say are used to hide the existence of the malware both on the USB drive and on the PC, once it's infected. The drivers are signed using a valid digital certificate owned by Realtek, a Taiwanese hardware manufacturer, and Stuxnet uses .lnk shortcut files to launch as soon as the USB drive is opened on a PC.
Mozilla

Submission + - Mozilla Bumps Security Bug Bounty to $3,000 (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: In an effort to enlist more help finding bugs in its most popular software, such as Firefox, Thunderbird and Firefox Mobile, Mozilla is jacking up the bounty it pays to researchers who report security flaws to $3,000. "For new bugs reported starting July 1st, 2010 UTC we are changing the bounty payment to $3,000 US per eligible security bug. A lot has changed in the 6 years since the Mozilla program was announced, and we believe that one of the best way to keep our users safe is to make it economically sustainable for security researchers to do the right thing when disclosing information," Lucas Adamski, director of security engineering at Mozilla, said.

In addition to Mozilla, Google also has established a bug bounty program. However, none of the larger software vendors such as Microsoft or Oracle have taken that step. Some researchers see that as an inevitiability, however.
Government

Submission + - Talk on Chinese Cyber Army Pulled From Black Hat (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: A talk on China's state-sponsored offensive security efforts scheduled for the Black Hat conference later this month has been pulled from the conference after concerns were raised by some people within the Chinese and Taiwanese government about the talk's content.
The presentation was to be delivered by Wayne Huang, CTO of Armorize, an application security company with R&D operations in Taiwan. The talk was billed as an in-depth, historical look at the offensive capabilities and operations of China's so-called cyber-army.
Security

Submission + - Spammers Moving to Disposable Domains (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: Spammers and the botnet operators they're allied with are continuing to adapt their techniques to evade security technologies, and now are using what amount to disposable domains for their activities. A new report shows that the spammers are buying dozens of domains at a time and moving from one to another as often as several times a day to prevent shutdowns. New research shows that the amount of time that a spammer uses a given domain is basically a day or less. The company looked at 60 days worth of data from their customers and found that more than 70 percent of the domains used by spammers are active for a day or less.

Submission + - Quantum Physics for everybody (bureau42.com)

Submitted by fiziko
fiziko writes: Yes, it's blatant self-promotion. As those who subscribe to the "Sci-Fi News" slashbox may know, Bureau 42 has launched its first Summer School. This year, we're doing a nine part series (every Monday in July and August) taking readers from high school physics to graduate level physics, with no particular mathematical background required. Part one can be read here.

Comment Re:-shrug- (Score 1) 604

by redsoxh8r (#32766834) Attached to: The Ignominious Fall of Dell
Child, please. The only surprise here is that it took this long. Dell has sucked out loud for years. Their products are crap and the media perpetrated the ridiculous myth that they had world class service.
Security

Submission + - Adobe Finally Fixes Remote Launch 0-Day (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: Adobe today shipped a critical Reader/Acrobat patch to cover a total of 17 documented vulnerabilities that expose Windows, Mac and UNIX users to malicious hacker attacks. The update, which affects Adobe Reader/Acrobat 9.3.2 (and earlier versions), includes a fix for the outstanding PDF "/Launch" functionality social engineering attack vector that was disclosed by researcher Didier Stevens.

As previously reported, Didier created a proof-of-concept PDF file that executes an embedded executable without exploiting any security vulnerabilities. The PDF hack, when combined with clever social engineering techniques, could potentially allow code execution attacks if a user simply opens a rigged PDF file.
Google

Submission + - Google Has Android Remote App Install Power Too (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: The remote-wipe capability that Google recently invoked to remove a harmless application from some Android phones isn't the only remote control feature that the company built into its mobile OS. It turns out that Android also includes a feature that enables Google to remotely install apps on users' phones as well. Jon Oberheide, the security researcher who developed the application that Google remotely removed from Android phones, noticed during his research that the Android OS includes a feature called INSTALL_ASSET that allows Google to remotely install applications on users' phones.

"I don't know what design decision they based that on. Maybe they just figured since they had the removal mechanism, it's easy to have the install mechanism too," Oberheide said in an interview. "I don't know if they've used it yet."
Security

Submission + - Mass SQL Injection Attack Hits Sites Running IIS (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: There's a large-scale attack underway that is targeting Web servers running Microsoft's IIS software, injecting the sites with a specific malicious script. The attack has compromised tens of thousands of sites already, experts say, and there's no clear indication of who's behind the campaign right now. The attack, which researchers first noticed earlier this week, already has affected a few high-profile sites, including those belonging to The Wall Street Journal and The Jerusalem Post. Some analyses of the IIS attack suggest that it is directed at a third-party ad management script found on these sites.
Security

Submission + - Botnets Using Ubiquity as Security (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: As major botnet operators have moved from top-down C&C infrastructures, like those employed throughout the 1990s and most of the last decade, to more flexible peer-to-peer designs, they also have found it much easier to keep their networks up and running once they're discovered. When an attacker at just one, or at most, two, C&C servers doling out commands to compromised machines, evading detection and keeping the command server online were vitally important. But that's all changed now. With many botnet operators maintaining dozens or sometimes hundreds of C&C servers around the world at any one time, the effect of taking a handful of them offline is negligible, experts say, making takedown operations increasingly complicated and time-consuming.

It's security through ubiquity.

Security researchers say this change, which has been occurring gradually in the last couple of years, has made life much more difficult for them. While it's a simpler task to find a C&C server when it's one of a hundred or so, taking the server offline if much less effective than it used to be. Researchers in recent months have identified and cleaned hundreds of domains being used by the Gumblar botnet, but that's had little effect on the botnet's overall operation.

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