Sep 7th, 2010
Microsoft Security Response team posted an interesting tweet at the tail end of Friday afternoon last week. The message itself was relatively low key, but pointed to something possibly more worrying. Enough to make me do some digging anyway…
“We’re aware of a publicly disclosed issue involving Internet Explorer. We’ll continue to investigate over the weekend.”
Hm, [...]
Sep 2nd, 2010
I was asked recently for a few tips on how to look after yourself online, particularly with regard to social networking. I know many of the people who read this blog are regular users of Facebook & Twitter, so I wanted to share those tips here. It’s by no means an exhaustive list and I [...]
Aug 23rd, 2010
I just received a call, not for the first time, from a call centre located in India. The caller knew my name and used it as if to demonstrate that this was not a cold call. Normally I hang up on this kind of call, but this time I decided to let them roll… This [...]
Jul 29th, 2010
A group of Turkish pranksters enlisted the help of their fellow message board users to mount a large scale linguistic assault on Facebook, resulting in red faces all round.
A post on the Inci Sözlük discussion forum describes the plan for abusing the Facebook translate application for the amusement of the discussion board members and it [...]
Jul 20th, 2010
On the 16th of July Microsoft released Security Advisory 2286198 confirming an as yet unpatched vulnerability in Windows Shell that exposes all users of all current versions of Microsoft Windows to very real risk of attack and infection.
According to Microsoft “The vulnerability exists because Windows incorrectly parses shortcuts in such a way that malicious code [...]
Jul 16th, 2010
If there’s one topic that’s apt to get security professionals uptight – and provoke stand-up rows in the office – then it’s cloud computing. Tony Lock from FreeformDynamics recently conducted a poll on the subject in a workshop for The Register.
The big issue is, of course, loss of control. If you trust [...]
Jul 14th, 2010
Phishing, Trojans, botnets – all well understood threats and terms which have swiftly passed into the lingua franca of daily life. “False positive”, on the other hand, is a concept which has largely been ignored – accepted as an inevitable if unwanted consequence of the traditional AV industry and its obsession with the signature update [...]
Jul 13th, 2010
You might have noticed in the news today, Facebook have agreed to make the ClickCEOP app available to their users. This app, often referred to in the media as a “Panic Button” gives concerned Facebook users a place where they can go to get help and advice related to many aspects [...]
Jul 7th, 2010
My colleague Jon Collins from Freeform Dynamics posted a really interesting question over on The Register: “Does business really care about security?”
Like all the big, crunchy questions, the answer is a lot more complex than initially seems possible.
You could take some sort of statistical approach – what proportion of businesses deploy [...]
Jun 30th, 2010
Data breach laws are starting to become a serious concern for businesses of all shapes and sizes. It’s already five years since California passed data breach disclosure laws, requiring companies to notify customers of security lapses.
Since then almost all other US states have joined it, many opting for penalties that [...]
Jun 15th, 2010
Researchers at the Technical University in Vienna have published details of an important evolution in Automated Social Engineering and proved the concept using IRC and Facebook chat.
Many of you will be familiar with the idea of Spam bots when it comes to real time chat, if not I detailed a Facebook related scam a while [...]
Jun 11th, 2010
I was very interested by a blog post by Bernd Marienfeldt that I read today, which appears to illustrate a serious security weakness in Apple’s iPhone data encryption implementation.
The iPhone 3GS offers Full Disk Encryption using 256 bit AES encoding which should (theoretically) keep your sensitive data safe from prying eyes. It has been public [...]
Jun 10th, 2010
Niket Biswas posted an entry in the Facebook Developers blog yesterday entitled “Confirming Developer Accounts“. It seems that they are asking application developers to attach either a mobile telephone phone number or a credit card to their Facebook account. The telephone number is verified by way of a validation code sent by SMS, the credit [...]
May 18th, 2010
In the world of computer security, there are two kinds of anti-virus software – stuff that works and stuff that doesn’t work at all. The problem for the average user is telling them apart, and this is something which criminals can make money from. A lot of money.
Have you ever had a window pop-up on [...]
May 10th, 2010
I was very interested to read an article on The Register yesterday and then try to wrap my brain around the associated research paper from matuosec.com.
The research paper details a method by which the researchers claim to be able to bypass every anti-malware product they tested against and the list of the [...]
