The Glider

UPDATE: I’ve added a link to the presentation slides and some other sites providing coverage of this.The following paper was published today at the CCC conference by Alexander Sotirov, Marc Stevens, Jacob Appelbaum, Arjen Lenstra, David Molnar, Dag Arne Osvik, and Benne de Weger. “We have identified a vulnerability in the…

“There is a new technique for luring unsuspecting users into installing viruses on their systems. Criminals will use a combination of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques and common redirects that can be found on Microsoft.com and the IRS.gov websites. Here is how it works. When users are on the IRS website…

“The FBI today challenged anyone in the online community to break a cipher code on its site. The code was created by FBI cryptanalysts. The bureau invited hackers to a similar code-cracking challenge last year and got tens of thousands of responses it said. A number of sites host such cipher…

“In a blow to anti-phishing efforts, the famed CastleCops organization dedicated to fighting spam and phishing quietly shuttered its site last week. The all-volunteer organization investigated phishing and malware scams, and was credited with successfully derailing many of these attacks and phishing sites. CastleCops itself was also a constant target of…

Jeremiah Grossman has posted an entry discussing the various security reports and how they are labeling web application security as a primary concern. “It’s unanimous. Web application security is the #1 avenue of attack according to basically every industry data security report available (IBM, Websense, Sophos, MessageLabs, Cisco, APWG, MITRE, Symantec,…

“Malware, especially from compromised web sites, was a huge issue in 2008. Many legitimate sites such as MSNBC.com, History.com, ZDNet.com and many others suffered compromises, in some cases for days. Unlike the past, the sites looked normal, but unsuspecting web surfers with vulnerable systems were exploited when they visited these sites….

“Data breaches continued to make their very public mark on cybersecurity news in 2008. And this time it wasn’t TJX making headlines. Despite being PCI compliant, Hannaford Brothers supermarkets announced that 4.2 million credit and debit card numbers were pilfered from its servers. We also learned in 2008 that attackers aren’t…

Ryan Barnett has posted an entry on identifying sessions lacking HTTPOnly and secure cookie flags on modsecurity.”In a previous post I showed how you can use both ModSecurity and Apache together to identify/modify SessionIDs that are missing the HTTPOnly flag. I received some feedback where people were asking how to accomplish…

“The first beta release. “Beta” means that there will be no significant changes till the final v2.00. Now it supports memory and hardware breakpoints. They are fully conditional, and the number of memory breakpoints is unlimited. Fast command emulation takes memory breakpoints into account. In fact, run trace may be much…

I came across an interesting article discussing the dangers of amateur genetic engineers. “A group of so-called “bio-hackers” is setting up a community laboratory called DIYbio in Cambridge, MA. They want to provide publicly available lab space to budding amateur bio-engineers that need equipment and experiment space for their projects. The…