Industry News

16-Year Old Indian Hacker Says College “Useless”

A 16-year old boy was arrested and interrogated for his involvement in eBay and PayPal scams, and said that he was happy with his lifestyle and that college was a “useless” alternative for making money. Coming from a modest background, the boy wanted to live lavishly with a fine haircut and brand-name clothes, and he found [...]

New Global Refurbishment Programs

A new program is starting in Uganda to refurbish and resell old computers the first world no longer wants, funded by Microsoft and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization. From Ars Technica: The center will have the capacity to handle 10,000 computers a year, and the machines that are salvageable will be resold for the local [...]

Data Breaches Targeting Presentation and App Layers

Chris Wysopal has a writeup on the recent Verizon Business data breach report today. The report found that 59% of breaches of the 59% of data breaches involve hacking, with the following breakdown: Application/Service layer -39% OS/Platform layer - 23% Exploit known vulnerability -18% Exploit unknown vulnerability - 5% Use of back door -15% That is over half - 62% of [...]

No Privacy on Facebook/MySpace

It’s not just your friends reading your personal details — any widget or app you add to a facebook profile might glean details about you and your personal information, which can be used for targeted advertising or other potentially more dangerous ways. Here are some details about what’s collected and the implications: Each site has come up [...]

European Backup Services Vulnerable to Attack

Online backup is seen as a good strategy for preventing data loss, in case of a disaster at a local datacenter or on a local machine. But apparently the software used by over 100 services is vulnerable to a man in the middle attack, even though it uses SSL to secure the connection: Tests by heise [...]

Safari Users at Risk — But Only in Windows

I love the Safari browser, so it caught my attention to read about a new exploit on the loose. However, I had to laugh, when I learned that Safari is only at risk in the Windows environment. Apple said they have no plans to patch it, but Microsoft released an advisory: The Safari bug, originally disclosed [...]

IT Workers Would Take a Pay Cut to Telecommute?

According to a recent study, a good percentage of IT Workers would be happy to telecommute, even if it meant a pay cut of up to10%: Nearly 40% of U.S. information technology workers would accept a reduced salary to have the ability to telecommute, a Dice Holding survey revealed Tuesday. In a poll of more than [...]

Symantec State of Spam Report for May

Symantec has a State of Spam report that comes out every month and happened to email it to me this past month. I finally got a look into the document and here are a few highlights from the May State of Spam report: An increase in the number of NDR (Non Delivery Report) bounce messages sent [...]

Apple Patches for Apache, Flash and More

Yesterday I blogged a Windows flaw for Adobe Flash player. Today I came across another advisory about a patch Apple just put out earlier this week for Adobe Flash. The security update also covers other software too. From SecurityFocus: The update patches eight vulnerabilities in the open-source Apache Web server and seven vulnerabilities [...]

Flash Player + Windows = Threat of SQL Injection

Apparently Adobe Flash players that aren’t patched and up to date on Windows might be vulnerable to a new SQL injection–there are apparently 18 variants of the new exploit. SecureWorks has the details: Attackers insert SCRIPT and IFRAME tags into the content of trusted, legitimate web sites via a known SQL injection attack. Those tags [...]