InetDaemon
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I’m paranoid about the web, and with good reason.
The #1 way hackers get into computers today is through your web browser from an infected website. The battle for control of your computer has spread from e-mail and attachments. Another battlefront has opened up on your web browser. A large number of big-name sites have been hacked recently and nobody is completely sure just what the hackers made off with. Hackers use DNS spoofing to trick computers into coming to an infected website, so you can’t completely be sure that you ended up on the website you intended to visit. They also buy up common misspellings of big sites to catch anyone that makes a typo.
Hackers have been using SQL injection vulnerabilities to break into websites for years (it is in fact one of the primary ways hackers get into a server), and these vulnerabilities still go unpatched. Now they are infecting websites in order to set up complex computer/browser/plugin fingerprinting engines that detect vulnerable versions. These engines deliver attacks custom-tailored to infect the visitor’s computer with slimy botware. Take out the cookies, pop-ups, plugins and JavaScript and you’ve stripped your attack surface these engines can attack, down to just your web browser. But this makes browsing less user friendly and a lot more frustrating in the short term, and confusing for people who aren’t technical.
Of course, whenever someone starts talking about a really secure platform, the Mac fanboys jump right in to tell me how secure Apple MacOS is–never mind that the MacOS/Safari combo gets hacked every year (2007, 2008, 2009, 2010,2011) during PWN2OWN at CANSECWEST. Never mind that the hackers have now developed a crimeware kit for the Mac, which means Mac users will need to be on the lookout for a deluge of malware from now on.
With so much dangerous malware and so many threats, how do I stay secure online?
READ MORE: Browser inSecurity – How I Stay Protected Online
Internet Explorer 9: Overview
Microsoft released Internet Explorer 9 with a new, slim, tabbed interface. Here’s a look at the new Microsoft Web browser.
Blocking Russian and Chinese SPAM is actually fairly easy. Unless you communicate in Russian or Chinese, just delete any e-mail that contains any of the special characters either of those languages use. I’ll admit that Chinese is a bit harder, since there are over 3000 characters in their ‘alphabet’, but using the top 30 or 40 characters should block most of the SPAM.
Blocking Russian and Chinese SPAM from Outlook
RSA Security, maker of the SecureID two-factor authentication system used in many encryption systems and VPN/Remote Access products, was successfully attacked with an “Advanced Persistent Threat”. The APT involved a small number of e-mails specifically targeted to the individuals contacted (spear phishing), a bit of social engineering in the e-mail and finally a malcode exel spreadsheet attachment that exploits a 0-day Adobe Flash vulnerability, that Adobe has since patched.
The RSA CIRT team apparently caught it while ‘ongoing’. Read about it on the RSA blog. Surprisingly forthcoming about the ‘how they got in’, not so much about the ‘what was stolen’.
Symantec estimates that 1/3 of all SPAM was stopped when Microsoft (with the assistance of the U.S. Marshals and a court order) took steps to shut down the Rustock botnet. Other botnets (Bagle, Festi, Cutwail, Lethic, Grum, Xarvester and others) are stepping into the void left by Rustock. Whether Rustock will remain ‘dead’, is unclear as the Rustock programmers and Rustock ringleaders are still unidentified and still at large.
This isn’t the first time Microsoft has taken down a botnet and Rustock is not the only botnet.
We have known for years that personal and business desktop computers infected with viruses and bots were the primary source of the majority of SPAM on the Internet. Lack of computer literacy, knowing how to use and protect your computer, is the primary enabler of computer infection. Having anti-virus isn’t enough, you have to know how to protect your computer and how to surf the web and handle e-mail and files safely.
From the Web:
MICROSOFT
SYMANTEC
- March 2011 MessageLabs Intelligence Report identified that global spam volumes fell by 33.6% between March 15 and 17
- Rustock Takedown’s Effect on Global SPAM volume
- Has The Rustock Botnet Ceased Spamming?
NEW YORK TIMES
Paul Baran, one of the geniuses working for RAND corporation, conceived of a distributed packet switching network in which information could broken up at the source, be transmitted across multiple paths and reassembled at the far end, preventing the message from being disrupted if the ‘network’ took a big hit (such as one or more nuclear blasts). This concept of a distributed message system paved the way for the ARPANET, the grand-daddy of today’s Internet.
He died today from lung cancer at age 84.
You can read the New York Times Article here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/28/technology/28baran.html?src=me&ref=technology
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