Nice initiative I just came across to. From the "M4 Message Breaking Project" :The M4 Project is an effort to break 3 original Enigma messages with the help of distributed computing. The signals were intercepted in the North Atlantic in 1942 and are believed to be unbroken. Ralph Erskine has presented the intercepts in a letter to the journal Cryptologia. The signals were presumably enciphered
Monday, 27 February 2006
Saturday, 25 February 2006
DVD of the Weekend - The Outer Limits - Sex And Science Fiction Collection
Posted on 10:35 by Unknown
"A sextet of sci-fi tales opens with Alyssa Milano as a woman whose "close encounter" leaves her with an insatiable lust in "Caught in the Act"; the sole survivor of a nuclear holocaust gets some computer-generated companionship in "Bits of Love," with Natasha Henstridge; Sofia Shinas is "Valerie 13," a robot whose emotions become all-too-human; a man who's lived his life onboard a mysterious
Friday, 24 February 2006
One bite only, at least so far!
Posted on 06:21 by Unknown
Apple's OS X has always been positioned as a juicy target even though it's market share is almost non-existent compared to Microsoft's domination. And while converting iPod customers into MAC users hasn't shown any progress so far and I doubt it would, malware authors are as always actively experimenting or diversifying the threatscape. One question remains unclear, why would someone want to own
Give it back!
Posted on 05:36 by Unknown
According to a recent article "Secret program reclassifies documents" :"Researcher Matthew Aid has discovered a secret reclassification program that has moved thousands of declassified pages out of the National Archives and Records Administration's facility in Maryland. Some groups, such as George Washington University's Nation Security Archive, are fighting to end the program, arguing that the
Master of the Infected Puppets
Posted on 04:37 by Unknown
In some of my previous posts, "What are botnet herds up to?", "Skype to control Botnets", "The War against Botnets and DDoS attacks", and "Recent Malware Developments", I was actively providing resources and updating my blog readers (thanks for the tips and the info sharing, I mean it!) related to one of the most relevant threats to the Internet ( more trends and bureaucracy ) - Botnets.I
Chinese Internet Censorship efforts and the outbreak
Posted on 03:14 by Unknown
In some of my January's Security Streams, I did some extensive blogging expressing my point of view on the current Internet censorship activities, and tried to emphasize on the country whose Internet population is about to outpace the U.S one - China. In my posts "China - the biggest black spot on the Internet’s map", "2006 = 1984?", "Twisted Reality", you can quickly update yourself on some of
Friday, 17 February 2006
How to win 10,000 bucks until the end of March?
Posted on 03:45 by Unknown
I feel that, in response to the recent event of how the WMF vulnerability got purchased/sold for $4000 (an interesting timeframe as well), iDefense are actively working on strengthening their market positioning - that is the maintain their pioneering position as a perhaps the first company to start paying vulnerability researchers for their discoveries. The company recently offered $10,000 for
DVD of the weekend - The Lone Gunmen
Posted on 03:42 by Unknown
The Lone Gunmen on two double-sided discs, pure classic! In one of my chats with Roman Polesek, from Hakin9, he was wise enough to state the you cannot be a prophet in your own industry, simple, but powerful statement you should take into consideration.Initiatives such as The Lone Gunmen, the X-files, and The Outer Limits have already proven useful, given someone listens! For instance :"In a
Smoking emails
Posted on 03:22 by Unknown
I just came across this, "Morgan Stanley offers $15M fine for e-mail violations" - from the article :"US investment bank Morgan Stanley will offer a settlement to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), agreeing in principle to pay a $15 million fine for failing to preserve e-mail messages. The e-mail messages could have provided useful evidence in several cases brought against the company.
Thursday, 16 February 2006
The end of passwords - for sure, but when?
Posted on 05:49 by Unknown
My first blog post "How to create better passwords - why bother?!" back in December, 2005, tried to briefly summarize my thoughts and comments I've been making on the most commonly accepted way of identifying yourself - passwords.Bill Gates did a commentary on the issue, note where, at the RSA Conference, perhaps the company that's most actively building awareness on the potential/need for
Wednesday, 15 February 2006
A timeframe on the purchased/sold WMF vulnerability
Posted on 06:27 by Unknown
The WMF vulnerability and how it got purchased/sold for $4000 was a major event during January, at least for me as for quite some time the industry was in the twilight zone by not going through a recently released report. But does this fact matters next to figuring out how to safeguard the security of your network/PC given the time it took the vendor to first, realize that it's real, than to
Detecting intruders and where to look for
Posted on 01:59 by Unknown
CERT, just released their "Windows Intruder Detection Checklist" from the article :"This document outlines suggested steps for determining whether your Windows system has been compromised. System administrators can use this information to look for several types of break-ins. We also encourage you to review all sections of this document and modify your systems to address potential weaknesses."I
Tuesday, 14 February 2006
Look who's gonna cash for evaluating the maliciousness of the Web?
Posted on 08:29 by Unknown
Two days ago, SecurityFocus ran an article "Startup tries to spin a safer Web" introducing SiteAdvisor :"A group of graduates from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) aim to change that by crawling the Web with hundreds, and soon thousands, of virtual computers that detect which Web sites attempt to download software to a visitor's computer and whether giving out an e-mail address
Monday, 13 February 2006
Recent Malware developments
Posted on 02:43 by Unknown
In some of my February's streams :) "The War against botnets and DDoS attacks" and "CME - 24 aka Nyxem, and who's infected?" I covered some of the recent events related to malware trends in the first months of 2006. This is perhaps the perfect time to say a big thanks to everyone who's been expressing ideas, remarks and thoughts on my malware research. While conducting the reseach itself I
Thursday, 9 February 2006
Who needs nuclear weapons anymore?
Posted on 09:47 by Unknown
Excluding Iran and the potential of its nuclear program(no country that bans music should have such a power!), perhaps I should rephrase - who can actually use them nowadays, are they just a statement of power, does flexibility and beneath the radar concepts matter? I feel they do. I just came across a news article from January on a new EMP warhead test, and while there have been speculations/or
The War against botnets and DDoS attacks
Posted on 07:32 by Unknown
In one of my previous posts talking about botnet herders I pointed out how experiments tend to dominate, and while botnets protection is still a buzz word, major security vendors are actively working on product line extensions. DDoS attacks are the result of successful botnet, and so are the root of the problem besides the distributed concept. Techworld is reporting that McAfee is launching a "
Wednesday, 8 February 2006
A top level espionage case in Greece
Posted on 07:06 by Unknown
Starting shortly after the Olympic games in 2004 and up to March 2005, the mobile phones of : Prime Minister Costas Caramanlis, minister of foreign affairs, defense, public order and justice, top military officials, a number of journalists, and human rights activists (hmm?) have been tapped by an unknown party though the installation of "spy software" (that's too open topic) , mind you,
Tuesday, 7 February 2006
Security Awareness Posters
Posted on 08:11 by Unknown
Security is all about awareness at the bottom line. The better you understand it, the higher your chance of "survival", and hopefully progress! Enjoy the following collections of witty and amusing security awareness posters : 1, 2, 3 (you may also be interested in going through my talk on security policies and awareness with K Rudolph from Native Intelligence as well), 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. Technorati
Hacktivism tensions
Posted on 06:08 by Unknown
It was about time the freedom of the press and the democratic nature of joking with politicians takes its hit. But why with spiritual leaders? The contradictive Muhammad cartoons sparkled a lot of anger, and with the recent tentions in France all we needed was a hacktivism activity from angry muslims. Remember how the China vs U.S cyberwar was sparkled due to the death of a Chinese pilot crashing
Monday, 6 February 2006
The current state of IP spoofing
Posted on 05:59 by Unknown
A week ago, I came across a great and distributed initiative to map the distribution of spoofable clients and networks - the ANA Spoofer Project, whose modest sample of 1100 clients, 500 networks and 450 ASes can still be used to make informed judgements on the overall state of IP Spoofing. I once posted some thoughts on "How to secure the Internet" where I was basically trying to emphasize on
Friday, 3 February 2006
What search engines know, or may find out about us?
Posted on 06:03 by Unknown
Today, CNET's staff did an outstanding job of finding out what major search companies retain about their users. AOL, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! respond on very well researched questions!Whatever you do, just don't sacrifice innovation and trust in the current services for misjudged requests at the first place from my point of view. At the bottom line, differentiate your Private Searches Versus
Thursday, 2 February 2006
CME - 24 aka Nyxem, and who's infected?
Posted on 09:19 by Unknown
Today, the F-Secure's team released a neat world map with the Nyxem.E infections. As you can see the U.S and Europe have been most successfully targeted, but I wonder would it be the same given the author started localizing the subject/body messages found within the worm to other languages? Who seeks to cause damage instead of controlling information and network assets these days? A pissed off
Suri Pluma - a satellite image processing tool and visualizer
Posted on 08:45 by Unknown
I just came across a great satellite image processing software and decided to share it with my blog readers. Perhaps that's a good moment to spread the word about my RSS compatible feed, so consider syndicating it. To sum up :"Suri Pluma is a satellite image processing tool and visualizer. It can open the most common image formats without importing to an internal format and minimizing the memory
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