Zombies inevitably turning into botnets represent a huge, automated and efficient advantage to malicious attackers, I topic and most of its dimensions I covered in my Future trends of malware research. CipherTrust's Zombie Stats help you measure the approximate population of infected zombie PCs according to the vendor's TrustedSource. Not surprisingly, China's steadily increasing novice Internet
Thursday, 29 June 2006
The WarDriving Police and Pringles Hacking
Posted on 18:52 by Unknown
These days you never know where the next hacking attempt on your wireless network may come from. In this case, it's from the police, as authorities start mimicking wardriving behavior :"The Douglas Country Sheriff's DOffice says it's going to start warning computer users that their networks may be vulnerable to hackers. The Sheriff's Department plans to equip several of its community service and
Wednesday, 28 June 2006
North Korea - Turn On the Lights, Please
Posted on 18:56 by Unknown
North Korea's recent missile launch furor, and the obvious conventional weaponry doctrine in place, as well as my comments in the Travel Without Moving series - Korean Demilitarized Zone, reminded me of a how they tend to fuel growth in military spending/the regime, where the trade-off is a developing economy, or any economy at all. I feel North Korea is still quite dark these days, very
Tracking Down Internet Terrorist Propaganda
Posted on 18:27 by Unknown
I always knew there's a team of cheap marketers behind every terrorist organization trying to market yet another multimedia killing, or put it simple fear, treats, and no respect for life. Why cheap? Mainly because there's no segmentation or niche issues to deal with, but mostly mass marketing, while harnessing the power of the never ending resonation from the media echo.Rather biased, today's
Tuesday, 27 June 2006
Delicious Information Warfare - 24/27 June
Posted on 17:35 by Unknown
Go through my daily reads for 13/24 June as well.01. Meteorite Collision - "Japanese animation showing what would happen if a giant meteor hit the Earth." to Space on june 2502. Should We Lift North Korean Sanctions? - "Quentin Hardy summed up his side’s argument: “Capitalism has corrupted other authoritarian regimes, why not North Korea?”to Investing on june 2503. The ABCs of New Security
Malicious Web Crawling
Posted on 08:34 by Unknown
SiteAdvisor indeed cashed for evaluating the maliciosness of the web, and New Zealand feels that nation wide google hacking initiatives are a more feasible solution to the problem of google hacking, compared to the Catawba County Schools Board of Education who blamed Google for indexing student test scores & social security numbers. It's like having a just-moved, 25/30 years old neighbors next
Monday, 26 June 2006
Shots From the Wild - Terrorism Information Awareness Program Demo Portal
Posted on 18:54 by Unknown
A lot has changed since my last post on "Data mining, terrorism and security", namely NSA's warrantless surveillance efforts. So, in the spirit of a second possible NSA facility, I've decided to post a shot from the TIA's early stages of development obtained though the most detailed, conceptual, and from a developer's point of view description of the program.There've also been speculations on the
Dealing with Spam - The O'Reilly.com Way
Posted on 06:23 by Unknown
While China feels that centralization is the core of everything, and is licensing the use of mail servers to fight spam, thus totally ignoring the evolution of spam techniques, the other day I came across to some recent Spam Statistics from Oreilly.com -- scary numbers!"Our mail servers accepted 1,438,909 connections, attempting to deliver 1,677,649 messages. We rejected 1,629,900 messages and
Sunday, 25 June 2006
Big Brother in the Restroom
Posted on 16:09 by Unknown
Wikes! This is nasty, and while the porn industry has commercialized the idea a long time ago, I never imagined the levels of crime in public restrooms would "reach" levels requiring CCTVs to be installed -- if there's so much vandalism going on in public restrooms, these will definitely get stolen as well, picture the situation! Norway installs surveillance cameras in park restrooms.Hint : once
World's Internet Censorship Map
Posted on 15:16 by Unknown
While it seems rather quiet on the Internet's censorship front, the media coverage on the topic represents a cyclical buzz that reemerges with the time.Thankfully, initiatives as the OpenNet one, and organizations such as Reporters Without Borders never stop being the society's true watchdogs when it comes to Internet censorship. ONI's neat visualization of the Internet filtering map is a great
Delicious Information Warfare - 13/24 June
Posted on 10:41 by Unknown
Brief summaries of key events for the last week and a half, catch up with previous ones as well. I intend to continue sharing my daily reads while emphasizing on the big picture, and emerging trends. Great quote courtesy of the The Royal Swedish Academy of War Sciences : “The world isn’t run by weapons anymore, or energy, or money. It’s run by little ones and zeros, little bits of data. It’s all
Travel Without Moving - Erasmus Bridge
Posted on 09:33 by Unknown
Catching up with last week's Travel Without Moving shot, this one isn't intelligence of military related, but a marvelous engineering achievement, Erasmus Bridge -- perhaps the perfect moment to demonstrate my amateur photographer skills while tripping around. I will definitely share more shots from cons and life, the way I experience it, anytime now. And meanwhile, you can take a peek at the
Friday, 23 June 2006
No Other Place Like 127.0.0.1
Posted on 19:36 by Unknown
Sincere apologies for the sudden disappearance, but thanks for the interest even though I haven't been active for the last week due to quality offline activities. No other place like 127.0.0.1, and the smell of an untouched by human hand, Cold War era postage stamps glue on my high value collections -- I do own several "stamp anomalies". Collecting postage stamps is a challenging hobby for a
Tuesday, 13 June 2006
Web Application Email Harvesting Worm
Posted on 08:40 by Unknown
This is a rare example of a web application vulnerability worm, targeting one of the most popular free email providers by harvesting emails within their 1GB mailboxes, and of course propagating further."Yahoo! on Monday has repaired a vulnerability in its email service that allowed a worm to harvest email addresses from a user accounts and further spread itself. The JS/Yamanner worm automatically
Consolidation, or Startups Popping out Like Mushrooms?
Posted on 07:13 by Unknown
If technology is the enabler, and the hot commodity these days, spammers will definitely twist the concept of targeted marketing, while taking advantage of them. Last week I've mentioned the concepts of VoIP, WiFi and Cell phone spam that are slowly starting to take place.Gartner recently expressed a (pricey) opinion on the upcoming consolidation of spam vendors, while I feel they totally ignored
Sunday, 11 June 2006
It's Getting Cloudy, and Delicious
Posted on 07:31 by Unknown
For real. A brief summary of the instant links for the last two days :01. Eight Indian Startups to Watch - "Some startups are offering unique solutions for India’s burgeoning domestic market, others are targeting global markets. Several are going after both. Red Herring has chosen a few below-the-radar young companies that we think are worth watching." - to Investing Technology India on june
Travel Without Moving - Georgi Markov's KGB Assassination Spot
Posted on 07:15 by Unknown
In the spirit of the previous hot spot in the Travel Without Moving series, here's another one, this time Georgi Markov's KGB Assassination spot. Georgi Markov was killed in London, in 1978, using a tiny pellet fired from an umbrella containing 0.2 milligram dose of poison ricin.You may also find this Time Out's briefing on London's espionage locations interesting.
Saturday, 10 June 2006
Going Deeper Underground
Posted on 08:11 by Unknown
IT Security Goes Nuclear, at least that's what they say."Venture capitalists are predicting a "business boom below ground" as blue-chip companies turn to nuclear bunkers built at the height of the Cold War in the battle to protect sensitive electronic data. The latest private equity investor to move in on the area is Foresight Venture Partners, which has just taken a 20 per cent stake in The
There You Go With Your Financial Performance Transparency
Posted on 07:57 by Unknown
Truly amazing, and the inavitable consequence of communication retention in the financial sector, but I feel it's the magnitude that resulted in Enron's entire email communication achive that's seems available online right now."Search through more hundreds of thousands of email messages to and from 176 former Enron executives and employees from the power-trading operations in 2000-2002. For the
All Your Confidentiality Are Belong To Us
Posted on 07:49 by Unknown
The proof that commercial and open source encryption has surpassed the technologies to police it, or the idea that privacy and business growth as top priorities would ruin the whole initiative?"The Government has launched a public consultation into a draft code of practice for a controversial UK law that critics have said could alienate big business and IT professionals. Part III of the
Friday, 9 June 2006
Brace Yourself - AOL to Enter Security Business
Posted on 06:49 by Unknown
In the re-emergence of the Web, AOL got the attention it never imagined it would get, Microsoft and Google fighting for a share of its modest, but strategic amount of eyeballs. After being an exclusive part of Time Warner's balance sheet since its early acquisition, and with a $510M fine, dial-up business that was profitable by the time telecoms started offering cable connections, due to the
Thursday, 8 June 2006
An Over-performing Spammer
Posted on 08:32 by Unknown
Th3 4r7 0f $3nd!ng spam messages is evolving like never before, and while spammers are still catching up with the newest technologies such as VoIP, WiFi, Cell phones -- newest at least in respect to spamming -- trying to avoid the now mature indystry's practices, and taking advantage of the growing economies and their newbie users as victims, is what keeps it going.I simply couldn't resist not to
Bedtime Reading - Rome Inc.
Posted on 08:21 by Unknown
If the Baby Business helped you envision the future, "Rome Inc - The Rise and Fall of the First Multinational Corporation" is going to help you perceive the past within today's corporate culture -- and Stanley Bing makes good points on every stage of the empire.Basically, the book emphasizes on the "first multinational corporation" Rome, selling the ultimate product of its time - citizenship.
Tuesday, 6 June 2006
Phantom Planes in the Skies
Posted on 10:37 by Unknown
I can barely imagine the panic with a non-responding -- can it respond when it's not there? -- plane in the sky, at least by the time a visual confirmation reveals the truth. In the post 9/11 world, airports were among the first strategic targets to get the funding necessary to protect against the threats fabricated in a think-tank somewhere. Money are wasted in this very same fashion on a daily
Where's my Fingerprint, Dude?
Posted on 10:25 by Unknown
Personal data security breaches continue occurring, and with the trend towards evolving to a digital economy, it's inevitably going to get ever worse. In a recently revealed case "Lost IRS laptop stored employee fingerprints", from the article :"A laptop computer containing fingerprints of Internal Revenue Service employees is missing, MSNBC.com has learned. The computer was lost during transit
Sunday, 4 June 2006
Skype as the Attack Vector
Posted on 08:52 by Unknown
It's often hard to actually measure the risk exposure to a threat, given how overhyped certain market segments/products' insecurities get with the time. Gartner, and the rest of the popular marketing research agencies seem to be obsessed with Skype as the major threat to enterprises, while Skype isn't really bad news, compliance is, in respect to VoIP, P2P, IM and Email communications retention
Travel Without Moving - KGB Lubyanka Headquarters
Posted on 08:26 by Unknown
Yet another hot spot in this week's Travel Without Moving series - this time it's Lubyanka Square's KGB Headquarters. There are still lots of Cold War sentiments in the air among yesterday's and today's super powers and you just can't deny it. Today's FSB, the successor to the KGB, is taking a very serious approach towards counter-intelligence, and offensive scientific intelligence practices in a
Saturday, 3 June 2006
May's Security Streams
Posted on 03:29 by Unknown
Here's May's summary of all the security streams during the month. This is perhaps among the few posts in which I can actually say something about the blog, the individual behind it, and its purpose, which is to - question, provoke, and inform on the big picture. After all, "I want to know God's thoughts... all the rest are details", one of my favorite Albert Einstein's quotes. The way we often
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)