Apple’s iPhone is a tough target for hackers, but a security researcher warned Friday that there are ways the sleek device could potentially be compromised.
CHINA has been the target of a big increase in cyber-attacks in recent years and faces more of a threat from hackers than any country in the West, a military researcher said. Beijing has hotly denied recent reports in Western media that Chinese hackers penetrated systems in the Pentagon and in the chancellery and key ministries of German leader Angela Merkel. Computers in Britain’s Foreign Office have also been hit, according to the Guardian newspaper.
An NHS trust is investigating how one of its hard drives containing confidential information was sold online. The Dudley Group of Hospitals NHS Trust is trying to find out how one of its computers full of confidential medical information was sold on eBay. Disposal of the trust’s computers is carried out under contract to Siemens Medical Solutions, as part of a PFI agreement. Computer Disposals has a subcontract with Siemens to dispose of obsolete IT. All hard drives that leave the trust via this route should undergo data wiping which meets the government’s standard of being overwritten three times.
With Bluetooth fast becoming a commonplace feature on mobile devices, users need to be aware of vulnerabilities and learn how to protect themselves from security threats. A study by research firm InsightExpress revealed that 73 percent of mobile device users are not acquainted with security issues that could put their mobile devices at risk, including mobile phones and Bluetooth-equipped notebooks. To these users, terms such as “bluejacking”, “bluesnarfing” or even “bluebugging” would probably be unfamiliar.
Ethical hacking kits, which provide a variety of tools for penetration testing, password theft and guides to virus development, are being sold on eBay. Three hacking courses were being auctioned on Thursday, according to Tier-3, a UK-based behavioral analysis vendor. Calling this “a serious development,” Geoff Sweeney, Tier-3′s CTO, noted, “It basically puts high-level hacking tools, including surreptitious trojan loaders and website-hacking utilities, into the hands of almost any internet user providing they have an eBay and PayPal account.”
A hacker group this week released a free, open-source unlock for the AApple iPhone (reviewed here), just a day after a commercial company started selling something similar for as much as ÂŁ49 <10683> through a network of online resellers. The iPhone Dev Team, a dozen programmers who began their attempts to break the iPhone’s reliance on AT&T in early July, have posted their hack on download servers.
Spending on security software across Europe will top âŹ2.4bn (ÂŁ1.65bn) this year, with antivirus continuing to form the largest slice of the pie. Antivirus will account for more than 50 percent of the total security software revenue market in 2007, according to the calculations by analyst Gartner. Organisations are getting more sophisticated in the way they choose security products, and technical evaluations are now common practice, the analyst said. Customers also want to deal with a smaller number of vendors that can supply products that work well together.
The New Zealand secret service has suggested the Chinese government was behind attacks on the country’s networks. New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark yesterday assured reporters that no classified information had been compromised but confirmed that she believed foreign government spies were behind the cyberattack. While Clark said officials know which government was behind the attack, she would not name the country suspected.
A year-old bug in QuickTime that, when paired with Firefox, allows hackers to hijack PCs and Macs now has Mozilla Corp. scrambling for a fix, the company’s chief security officer said yesterday.According to Petko Petkov, a U.K.-based Web application penetration tester, the current version of QuickTime contains a flaw in its Media Link (.qtl file formats) function. Any file with a QuickTime-supported extension — there are more than 60 — will be parsed by Apple Inc.’s media player. However, because it fails to sanitize the XML content, an attack can sneak links to malicious JavaScript into the file and get QuickTime to run it.
Berlin – “Irhabi007″ was the name of the phantom that haunted the far reaches of the Islamist cyber world a few years ago and was very active there. The “Internet terrorist” placed videos of attacks on websites, he gave insider tips to “hackers,” and the fact that he praised the Al-Qa’idah leaders to high heaven finally completed his status as a propagandist of terror. However, “irhabi007″ was not a Muslim version of James Bond but Younis Tsouli from London. The 22-year-old student of information technology, who came from Morocco, is considered to be the prototype of a cyber jihadists.