Microsoft announced yesterday that it will release five security bulletins – one for a flaw deemed “critical” – next week as part of its September Patch Tuesday distribution.The critical flaw exists in Windows and can be exploited for remote code execution, according to Microsoft’s advance notification. Four âimportantâ patches will also be released. Two of the bulletins fix bugs allowing remote code execution in Visual Studio and MSN Messenger and Windows Live Messenger.
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The People’s Liberation Army strategists have made little secret of their desire to establish cyber warfare units capable of mounting just such sorts of mission as the hacking of international government targets. From a satellite-killing missile test in January to reports of spyware in German government computers last month, there are growing concerns that China is being increasingly sophisticated and ambitious in its use of technology to secure information and disrupt communications.
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eBay is one famous site, that’s for sure. And being high-profile as it is and also containing a large amount of personal and financial data it is only a natural thing that it has been attacked by
hackers. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but small sites rarely suffer from hacks. Sure, some get a little DoS once in a while, but the big web pages are the ones that suffer the most.
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Claims of hackers also infecting German government computers. BEIJING – China on Tuesday rejected a report that hackers controlled by its military had successfully entered a Pentagon network, calling the claim a product of “Cold War” thinking. The Financial Times, citing former and serving U.S. officials, said Chinese People’s Liberation Army hackers broke into a U.S. Defense Department network in June, taking data and prompting the shutdown of a system serving department secretary Robert Gates.
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John J. Tkacik Jr., a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, has a “sneaking suspicion” that the CIA is being pressured to downplay the “China threat.” Otherwise, why would the intelligence agency have hastily revised, downward, its estimates of the percentage of Chinese GDP dedicated to defense spending? Clearly, the Bush administration is going even softer on China. But if so, someone’s sending mixed messages. Because a slew of unnamed U.S. officials are quoted in Tuesday’s Financial Times expressing alarm about an “incursion” by People’s Liberation Army “hackers” into Pentagon computer systems — “the most successful cyber attack on the U.S. Defense department,” according to the officials.
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San Francisco (IDGNS) – The web site of Bank of India, one of India’s leading banks, was restored early Tuesday. The bank had closed the site on Friday after it found that the site had been hacked, and was dispensing malicious code. Sunbelt Software Inc., a provider of security software in Clearwater, Florida, had on Thursday alerted users on its blog that the bank’s site had been compromised, and advised them not to visit the site.
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Microsoft plans Vista Service Pack 1, XP Service Pack 3 releases for first quarter 2008; betas due within weeks. Microsoft is planning to release Service Pack 1 (SP1) for its Vista operating system in the first quarter of 2008, and its beta will be available within a month. The corporation is also planning to release Service Pack 3 (SP3) for Windows XP during the first three months of 2008, and its beta within the next month.
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Sony has used a technology in one of its products that relies on similar techniques to those employed by hackers. The Sony MicroVault USM-F is a flash drive that includes a biometric protection device, namely a fingerprint recognition scanner. According to security firm F-Secure, the software that comes with the drive creates a hidden folder using ‘rootkit techniques’. Rootkits are usually malicious programs that lie hidden on a PC, disguising their presence by accessing the operating system in an unusual way. While F-Secure suspects that Sony’s rootkit-like software is hiding fingerprint authentication, which seems like a sensible reason to hide data, the company also notes that the system can be abused by bad guys: “This new rootkit… can be used by any malware author to hide any folder.” McAfee has also analysed the software and demonstrated how it can be used to cause problems on a system.
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Security experts believe it’s just a matter of time until widespread attacks on VoIP systems begin to materialize. But there has yet to be a major event to make the IT industry sit up and take notice. Still, as VoIP adoption continues to grow, vendors and integrators are stressing the importance of building layers of security into VoIP deployments. Last November, the SANS Institute, in its annual ranking of the Top 20 security threats, for the first time included VoIP servers and phones, in recognition of the fact that collaboration technologies that weave VoIP into messaging systems provide new pathways for hackers to exploit.
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After two long weeks back in Australia with my WiFi only iPhone I’m pleased to say I’ve finally got it working on an Australian GSM network. And it works perfectly (albeit with no visual voicemail – but I’ll survive). There are now no fewer than four different ways to unlock the iPhone, and it seems more are being released each day. Software solutions are just around the corner, however I chose to go theTurboSIM method, as I felt a hardware based unlock was more update-resistant than the software solutions. This is a hunch, and I’m comfortable if I’m proved wrong — the TurboSIM still works for me!
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