Emails containing malicious PDF files have been putting computers at risk since Friday, Finnish security software firm F-Secure said on Saturday. “The emails, sent in bulk, looked like credit-card statements, and contained an attachment called ‘report.pdf’,” chief research officer Mikko Hypponen said in a statement.
RealNetworks Inc. said it would publish a patch later Friday for its RealPlayer media program to protect users from ongoing attacks. Less than 24 hours before, Symantec Corp. had issued a high-level alert that warned of a critical vulnerability in RealPlayer that could be used against anyone browsing the Web with Internet Explorer.
TIRUCHI: The Chinthamani Cooperative Supermarket at Puthur here has fixed a cracker sales target of Rs. 1 crore for Deepavali festival. The authorities have planned to establish 10 special sales outlets in the Chinthamani branches at Puthur and Teppakulam in the city and Manapparai and Kulithalai towns to sell popular brands of fireworks.
Software giant Microsoft is investigating why some Windows machines automatically updated themselves and rebooted following last week’s Patch Tuesday. As first reported on Windows user group AeroXperience, last week the automatic updates feature caused some Windows machines to reboot. Users complained to Microsoft that their machines had downloaded and installed updates they did not consent to.
Corporate storage systems and networks are an attractive target for hackers looking to steal sensitive data or launch computer attacks, Alan Lustiger, security architect at TD Ameritrade Inc., told an audience at Computerworld’s Storage Networking World user conference here yesterday. In particular, he warned IT executives that network-attached storage (NAS) systems are a most attractive entry point for hackers. “The easiest storage technology to hack is clearly NAS,” Lustiger said. “NAS is virtually indistinguishable to a file system from a hacker perspective; this is a well-developed and well-known means of attack.”
All too often, IT shops realize their weaknesses only after they’ve been hacked. Fortunately, Core Security Technologies has a solution: Hack yourself before others do. The company on Tuesday introduced Core Impact v7.5, the latest version of its security analysis and testing tool. The update adds new features that let users attempt to breach themselves to see how far the rabbit hole goes.
One in two UK organisations are ill-equipped to deal with natural disasters, computer system failures and external threats, new figures from Symantec show. According to the study, 91 per cent of IT companies carry out full scenario testing of their disaster recovery plans, yet nearly half of those tests fail.
The personal details of nearly 4,000 US citizens – including commercial truck drivers who transport hazardous materials – were on two laptops stolen from a third-party contractor working with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) in the US. The laptops contain the names, addresses, birthdays, commercial driver’s license numbers and, in some cases, the Social Security numbers, of 3,930 people, according to an Associated Press report.
The owners of the Storm botnet, whose identities are as yet unknown, could be preparing to sell off the “services” of segments of the network, according to Joe Stewart, a researcher from managed security services company SecureWorks. Stewart claimed in a blog post on Sunday that the latest Storm variants now use a 40-byte key to encrypt their peer-to-peer traffic, meaning each node will only be able to communicate with nodes that use the same key.
Some people just have no idea what they are doing. Here we go again â this is another case of overzealous security that can seriously end up in hurting the ones who should be protected!
General Motors is going to come up with a system to make car thefts history⌠at least in their opinion! The technology is called Stolen Vehicle Slowdown and itâs used, as you might have imagined, to slow down cars. So, basically, should the Police be chasing a stolen vehicle, or a speeding one, they could call GM and ask for them to remotely shut down the engine. Now, surely this would help the Police a lot, but letâs think what else could happen.