Lisa Vaas

I had just finished writing up this story of a European country with a defense agency site that’s got its database dangling out for all the world to play with, when Exploit Prevention Labs Chief Technology Officer Roger Thompson pointed to about a dozen poisoned government sites that are hosting pages serving malware and porn. […]

Microsoft is planning to release five security bulletins on Septembers Patch Tuesday. While only one—a vulnerability in Windows—is deemed critical, three of the advisories address vulnerabilities that can lead to system takeover: the Windows flaw, flaws in MSN Messenger and Windows Live Messenger, and holes in Visual Studio. The IM client vulnerability in particular should […]

No -Defense Department”> On July 18, Sunbelt Software came across a SQL command passed as a query within a URL belonging to an arm of a European countrys military. With that, any visitor can pass queries in the URL straight to the back-end database and squeeze out any data, no password required. At the time, […]

Before you rush out to snag one of those new iPods or cheaper iPhones, update your iTunes, because its got a buffer overflow that could let some nasty music file “pwn” your toy. Apple on Sept. 6 put out an update, iTunes 7.4, that deals with the buffer overflow, which occurs when processing album cover […]

Online networking site Quechup.com is infuriating would-be members by e-mailing their contacts without permission, turning the unwary into unintentional spammers. “I inadvertently invited everyone in my Gmail contact [list] to join a lousy social network called Quechup,” reads one apologetic message from a typically chagrined ex-Quechup member. “Please ignore that and please accept my apologies.” […]

China can keep on denying that its Peoples Liberation Army is responsible for infiltrating government networks, but good luck denying that its pumping out the most malware on the planet. Sophos nailed China as the top junk-spewer back in its July 2007 Sophos Threat Report. In the report, Sophos said that China servers are behind […]

In a routine thats become as regular as the waxing moon, China has once again denounced charges that the Peoples Liberation Army has been engaged in hostile hacking of government sites—in this case, a Pentagon network—calling the charges “wild accusations” that smack of Cold War mentality. “The Chinese government has all along [been] opposed to […]

A network of infected zombie computers has been roped into acting as vectors in a new distributed attack thats targeting eBay accounts. The attack, which is trying to wrestle personal financial data out of eBay accounts by brute force, has been going on for at least a week, officials at Aladdin Knowledge Systems told eWEEK. […]

Attackers can nail Apples AirPort Extreme wireless routers thanks to—yet again—the way the IPv6 protocol handles Type 0 routing headers. Its long been known these routing headers can be used in IPv4 to crazily bounce network packets back and forth between hops on their route, potentially causing denial of service. The fact that they can […]

Microsoft lawyers have shut down a free, popular patch download utility thats been dispensing patches to its systems users for four years now. “I had a call from Microsoft Legal this morning and they have told me that we are no longer allowed to endorse AutoPatcher on Neowin,” said Steven Parker in a posting to […]

McAfee Lauds Microsofts Vista SP1 Security Overhaul “> Back in the fall of 2006, McAfee, Symantec and Check Point fumed as Microsoft Vistas Security Center hid their products where only sophisticated and dedicated customers could dig them out. Not only that, Microsoft in effect hid its x64 kernel as well, putting it beyond the reach […]

Sony appears to be reliving its rootkit nightmare of 2005, when it had to yank its XCP digital rights management technology after security experts said the technology used malicious rootkit techniques to evade detection on Windows systems. This time, three Sony USB fingerprint devices are planting hidden files for two separate rootkitlike programs, according to […]