attacks

An international report says that the term "cyber war" overstates the genuine security risks that national governments face in the online age. It goes on to note that officials need to plan for accidental incidents as well as attacks. The report, ... from the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, says that comparing online attacks to an armed military conflict exaggerates the potential effects. It also argues that a financial crisis or a health pandemic would also be much more serious than cyber attacks. The key finding of the report is that most forms of attack against ... (view more)

Microsoft has revealed that hackers have attempted to exploit a bug in Microsoft Word. The bug was fixed in a security update last month, but the company is also concerned that some users may not have installed the update. The bug involves the way ... MS Word handles rich text format (.RTF) files. This is a format used for text documents that have a very limited degree of formatting information compared to full-blown MS Word documents. The format is most commonly used as a way of moving documents from one word processor to another without altering the text's formatting. RTF Flaw Causes Memory ... (view more)

Internet activists that stand behind " Operation Payback " have waged war on corporations deemed enemies of the Wikileaks web site, the non-profit organization that publishes otherwise unavailable documents from anonymous news sources and leaks. ... Distributed Denial of Service Attacks Flood Targets What began as a vengeful campaign intended to target opponents of Internet piracy, Operation Payback utilizes distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against their enemies. In short, a DDoS attack occurs when many computers band together to flood a target computer (usually a web server) with ... (view more)

Amazon Web Services (AWS) earlier this month pulled the plug on the WikiLeaks web site, forcing the latter to find a new web hosting company. WikiLeaks is amid controversy after the site began releasing a mammoth collection of confidential U.S. ... State Department diplomatic cables. According to Computerworld, "WikiLeaks is now hosted by a Swedish firm, Bahnhof Internet AB, which is headquartered in Uppsala, a city approximately 44 miles north of Stockholm." (Source: computerworld.com ) In response, activists calling themselves "Anonymous" who support the WikiLeaks cause have ... (view more)

Microsoft says more than 10,000 computers have been attacked through a bug in the Windows XP help system. Strangely, it has resisted criticizing the security researcher who publicized the security flaw. The bug involves the way XP directs web ... browsers towards help pages, having first checked the page against a "whitelist" to make sure it is legitimate. It's possible for hackers to exploit the flaw by fooling the computer during this checking process. The result is that the browser can be relocated to a page containing malicious software. Microsoft hasn't yet found a permanent solution to the ... (view more)

After weeks of speculation, Microsoft has confirmed that it will release an emergency patch fix for a critical zero-day flaw in its Internet Explorer web browser. The patch, which applies to attacks targeting Internet Explorer (IE) 6 and IE7, will ... be released later today. Emergency patches are relatively rare for Microsoft, which typically only releases its fixes on the second Tuesday of every month. However, the March Patch Tuesday was a light affair , owing to the fact that the zero-day issue being addressed today had only recently been revealed. Windows XP and Vista Users Vulnerable It's ... (view more)

According to reports, Google and the National Security Agency (NSA) are teaming up in the name of cyber security. Under the agreement, the NSA would help Google defend against attacks like the one that targeted the search company (along with Adobe ... and several other firms) from China several weeks ago . Google announced publicly that their systems had been hacked beginning in December . The Google intrusions targeted Google source code and extended to more than 30 other large tech, defense, energy, financial and media companies. Gmail accounts of human rights activists in Europe, China and the ... (view more)

In the past, Russia and America were rivals. But now, it appears that that two are joining forces to fight a common foe, with hopes of tightening Internet security for the near and distant future. Insiders are calling the talks a new-age Geneva, ... akin to the nuclear arms discussions of an older generation. The purpose of these new meetings is to reduce the number of hacker attacks on major institutions, including government agencies, banks, businesses, and the military. According to reports, it's believed a common policy on cyber security will help reduce the number of these attacks, some of ... (view more)

It seems as if the massive phishing campaign reported yesterday was not specific to Hotmail.com as was initially believed. According to a report by the BBC, many Gmail and Yahoo Mail accounts have also been compromised. (Source: computerworld.com ) ... While the source of the latest attacks has not been determined, many are pointing to the same bug that claimed at least 10,000 passwords from Microsoft Windows Live Hotmail. Microsoft, Google Prompt Password Reset Microsoft has done their part in blocking all known hijacked Hotmail accounts and created tools to help users who had lost control of ... (view more)

Microsoft is in some serious trouble after sources confirmed that the company had known about the recent IE6 and IE7 virus attacks (also known as the infamous " browse and get owned " attacks) for more than a year. Hackers have been exploiting a ... vulnerability in ActiveX by enticing innocent users to click on infected web pages while planting "drive-by" attack codes within legitimate sites. According to ScanSafe, the number of compromised sites has entered into the millions since the attacks first began. Attacks Predicted One Year in Advance If the viruses and malware weren't bad enough, Mike ... (view more)