Weekly News
Hi all. This is the new way news posts will be done, please leave any constructive feedback you like.
The malware challenge begins tomorrow.
Starting from October 1, 2008 and ending October 26, 2008 we will be running a malware analysis challenge at http://www.malwarechallenge.info. In the challenge participants will download a malware sample to analyze. The site will have a list of questions for participants to answer and send in. We will judge the answers and those scoring the highest will win prizes.
We have some great prizes donated by some very cool companies. To only name some, Hex-Rays is donating a copy of IDA Pro and No Starch Press is donating a copy of Chris Eagle's IDA Pro book. Addison-Wesley and KoreLogic Security are also donating prizes (yet to be announced).
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PCMag's top 10 most mysterious cyber-crimes.
The most nefarious and crafty criminals are the ones who operate completely under the radar. In the computing world security breaches happen all the time, and in the best cases the offenders get tracked down by the FBI or some other law enforcement agency.
But it's the ones who go uncaught and unidentified. Attempting to cover your tracks is Law-Breaking 101; being able to effectively do so, that's another story altogether.
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Nevada to require all email containing personally identifiable information to be encrypted from October 1.
On Oct. 1, the state of Nevada will be requiring the encryption of all transmissions, such as e-mail, for all businesses that send personal, identifiable information over the Internet. The statute was signed into law in 2005 and is about to kick in as an enforceable law next month. Three years flies when you're raking in chips at casinos and enjoying the rising popularity of poker.
The Nevada law is stated as such:
NRS 597.970 Restrictions on transfer of personal information through electronic transmission. [Effective October 1, 2008.]
1. A business in this State shall not transfer any personal information of a customer through an electronic transmission other than a facsimile to a person outside of the secure system of the business unless the business uses encryption to ensure the security of electronic transmission.
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The seven deadliest social networking hacks according to Dark Reading, as though we needed another reason to stay away from it.
It started with a stolen Facebook photo attached to an inflammatory profile. It led to online harassment, death threats, and emails to the victim’s boss questioning the victim’s character. But an online personal attack against Graham Cluley earlier this year is one example of how easy it is to use a social network to damage the identity of an individual -- or an entire company.
Cluley’s case shows just how rapidly social networks can spread a smear campaign or personal attack -- and how it can quickly spread to the victim’s professional life. Cluley, who is a senior technology consultant with Sophos, recently met another victim who experienced a similar attack on Facebook, Kerry Harvey. He says it was apparently an acquaintance of Harvey’s who built a phony Kerry Harvey Facebook profile that branded her occupation as a “prostitute,” complete with her cellphone number. (See ID Theft Victim Branded a 'Prostitute' .)
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New York offers "enhanced" drivers license containing RFID chip, permitting travel to Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean without a passport.
You can now get an enhanced New York State driver license that will allow you to travel by land and sea to Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean without a passport.
The only obvious differences on the new Enhanced Driver License (EDL) are the word "enhanced," an American flag, and a heart for organ donors.
Inside the new license is a radio frequency identification (or RFID) chip.
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The DHS is in the testing phase of a system to detect "hostile thoughts" at border security checkpoints. Yet another reason to avoid US travel it would seem.
Project Hostile Intent as it was called aimed to help security staff choose who to pull over for a gently probing interview - or more.
Commentators slated the idea that sensors could spot people up to no good from their pulse rate, breathing, skin temperature, or fleeting facial expressions. One likened it to the "pre-crime" units that predict criminal behaviour in the movie Minority Report.
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Yahoo's Zimbra email client is sending passwords in plaintext.
Passwords used to access Yahoo mail through the Zimbra client are sent over the Internet in clear text, a Canadian programmer says.
Holden Karau stumbled upon this problem while participating in the Yahoo University Hack Day at the University of Waterloo last week.
"The Yahoo imap server's used by the Yahoo Desktop don't support SSL and the password was being transmitted in plain text," Karau wrote in a blog post on Friday.
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A UCLA group has found the 46th Mersenne prime comprised of 13 million digits.
Mathematicians at UCLA have discovered a 13 million-digit prime number, a long-sought milestone that makes them eligible for a $100,000 prize.
The group found the 46th known Mersenne prime last month on a network of 75 computers running Windows XP. The number was verified by a different computer system running a different algorithm.
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Microsoft and Nokia will be including jQuery in the next version of their development environments.
Could Microsoft be learning the way things work on the web? That big software company in Redmond will include JavaScript framework jQuery in its development environment. At the same time, Nokia announced that it will use jQuery for its mobile-browser development. That’s two more big companies to join Google, Amazon and thousands of other sites using jQuery.
Microsoft has long struggled to keep up with advances in JavaScript. In July the company announced an Ajax roadmap, which looked like Microsoft was going to eventually re-create all the features already in popular frameworks. Instead, Microsoft is going to incorporate someone else’s code, and it’s open source code at that.
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