The Network Security. Org

What if you wanted to build your own botnet to act as a spam relay or to launch a denial-of-service attack against an organization or a country? "It’s actually a lot of work," says Joe Stewart, director of malware research at SecureWorks.

[Read more →]

The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) has attracted renewed interest lately, but not in a good way: The bad guys are now using the ‘70s disco-era file transfer technology to serve up bot malware, and even as a backdoor into some enterprises that neglect to lock down their FTP servers.

[Read more →]

One of the adages of computing is that no hardware is safe when a hacker has physical access to the machine. In an age of booming laptop sales, people haven’t found that reassuring and have frequently turned to disk encryption in an effort to protect their personal data.

[Read more →]

One of Harvard University’s Web sites appeared on Monday to have been hacked, with its contents appearing on the BitTorrent file-sharing network. A compressed 125 M-byte file claiming to be the database for the Web site of Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences is available via the BitTorrent P-to-P (peer to peer) network.

[Read more →]

Computer users are becoming increasingly pessimistic about the Mac’s ability to sustain its mostly malware-free existence. Sophos, a computer security company, surveyed 355 computer users, asking them whether they believed Apple’s Macintosh computers will be targeted more frequently by malware in the future.

[Read more →]

The industry is just one multi-million-dollar corporate data breach away from waking up to the serious and often-silent threat of corrupted DNS resolution servers, says DNS inventor Paul Mockapetris.

[Read more →]

Researchers have built a prototype authentication technique that could ultimately reduce the risk of attackers hacking users’ credentials via a keylogger or spyware.

[Read more →]

Now the bad guys have discovered a way to set up a stealthy, continuous connection between the machines they infect and their own command and control servers. Researchers with the Honeynet Project have been studying a new method being used by botnet operators and other cyber criminals that sets up what’s called a "reverse tunnel [...]

[Read more →]

Referring to the malware known as “random js toolkit,” Andrew Storms, director of security operations for nCircle Network Security, said, “While a blacklist may help some users… it’s no substitute for a good set of layered defenses… Security managers need to take a more active role in using management tools.

[Read more →]

Blackjack, a hacker working from an internet cafe in London, is about to launch an attack on a major government agency. His aim is to cause maximum disruption and embarrassment. And, according to security experts, his job is going to be worryingly easy.

[Read more →]