Archive for the ‘Internet’ Category

Mass File Injection Attack

Sunday, May 11th, 2008

We received a report from Mike this afternoon about a couple of URLs containing a malicious JavaScript that pulls down a file associated with Zlob.  If you do a google search for these two URLs, you get about 400,000 sites that have a call to this Javascript file included in ...

Reading EXIF data with Javascript

Sunday, May 11th, 2008

Inspired by a comment on Ajaxian, I killed another afternoon or two making a small library capable of reading EXIF data from JPEG images, figuring I would at least learn a bit about EXIF and the JPEG (and TIFF) image formats. Before we start, a small disclaimer. I'm somewhat of a ...

Gmail as a spam engine

Sunday, May 11th, 2008

This is not good. Researchers from INSERT found a vulnerability in the Gmail engine that could allow spammers to forward mail through Google, thereby bypassing blacklists and being accepted by whitelists. It works by using the same forwarding features that allow users, myself included, to forward their email through ...

Hackers Find a New Place to Hide Rootkits

Saturday, May 10th, 2008

Security researchers have developed a new type of malicious rootkit software that hides itself in an obscure part of a computer's microprocessor, hidden from current antivirus products. Called a System Management Mode (SMM) rootkit, the software runs in a protected part of a computer's memory that can be locked and rendered ...

Windows Vista More Vulnerable To Malware Than Windows 2000

Thursday, May 8th, 2008

Microsoft's Vista operating system is more susceptible to malware than Windows 2000, and though it's 37% more secure than Windows XP, it's still too vulnerable.That's the contention of security vendor PC Tools, which has a financial interest in the vulnerability of Microsoft's software. "Ironically, the new operating system has been hailed ...

Top Six Database Attacks

Thursday, May 8th, 2008

It takes the average attacker less than 10 seconds to hack in and out of a database -- hardly enough time for the database administrator even notice the intruder. So it’s no surprise that many database attacks go unnoticed by organizations until long after the data has been compromised. And surprisingly, ...

Firefox Plugin Shipped With Malicious Code

Wednesday, May 7th, 2008

Mozilla warned Wednesday that a malicious program inserted adware code into a Firefox plugin that has been downloaded thousands of times over the past three months. Because of a virus infection, the Vietnamese language pack for Firefox 2 was polluted with adware, Mozilla security chief Window Snyder said in a blog ...

SQL Injection Worm on the Loose

Wednesday, May 7th, 2008

A loyal ISC reader, Rob, wrote in to point us at what looks to be a SQL Injection worm that is on the loose.  From a quick google search it shows that there are about 4,000 websites infected and that this worm started at least mid-April if not earlier.  Right ...

Yahoo displays warnings about malware links

Wednesday, May 7th, 2008

Yahoo is to start flagging links to sites that may contain dangerous content. Google has been warning users if a potentially dangerous website is behind the link in the list of hits displayed for some time now. Yahoo is following suit by marking websites that could possibly infect visitors with ...

New Spam Attack Exploits Edunet Servers

Monday, May 5th, 2008

Researchers have discovered a new, complex spam attack that uses a sophisticated ruse to fool users into downloading malware. The exploit, which researchers at BitDefender call "a spam-sending scheme of Byzantine complexity," features spam messages that claim to contain links to videos. When users try to click and see the video, ...