Who Killed My Hard Drive?

Tuesday, May 6th, 2008

You've heard the threat before: A virus or Trojan could infect your PCs and wreck their hard drives. But how often does it really happen -- and how bad is the damage? A new university study suggests that hard-drive-killing attacks launched by hackers are actually pretty rare -- but when they ...

Sandman - Read the Windows Hibernation File

Monday, May 5th, 2008

This is a pretty new tool and a very cool one, Hibernation is a fairly new feature for Windows so it’s good to see a new tool targeting that. Microsoft provides a feature called Hibernation also know as suspend to disk that aims to save the system state into an undocumented ...

Safest Way to Bank Online? Your Cell Phone

Monday, May 5th, 2008

So you want to bank safely online? Then ditch your computer and make the transaction via your cell phone instead. Using a mobile handset for this most sensitive online act might sound counterintuitive, given that phones are prone to being lost or stolen, but your cell phone might actually be safer ...

IronKey Unveils 8GB Version of Secure USB Drive

Friday, May 2nd, 2008

IronKey Inc., maker of the world's most secure flash drive, announced today availability of the 8GB-capacity of its IronKey secure USB devices. IronKey brings unprecedented mobile data convenience and security to individuals and organizations with its rugged, waterproof and tamper resistant USB drives that include always-on hardware encryption, strong authentication, portable ...

Microsoft Gives Vista Backdoor Keys To The Police

Tuesday, April 29th, 2008

It's long been assumed that Microsoft has built in various "backdoors" for law enforcement to get around its own security, but now reader Kevin Stapp writes in to let us know that the company has also been literally handing out the keys to law enforcement. Apparently, they're giving out special ...

Microsoft offers assistance to combat mass SQL injection

Monday, April 28th, 2008

Microsoft has provided security advice to web developers using its products after many such sites were compromised. Last week, hundreds of thousands of web pages were infected with a malicious iframe which tries to infect visitors with a trojan. Many high profile sites including the United Nations (un.org), the UK ...

Hackers Focus Efforts on Firefox, Safari

Sunday, April 27th, 2008

Many people are switching from Internet Explorer to alternative browsers such as Firefox and Safari. Though that might make them feel more secure, the shift has also opened new doors for bad guys. Case in point: We have no IE bugs to report this month, but both Firefox and Safari have ...

Lateral SQL Injection

Saturday, April 26th, 2008

How can an attacker exploit a PL/SQL procedure that doesn’t even take user input? Or how does one do SQL injection using DATE or even NUMBER data types? In the past this has not been possible but as this paper will demonstrate, with a little bit of trickery, you can ...

WordPress 2.5 Cookie Forging Explained

Saturday, April 26th, 2008

WordPress 2.5.1 came out recently. It includes a critical security fix for a cookie integrity bug that would allow an attacker to impersonate other users, including WordPress admins, by manipulating the contents of an HTTP cookie. Whenever I read about a vulnerability predicated on the user identity being embedded ...

QuickTime 0day for Vista and XP

Friday, April 25th, 2008

A remote vulnerability exists in the QuickTime player for Windows XP and Vista (latest service packs). Other versions are believed to be affected as well. For now, no details will be released regarding the method of exploitation. Because we are an information security think tank and because we encounter some very ...