Five free pen-testing tools

Tuesday, May 27th, 2008

Security assessment and deep testing don't require a big budget. Some of most effective security tools are free, and are commonly used by professional consultants, private industry and government security practitioners. Here are a few to start with.For scanning in the first steps of a security assessment or pen test, ...

Critical holes in Trillian Instant Messenger

Thursday, May 22nd, 2008

Security service Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) has found three critical vulnerabilities that allow attackers to infect the computers of Trillian Instant Messenger users with malicious code. The vendor has responded by releasing an update to close the holes. When processing XML through functions of the talk.dll dynamic link library, malformed ...

Permanent Denial-of-Service Attack Sabotages Hardware

Tuesday, May 20th, 2008

You don’t have to take an ax to a piece of hardware to perform a so-called permanent denial-of-service (PDOS) attack. A researcher this week will demonstrate a PDOS attack that can take place remotely.A PDOS attack damages a system so badly that it requires replacement or reinstallation of hardware. Unlike ...

Tomorrow’s Malware

Tuesday, May 20th, 2008

My favorite tech quote is from Giorgio Maone. It goes like this: If today’s malware mostly runs on Windows because it’s the commonest executable platform, tomorrow’s will likely run on the Web, for the very same reason. Because, like it or not, Web is already a huge executable platform, and ...

Cisco alums readying firewall killer

Monday, May 19th, 2008

Five former Cisco engineers have co-founded a start-up called Rohati Systems whose products take dead aim at traditional perimeter firewalls. A traditional firewall and its access control lists "is not capable of doing its job today from an access-control perspective," says CEO and President Shane Buckley. "Nowadays, your ...