Hackers find new crack in Windows

Saturday, December 20th, 2008

Microsoft Corp. rushed out an emergency patch Wednesday to fix a major security flaw in its Internet Explorer Web browser that has allowed hackers to infect millions of computers with viruses and steal personal information. So far, the vulnerability has not led to the widespread infections common a few years ago. ...

Unprotected computer rendered unusable in under two hours

Monday, December 1st, 2008

In just under two hours an unprotected computer was rendered unusable through online attacks in an experiment in Auckland today. The experiment was designed to show what a household with a computer put itself at risk of everyday, and was carried out by NetSafe and IBM. It was carried out to mark ...

Vulnerability discovered in SSH specification

Monday, November 17th, 2008

According to the UK-based Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure (CPNI), an error in the secure shell protocol (SSH) specification can in rare cases be exploited to reconstruct part of the plain text. According to their description of the error, the standard OpenSSH configuration allows 32 bits of plain ...

ActiveX poses threat to Vista, Microsoft says

Monday, November 10th, 2008

Windows Vista operating system is far better protected from attack code than Windows XP is. However, in a report issued last week, the company said that its own ActiveX plug-in technology is a significant threat to Vista. The latest of the company's twice-yearly security intelligence reports said that half of the ...

Once Thought Safe, WPA Wi-Fi Encryption Is Cracked

Friday, November 7th, 2008

Security researchers say they've developed a way to partially crack the Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) encryption standard used to protect data on many wireless networks. The attack, described as the first practical attack on WPA, will be discussed at the PacSec conference in Tokyo next week. There, researcher Erik Tews will ...