security

LAS VEGAS--After three days here--about as much time as any sane person should spend in this town--I bid adieu to Interop.

I heard that there were 21,000 people in town for the Interop conference. Judging by the hoard of people leaving the Mandalay Bay convention center yesterday (and headed for the saloon for a little geek speak), I believe it. My takeaways from the show are as follows:

• The buzzwords this year were network access control, wide-area network optimization and security. Security is a must-have. NAC is real and will go from concept to strategy in the next … Read more

If you've seen one too many reruns of the Thomas Crown Affair (the original version with Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway was far superior), and you're of the paranoid ilk like us, you may very well be tempted to try out something like this to protect your precious oils and water colors. The "Guard Alarm" aims to provide security for hanging artwork directly at the source, rather than wiring the room they're in.

It screws into the wall, serving essentially as a "smart" hook--if a painting is removed, it sounds a "piercing, … Read more

Heard the one about the Skype worm? Actually, users of the popular VoIP service Skype have been contending with misleading and dangerous URLs for some time. Like worms spread by MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger, various Skype worms have been known to include a message such as "Give me your opinion" followed by a URL. Clicking the link then installs several malicious files including versions of the Warezov/Stration Trojan horse. Stration has been known to open remote access on infected machines.

Now, Chris Boyd, Director of Malware Research at Facetime Security Labs, has found a recent Skype … Read more

Those of us who grew up in the Paleolithic period remember that scene at the opening of every Mission Impossible episode--the original TV show, not the movies--when the reel-to-reel tape self-destructs after conveying that week's orders. Ever since then, we've always been fascinated with gadgets that protect themselves independently.

There's a new phone out of China that doesn't self-destruct, but it does have a special feature that will prevent it from functioning if it falls into the wrong hands. Qiao Xing Mobile Communication's T100 has fingerprint recognition technology designed to ensure that thieves don't … Read more

A Michigan man who used a coffee shop's unsecured Wi-Fi to check his e-mail from his car could have faced up to five years in prison, according to local TV station WOOD. But it seems few in the village of Sparta, Mich., were aware that using an unsecured Wi-Fi connection without the owner's permission--a practice known as piggybacking--was a felony.

Each day around lunch time, Sam Peterson would drive to the Union Street Cafe, park his car and--without actually entering the coffee shop--check his e-mail and surf the Net. His ritual raised the suspicions of Police Chief Andrew … Read more

Every large Internet company has an online security team in place, and Google is no different. Now the search engine giant is going public. Yesterday, Google launched its new online security blog. The blog will post news on its little-known antimalware team, which, it turns out, has been in existence for about a year.

In its initial post, Google clarifies its now-famous one-in-10-Web-sites-are-malicious statement, derived from a presentation Niels Provos, Dean McNamee, Panayiotis Mavrommatis, Ke Wang, and Nagendra Modadugu gave at last month's Hotbots 2007. Provos says the figure that is quoted in the media should be 0.1 … Read more

Just a few days ago, Opera Software was singing the blues.

It turned out that unsavory attackers could craft malicious torrent files, which, in turn, could lead to a buffer overflow in Opera for Microsoft Windows users, according to Opera's security advisory.

And that's not a good thing.

These attackers could inject arbitrary code into users' systems, if they right clicked on a torrent entry in the transfer manager, resulting in a buffer overflow. Fortunately, for some, simply clicking on a torrent link would not trigger the vulnerability.

Opera, which was notified of the flaw on May 8 … Read more

Warning: disturbing a war memorial can provoke all out cyber war--at least in Estonia. On April 27, 2007, Estonia officials relocated the "Bronze Soldier," a Soviet-era war memorial commemorating an unknown Russian who died fighting the Nazis, a move that incited rioting by ethnic Russians and the blockading of the Estonian Embassy in Moscow. It also started a large and sustained distributed denial-of-service attack on several Estonian Web sites, including those of government ministries and the prime minister's Reform Party. A denial-of-service attack (DoS) occurs when someone directs a large number of requests to a target URL; … Read more

It's one of the most worn-out cliches of all action movies: the laser beam alarm system. But if they've been around for so long, why they haven't become household staples in today's security-obsessed society?

The latest example comes from Arizona-based company Ionatron and its "Portal Denial System" (sounds so RoboCop). Created for the U.S. government, it fires a stream of "laser-induced plasma" across any entryway, though SCI FI Tech says the operator has the option of making it lethal or "less lethal." Come to think of it, maybe it'… Read more