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Security

Submission + - Time Bomb May Have Destroyed 800 Norfolk City PCs (krebsonsecurity.com)

Submitted by krebsonsecurity
krebsonsecurity writes: The City of Norfolk, Virginia is reeling from a massive computer meltdown in which an unidentified family of malicious code destroyed data on nearly 800 computers citywide. The incident is still under investigation, but city officials say the attack may have been the result of a computer time bomb planted in advance by an insider or employee and designed to trigger at a specific date, according to krebsonsecurity.com. "We don't believe it came in from the Internet. We don't know how it got into our system," the city's IT director said. "We speculate it could have been a time bomb waiting until a date or time to trigger. Whatever it was, it essentially destroyed these machines.
Security

Submission + - Texas Bank Sues Customer in $800,000 Cyber Heist (krebsonsecurity.com)

Submitted by krebsonsecurity
krebsonsecurity writes: A machine equipment company in Texas is tussling with its bank after organized crooks swiped more than $800,000 in a 48-hour cyber heist late last year. While many companies similarly victimized over the past year have sued their banks for having inadequate security protection, this case is unusual because the bank is preemptively suing the victim. From the story: "PlainsCapital sued Hillary on Dec. 31, 2009, citing a letter from Hillary Machinery that demanded repayment for the rest of the money and alleged that the bank failed to employ commercially reasonable security measures." The story notes that the bank's idea of multi-factor authentication was sending the customer an email with a random code if the bank's site didn't recognize the customer's IP address, but of course this method assumes the criminals don't already control the victim's PC. Internal bank memos show dozens of transactions were initiated from computers in Romania and Italy, among others, and sent to accounts in Ukraine, Russia and other Eastern European nations.
Google

Submission + - Google proposes DNS extension (blogspot.com) 1

Submitted by ElusiveJoe
ElusiveJoe writes: Google along with a group of DNS and content providers hope to alter the DNS protocol. Currently, a DNS request can be sent to a recursive DNS server, which would send out requests to other DNS servers from its own IP address, thus acting somewhat similar to a proxy server. The proposed modification would allow authoritative nameservers to expose your IP address (instead of an address of your ISP's DNS server, for example) in order to "load balance traffic and send users to a nearby server." Or it would allow any interested party to look at your DNS requests. Or it would send a user from Iran or Libya to a "domain name doesn't exist" server.
The Courts

Submission + - Seinfeld's Good Samaritan law now reality? (fresnobee.com) 1

Submitted by e3m4n
e3m4n writes: The fictitious 'good samaritan' law from the final episode of Seinfeld (the one that landed them in jail for 1 year) appears to be headed toward reality for California residents after the house passed this bill. There are some differences, such as direct action is not required, but the concept of guilt by association for not doing the right thing is still on the face of the bill.
Government

Submission + - US Congressional websites defaced-Joomla to blame? (praetorianprefect.com) 1

Submitted by garg0yle
garg0yle writes: A number of websites for US congresspersons in the house.gov domain were defaced after last night's "State of the Union" address by the Red Eye crew. All of the affected sites appear to have been running Joomla, suggesting that flaws within that software may have been used in the attack.
Security

Submission + - Insecure Plugins Ding IE, Safari, Chrome, Opera (krebsonsecurity.com)

Submitted by krebsonsecurity
krebsonsecurity writes: The Web browser wars often focus on which browser is more secure, but the dirty secret is that insecure plugins are a serious threat to all browsers, both from a stability and security perspective. Krebsonsecurity.com features an interestingly look at the administration page for a popular browser exploit kit called Eleonora, which suggests that plugins like Adobe Reader and Java are leading to successful compromises for users surfing not just with Internet Explorer, but also Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera.

Submission + - Stanford researchers make fabric batteries

Submitted by TheBobJob
TheBobJob writes: According to a BBC news article, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8471362.stm researchers from Standford University have published details on their carbon nanotube dye for making batteries on fabric. The article goes on to explain the application for this tech in wearable electronics. After the stories of late of exploding batteries I'm not sure this is a great idea, but it is a cool achievement none the less.

Submission + - The best way to test your site in every browser (pcpro.co.uk)

Submitted by Barence
Barence writes: Testing that your website works across all browser versions on all operating systems is still a major pain largely because most browsers don’t let you run multiple versions on the same machine. PC Pro blogger Tom Arah has been testing various services that allow you to see how your site looks in all the major browsers. Microsoft seriously hyped its SuperPreview utility when it launched Expression Web 3, largely because it was about the only new feature of note that stood out compared to Dreamweaver CS4. Alternatively, there's the free preview of Adobe’s BrowserLab. Rather than running on your own system, BrowserLab runs in the cloud which has huge benefits – in particular it means that you get access to all major versions of all major browsers running on both Windows and Mac and you don’t need to install anything beyond your own preferred browser.
Cellphones

Submission + - Nexus One automatically sensors curse words 1

Submitted by adeelarshad82
adeelarshad82 writes: One of the most innovative features of Google's new Nexus One is the built-in voice recognition. But there's one major limitation to it. While uttering a curse word into the Nexus One, the smartphone will replace the curse word automatically with a string of # symbols. While perhaps not as politically charged as Google's censorship of Internet search results in China, this censorship has more to do with precautionary measures.
Security

Submission + - Firm to Drop 0day in Database, Web Server Apps (krebsonsecurity.com)

Submitted by krebsonsecurity
krebsonsecurity writes: January promises to be a busy month for Web server and database administrators alike: A security research firm in Russia says it plans to release information about a slew of previously undocumented vulnerabilities in several widely-used commercial software products, including Mysql, Tivoli, IBM DB2, Sun Directory, and a host of others, writes krebsonsecurity.com. From the blog: “After working with the vendors long enough, we’ve come to conclusion that, to put it simply, it is a waste of time. Now, we do not contact with vendors and do not support so-called ‘responsible disclosure’ policy,” Legerov said.
Censorship

Submission + - Google Censoring (foxnews.com)

Submitted by phazlett
phazlett writes: Type a few words into the search field on Google's home page and the engine automatically returns a helpful list of popular, similar searches for the words you've typed in so far — a convenient way to find the right information.

Enter "Christianity is" and you'll find results that, while offensive, at least indicate common discussions on the Internet. Likewise, type "Judaism is" and Google suggests other, potentially offensive searches such as "Judaism is false" and "Judaism is not a race."

But type "Islam is" into the search engine and Google's auto-results pane mysteriously vanishes, leading some to conclude that Google, whose mantra is "don't be evil," is censoring its search results.

A Google spokesman explained that the weird absence of results is just a software problem: "This is in fact a bug and we're working to fix it as quickly as we can." But the company would not respond to requests for clarification.

Submission + - Dazzboard 2.0 manages your Android apps

Submitted by JontteG
JontteG writes: The new version of Dazzboard, the universal web-based media manager, allows easy media transfer between mobile devices and social networks such as Facebook, Flickr and YouTube. V2 also features an application manager for Android mobiles. Dazzboard is free and doesn't require registration. Give it a try: http://dazzboard.com/

Submission + - CES Kicks Out Vendors doing Business in Hotels (dailytech.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: DailyTech reports that a number of companies with tiny budgets who resorted to the survival tactic of showing their new gear at hotel suites around Vegas during CES were kicked out of hotel rooms they paid for by CES's organizers. According to our sources as many as 30 small electronics companies may have been kicked out of The Venetian and The Palazzo on Thursday.

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