Victor Fors - Slashdot User

Comment Iv'e played with a few of these. (Score 4, Informative) 55

by Victor Fors on Sunday December 31, 2006 @06:59PM (#17418588) Attached to: Review of 12 Vulnerability Scanners

Granted, i don't consider myself to be in a proper position to write a review of them. However, a few points:

* Most of these are completely outdated, and easily miss newer security holes. (maybe apart from CORE, which is a commercial and expensive scanner).
* They are loud and noisy, and due to using well-known shellcode and attack patterns extremely prone to setting off IDS systems.
* They are, in comparison to Nmap + version scan + personal archive of public exploits, very slow.

Simply spidering public exploits off archive sites (milw0rm, packetstorm, etc...) and using custom shellcode (even without using tricks like polymorphism) would in my opinion result in much, much higher efficiency compared to using any of these programs.

Cyber Crime Hits Big Time This Year 97

Posted by Zonk on Saturday December 23, 2006 @09:55PM from the too-many-bored-people dept.

An anonymous reader writes to point out the Washington Post's analysis of this year's spike in junk email and online attacks, such as botnets and worms. Image-embedded spam emails made up an amazing percentage of all messages sent in the months of October and November, and something like four million bots are actively adding to that total. These botnets are also increasingly connected to organized crime, as are 'independent' hacker groups. The article goes on for three pages, and doesn't have a lot of hope that 2007 will look a whole lot better. From the article: "Experts worry that businesses will be slow to switch to the [Windows Vista]. And even if consumers rush to upgrade exiting machines or purchase new ones that include Vista, Microsoft will continue to battle security holes in legacy versions of Microsoft Office, which are expected to remain in widespread use for the next 5-10 years."

Lawsuits That Changed the Games Industry 54

Posted by Zonk on Wednesday December 20, 2006 @05:26PM from the case-of-mario-v.-kong dept.

Gamasutra has up a piece looking at litigation that changed the way the games industry works. Deep, interesting questions like "Is modding legal?", "Are games covered by the 1st amendment?", and "Are games protected by copyright laws?" have all been decided in legal cases within the last 20 years. The site explores these issues, and ponders issues that are likely to affect the business of the games hobby in the future. From the article: "A variety of laws have been put forth by state legislature to act toward censoring game content or controlling the sale of games. As a rule, be immediately suspicious of any legislation proposed in the name of 'security' or 'protecting our children.' The result is often a jumbo size bite taken out of artistic expression and individual liberty. To date, the ESA has fought and won nine out of nine cases on these issues, having the state laws declared unconstitutional. Furthermore, the ESA has sought and won more than $1.5 million dollars in attorneys fees."

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