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Submission + - AntiVirus Firms Out of their League with Stuxnet, Flame 2

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Mikko Hypponen, Chief Research Officer of software security company F-Secure, writes that when his company heard about Flame, they went digging through their archive for related samples of malware and were surprised to find that they already had samples of Flame, dating back to 2010 and 2011, that they were unaware they possessed. "What this means is that all of us had missed detecting this malware for two years, or more. That’s a spectacular failure for our company, and for the antivirus industry in general." Why weren't Flame, Stuxnet, and Duqu detected earlier? The answer isn't encouraging for the future of cyberwar. All three were most likely developed by a Western intelligence agency as part of covert operations that weren’t meant to be discovered and the fact that the malware evaded detection proves how well the attackers did their job. In the case of Stuxnet and DuQu, they used digitally signed components to make their malware appear to be trustworthy applications and instead of trying to protect their code with custom packers and obfuscation engines — which might have drawn suspicion to them — they hid in plain sight. In the case of Flame, the attackers used SQLite, SSH, SSL and LUA libraries that made the code look more like a business database system than a piece of malware. "The truth is, consumer-grade antivirus products can’t protect against targeted malware created by well-resourced nation-states with bulging budgets," writes Hypponen adding that it’s highly likely there are other similar attacks already underway that we haven’t detected yet because simply put, attacks like these work. "Flame was a failure for the antivirus industry. We really should have been able to do better. But we didn’t. We were out of our league, in our own game.""
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Facebook Master Password Was "Chuck Norris" 319

Posted by samzenpus from the ad-nauseum-roundhouse dept.
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "A Facebook employee has given a tell-all interview with some very interesting things about Facebook's internals. Especially interesting are all the things relating to Facebook privacy. Basically, you don't have any. Nearly everything you've ever done on the site is recorded into a database. While they fire employees for snooping, more than a few have done it. There's an internal system to let them log into anyone's profile, though they have to be able to defend their reason for doing so. And they used to have a master password that could log into any Facebook profile: 'Chuck Norris.' Bruce Schneier might be jealous of that one."

Comment Brute Force ssh attacks from Amazon (Score 3, Interesting) 89

by peterthomas2009 (#30394214) Attached to: Hackers Find Home In Amazon EC2 Cloud
"This marks the first time Amazon Web Services' cloud infrastructure has been used for this type of illegal activity"

I posted to my blog back in June that Amazon cloud nodes were compromised and performing brute force SSH scans against some of my hosts.

This story and my post merely highlight the obvious fact that most cloud services are just scalable hosting. Remember your instance / slice / vm can be compromised like any other web host.

Amazon Cloud Service Brute Force Attacks

Comment Autowhaler = crowd sourcing? (Score 1) 137

by peterthomas2009 (#30361568) Attached to: Hackers vs. Phishers
Since the tool is not run locally you can only assume that all the submitted url's are going into someone's database.

That someone is going to collect a lot of hacked accounts very quickly.

Hackers vs Phishers vs Hosted Hacked account collection Service?

Comment It is significantly faster (Score 1, Informative) 73

by peterthomas2009 (#28724083) Attached to: Nmap 5.00 Released, With Many Improvements
I have just added the latest version to HackerTarget.com.

Across the board I am seeing significant speed improvements over 4.85.

Congratulations to the developers this looks like another quality release. I am looking forward to testing some of the new features to determine what additional capabilities can be added to our online scanning.

* Full disclosure - I run HackerTarget.com *
Security

Nmap 5.00 Released, With Many Improvements 73

Posted by timothy from the ok-now-release-another-nsfw-introduction dept.
iago-vL writes "The long-awaited Nmap Security Scanner version 5.00 was just released (download)! This marks the most important release since 1997, and is a huge step in Nmap's evolution from a simple port scanner to an all-around security and networking tool suite. Significant performance improvements were made, and dozens of scripts were added. For example, Nmap can now log into Windows and perform local checks (PDF), including Conficker detection. New tools included in 5.00 are Ncat, a modern reimplementation of Netcat (with IPv6, SSL, NAT traversal, port redirection, and more!), and Ndiff, for quickly comparing scan results. Other tools are in the works for future releases, but we're still waiting for them to add email and ftp clients so we can finally get off Emacs!"

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