Security

On Tuesday, January 8 Adam Dabrowski, 14, managed to turn the tram system in the town of Lodz, Poland into his own plaything. Dabrowski was able to rig a TV remote control to change track points causing trams to veer in unintended directions. The ... problems became apparent when one of the operators tried steering his train to the right only to find it veering out of control in the opposite direction, jumping the track and crashing into an oncoming tram. Four vehicles were derailed during Dabrowski's stint at the helm, with twelve people injured. (Source: metro.co.uk ) It didn't take police long ... (view more)

If you visited Sears.com or Kmart.com and agreed to join their "online community," you may have installed spyware without your knowledge. Late last year, Sears.com and Kmart.com reportedly began asking users if they wanted to participate in a ... "community" online -- presumably a community made up of Sears and Kmart partners. In late December, security researcher Benjamin Googins of Computer Associates noticed that the "community" actually installed software from comScore, a market research firm, in order to track the web activities of the site's visitors. Googins noted on his company' ... (view more)

Think CNN and the major network news agencies are the only ones quick to jump on breaking international events? Think again. Only hours after the tragic announcement of the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, malware ... creators had already crafted an exploit to take advantage of curious web users. A number of security companies are reporting the widespread exploit, including McAfee, Symantec, and WebSense. According to this group, at least ten sites on Blogger.com (Google's primary blog service) were, as of the day of Bhutto's assassination, spreading a fake video ... (view more)

Has the Storm Worm passed? According to reports over the last few months, the danger has been minimized. And yet, some hackers still believe they can have a real impact with what was arguably the most popular bug of 2007. A recent Christmas-inspired ... version has been released and is reportedly bringing Storm back to its original potency. Since its debut almost a year ago, the Storm Worm -- which initially created headaches for IT employees, Internet providers, web site owners, and the average surfer alike -- appears to have been downgraded significantly. Like a hurricane passing over land, the ... (view more)

Hundreds of thousands of users on Google's social networking site have had their computers infected by a 'worm' virus. One source reports 400,000 computers fell victim, while another puts the figure at over 700,000. The attack took place in the ... Portuguese language, likely because the Orkut site is particularly popular in Brazil. The virus took advantage of a loophole in the site's scrapbook feature to post a JavaScript code on users' personal pages. JavaScript is a type of computer code commonly used to make websites interactive. The code then sent copies of itself to a user and his or her ... (view more)

A cryptographically flawed pseudo random number generator is reportedly being added to the upcoming Windows Vista Service Pack 1, raising concerns about a new random-number standard that includes a slow, badly designed algorithm containing a ... backdoor for the National Security Agency (NSA). Cryptographers Dan Shumow and Niels Ferguson wrote a yp.to (PDF) that revealed flaws in Dual_EC_DRBG standard at the Crypto 2007 conference this past August. Dual_EC_DRBG is one of four approved random number generators that's three times slower than the others. The design is based on the mathematics of ... (view more)

On Sunday, Iranian police shut down 24 Internet Cafes and arrested 23 people, including 12 men and 11 women. According to Tehran's police agency, more than 400 establishments were inspected and approximately 170 warnings were handed out the day ... before the crackdown began. (Source: newswire.ca ) "Using immoral computer games, storing obscene photos...and the presence of women wearing improper hijab were among the reasons why [the Internet cafes] have been closed down," said provincial police commander Colonel Nader Sarkari. (Source: reuters.com ) The move is part of a larger effort ... (view more)

Scary: A recent survey sponsored by Deloitte ... (view more)

The rise of online video sites could cause major problems for the Internet as a whole, according to researchers. The amount of traffic on the web is increasing much quicker than its capacity. Brett Swanson of the Discover Institute says this is most ... likely to affect the 'edges' of the Internet, the final mile or so of cabling between telephone exchanges and peoples homes. He has coined the phrase 'exaflood', which refers to an exabyte, or one thousand million gigabytes of date. Until recently, an exabyte had simply been a mathematical concept, but Cisco estimates total Internet traffic will ... (view more)

Scared about holiday spam and spyware messages? Although it's some ways off, Symantec is now just a few weeks away from shipping a test edition of its next significant update to the Norton 360 security/backup formula. The finished product is ... expected to wrap up early this spring, shipping by the time March wraps up. So, what's under the hood of this new Norton 360 (for now dubbed 'version 2.0)? Preventative measures against Internet hackers and identity thieves A "Smart Firewall" that reportedly uses behavior-based methods to weed out incoming threats New software that can be used to back up ... (view more)