Tag: internet
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Facebook worms have free reign
A new worm is spreading rapidly via Facebook. The cause is a problem disclosed weeks ago which Facebook seems unable to fix. As a result, there has been another wave of crafted status messages – this time they refer to a web page which allegedly presents the “101 hottest women in the world”. Those who…
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Adobe get’s hacked ( again )
It didn’t take long for someone to start exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities in Adobe’s software. In fact, having the the honour of designing the most hacked software on the planet, means that Adobe’s products are always going to be on the front-line of attacks. Since late Friday attackers have been exploiting a critical vulnerability in the…
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VP8 vs H264
Apparently the MPEG-LA forum, which manages a pool of patents relating to H.264, thinks that any implementation of video will be encompassed by one or more patents from its patent pool. Not only does this reek of megalomania, but it also shows just how far gone the US patent system had gone down hill. It…
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All root servers now offering DNSSEC
Verisign’s J root server was switched over to DNSSEC yesterday bringing the entire authoritative DNS system onto the new security platform. Alhough all the root servers are serving a signed version of the root zone, these are not yet able to be validated as the public key has not yet been disclosed. This allows the…
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Anti-virus – is there really any point?
Last weeks epic FAIL by Mcafee brings the entire Microsoft platform into perspective. It’s all broken: Symantec says that it has detected botnet infections on more than 1,100 separate computers spread across multiple subnets within the UK National Health Service (NHS) network Criminals are increasingly attempting to conceal malware embedded in hacked websites from search…
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ProPublica and This American Life team up to expose investment bankers and hedge fund managers
A fascinating look into the financial crash in America and world wide: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/sites/all/play_music/play_full.php?play=405 For seven months a team of investigative journalists from ProPublica looked into a story for us, the inside story of one company that made hundreds of millions of dollars for itself while worsening the financial crisis for the rest of us. A…
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Net Neutrality – South Africa
Net Neutrality is currently, and has been for some time, a raging hot topic in the US. The FCC recently took Comcast to court for throttling customers’ bandwidth – and lost. NN basically means allowing data to flow from source to destination without interruption or alteration. But the big ISPs and carriers in America would…
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Google hacks affect local SA users
So it seems that some South African users have been bitten by the GMail hack bug. Big Whoopy Ding! They’re not honestly using a free on-line email service for anything critical, are they? They are?!?!?! Well serves them right. I’ve written a number of articles on the security of cloud or internet-based services – my…
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Internet etiquette
The Internet age has ‘been upon us’ for quite a number of years already – it’s a mainstream part of everyday life. The amount of people joining the web-age is increasing by 10’s of thousands of people everyday – there were 1.7 billion internet users as of the end of 2009 and my article ‘The…
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2009 most hacked app – Acrobat Reader
Malicious Acrobat Reader documents made up almost 80% of all exploits for 2009 according to security research company ScanSafe. Vulnerabilities have doubled year on year in Adobe’s PDF reader and they seem to be having a problem in keeping things under any sort of control. To keep yourself safe ( well sort of ) disable…
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The Internet is a BIIIIIG place!
We take a lot of what happens on the Internet for granted but the numbers that make up the Internet are staggering to say the least. Here’s a small subset from 2009 of what goes on out there: 247 billion emails per day 81% of email is spam ( that’s 200 billion per day )…
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On-line storage – safe or not?
Cloud computing has become a major buzzword this year and entails the provisioning of application and storage services within a distributed system operating on the Internet. Think Google Apps ( Wave, Docs, GMail, etc. ), T-Mobile SideKick, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud ( EC2 )/Web Services, Salesforce, Bittorrent and many others. These can be put into…
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Adobe security issues – again
A new 0-day vulnerability has been found in Adobe Reader and Acrobat – this time relating to how the 2 products handle Javascript. The only ‘fix’ at the moment is to turn Javascript off in these products. Or don’t open email you get from unexpected sources. Let’s see how long Adobe take to fix this…
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Online mail services, security and your identity
A number of high profile on-line mail services were hit with a phishing scheme which resulted in the posting on-line of thousands of account details over the weekend. Hotmail seems to have been hit the hardest but both GMail and Yahoo were also targetted. There are 2 serious issues here: many people are still using…
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DNS Security
.. has always been a hot topic, considering that it is the cornerstone of the Internet. Without DNS or with a broken DNS, the Internet stops working ( correctly ) so it’s important that this building block is always in top shape, something that has been lacking from time to time. Considering it’s age and…