IT Security Top Headlines » personality

A web page is infected every 4.5 seconds, and other current statistics

pinolobu — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 03:47:11 +0000

Amongst other things mentioned at the ongoing 2009 RSA conference in San Francisco, the largest ICT security event in the world:

(i) ICT security pros need to work together to fight the now highly organised cyber criminals the world over. Online fraudsters “are not bound by any rules of law” and have control over “massive armies of zombie computers”. No more acting independently: now there’s a need to collaborate, to create a common development process: standards, sharing technologies and integrating technologies and controls into the infrastructure.

(ii) Cyber criminals have infiltrated everything imaginable: from the US power grid to the Pentagon.

(iii) Sophos said a web page is infected every 4.5 seconds & every day more than 20,000 new samples of malware are discovered.

(iv) Symantec said it had blocked 245 million attacks per month in 2008 : that’s 200,000 attacks every 30 minutes, and that 90% of attacks target confidential information

(v) Attackers are changing their approaches, from mass distribution (random attacks) to a few threats being distributed to micro-distribution where there are millions of distinct threats. Meaning, they now target individuals, to try to steal confidential information (medical, financial etc). Hence, anyone can be a victim.

Source
The BBC, 21 April 2009

Jon Lech Johansen: reverse engineering wizard

pinolobu — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 21:59:59 +0000

Nicknamed “DVD Jon”, infamous for coauthoring DeCSS, which decodes the content-scrambling system used for DVD licensing enforcement.

In October 2006, Johansen and DoubleTwist Ventures announced they had reverse engineered Apple Computer’s DRM for iTunes, called FairPlay. Rather than allow people to strip the DRM, DoubleTwist would license the ability to apply FairPlay to media companies who wanted their music and videos to play on the iPod, without having to sign a distribution contract with Apple.

His blog is entitled “So Sue Me”.

source

Tags: jon lech johansen, dvd, dvd jon, reverse engineering, decss, fairplay

Vardan Kushnir: Russia’s spam king murdered

pinolobu — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 15:33:25 +0000

He is Russia’s most despised Internet figure, sending 25 million spam emails a day and earning 5 figures (US dollars) a month, a fortune by Russia’s standards.

He was into the good, but sleazy life and found dead one morning in his bathroom, skull bashed in.

source

Tags: Vardan+Kushnir, spam, Russia

Gary McKinnon aka Solo: the new Mitnick?

pinolobu — Wed, 10 May 2006 16:15:22 +0000

US govt alleges that between February 2001 and March 2002, he repeatedly hacked into, from the UK, dozens of computers used by the US Army, Navy, Air Force, and Department of Defense.

Talk about bad timing: that’s within 9/11’s timeframe.

US govt is attempting to extradite him to stand trial.

One American prosecutor called “the biggest military computer hack of all time”.

He got caught after 2 years because “it got so routine and blase that he got sloppy. A fellow hacker remarked that if he had done it for two weeks they would never have caught him.

Faces decades in jail and millions of dollars in fines.

ref:

bbc