SC Magazine

As cybercriminals more heavily rely on targeted attacks, the amount of spam this year fell to the lowest levels since 2007, according to Cisco. The volume of unsolicited email dropped dramatically, from 379 billion messages daily in August 2010 to 124 billion last month, according to Cisco's "2011 Annual Security Report," released Wednesday. One reason for the change – mass mailing campaigns are simply not as lucrative as targeted malware efforts. While the latter requires just one or a few...Read Full Story

pbr / /p pDefending the perimeter increasingly is becoming an ambiguous concept. The hard, knife-edge perimeter of the past is dead and gone. Long live the sort-of-fuzzy, kind-of-gray area, not-quite-a-DMZ perimeter of the future. This notion begs the question: “Who cares about the perimeter anyway?” After all, it's all about the data, and we are interested in sharing a lot with the world at large, so why not just protect the data and let the rest go?/p pWell, that's barking up the right tree...Read Full Story

Microsoft on Tuesday pushed out 13 patches, one fewer than anticipated, to address 19 security vulnerabilities, including a bug that allows the data-stealing Duqu trojan to spread. Duqu, the so-called "son of Stuxnet " trojan, contains a dropper program that exploits the vulnerability, located in the Windows kernel, Microsoft revealed in early November. The software giant subsequently issued a workaround, and the issue now is corrected with bulletin MS11-087, rated "critical." “The most...Read Full Story

»The hacktivist group bAnonymous/b made good on its promise of digital retaliation against the Oakland Police Department for the force it used against protesters following the clearing of an Occupy Oakland encampment. Members of the collective launched a denial-of-service attack that took down the department's website, and also released employment details on a number of police officers. p»bDuqu/b, the so-called “son of Stuxnet ” trojan, contains a dropper program that exploits a previously...Read Full Story

Attackers over the weekend uploaded malware-laden copies of a number of popular apps, such as Angry Birds , to Google 's official Android Market, researchers warned. A rogue developer with the handle “Lagostrod” uploaded trojanized versions of at least a dozen popular games, including Cut the Rope, Need for Speed: Shift , and Assassin's Creed: Revelations , Sean Sullivan , security adviser at anti-virus firm F-Secure , said in a blog post Monday. If installed, the apps attempted to send SMS...Read Full Story

A new worm spreading on Facebook is aiming to infect users with the data-stealing trojan Zeus, security researchers have warned. The worm uses stolen Facebook account details to log in to users' accounts and spam their contacts, according to researchers at Danish security firm CSIS , which first identified the threat. The messages contain a link, which, if clicked, appears to be downloading a screensaver of two attractive women, but actually attempts to drop a cocktail of malware onto the...Read Full Story

GlobalSign, a Portsmouth , N.H. -based certificate authority (CA) that briefly halted the issuance of SSL certs over fears it had been hacked, has determined its CA infrastructure was never compromised. In addition, the company said in a statement Tuesday that it concluded its investigation and found no evidence of any bogus certificates being issued or customer data exposed. During its probe, GlobalSign did confirm that a "peripheral web server" -- not connected to any CA systems -- had been...Read Full Story

The identity of those behind Duqu, the so-called "son of Stuxnet ," is still a mystery and the perpetrators have taken pains to keep it that way. On Oct 20, just two days after security firm Symantec first released details about Duqu, the coders behind the information-stealing trojan, which researchers believe shares much of its code with the notorious Stuxnet worm, scrubbed all the files from their command-and-control (C&C) servers in an effort to conceal their identity, according to...Read Full Story

An Illinois water utility pump failure was not the result of a cyberattack, as previously was suspected, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has announced. After its investigation into the water pump failure at the Curran-Gardner Public Water District in Springfield, Ill. , the DHS' Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team (ICS-CERT), working with the FBI , found no evidence that hacking was involved, according to the bulletin released on Wednesday. The incident was...Read Full Story

pimg alt="" src="http://media.scmagazineus.com/images/2011/11/18/1211-update-liam-o-murchu_211517.jpg" style="float: left; margin: 11px;" /bPRO/b/p pbLiam Ó Murchu operations manager, security technology response, Symantec /b/p pWe are certain Duqu was created using the same source code as Stuxnet. This is because roughly 50 percent of the code in Duqu is reused from Stuxnet. It would be nearly impossible to reverse engineer Stuxnet's binary and achieve code so similar, not to mention...Read Full Story