Support Wars

From Security Focus: Microsoft released data collected from an FTP-server honeypot, showing that attempts to guess passwords continue to focus on the low-hanging fruit: passwords with an average length of eight characters, with “password” and “123456″ being the most common. The data is part of a project to monitor attacks that everyday users might encounter [...]

From Motherboard: We already know that we don’t need air force pilots to drop bombs on terrorist dinners anymore, just gamers manning drones. And eventually, gamers flying virtual drones. And eventually robots flying virtual drones in the form of manga characters. To get there and other places, the Air Force is buying 2,200 PlayStation3s. They’ll [...]

From US-CERT: US-CERT is aware of public reports of malicious code circulating via phishing email messages that appear to come from the Social Security Administration. The messages indicate that the users’ annual Social Security statements may contain errors and instruct users to follow a link to review their Social Security statement. If users click this [...]

Found this priceless gem at Gizmodo: In this exclusive, never-before-seen training footage from The Geek Squad, the horrible truth of their agenda is finally revealed. Snitch & Langford – Geek Squad from brianhogg on Vimeo.

From Dark Reading:

From Dark Reading: Microsoft’s Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT) removed malware from more than 1.5 million machines just three days after it was updated on November’s Patch Tuesday, and the software giant has detected two new fake antivirus threats on more than 110,000 machines. The latest statistics come on the heels of Microsoft’s recently published [...]

From  Tech Republic: Roberto Suggi Liverani and Nick Freeman, security consultants with security-assessment.com have discovered that poorly-written Firefox extensions can be exploited to install malware on a victim’s computer. It seems Mozilla does not have any security requirements for extensions. That’s a problem, as their flagship Web browser Firefox implicitly trusts extension software. I first [...]

A new zero day exploit has been reported for IE 6 and 7.  From Symantec: A new exploit targeting Internet Explorer was published to the BugTraq mailing list yesterday. Symantec has conducted further tests and confirmed that it affects Internet Explorer versions 6 and 7 as well. The exploit currently exhibits signs of poor reliability, [...]

I found this little gem while catching up on my ISC SANS reading this morning. Have you ever thought about your routers.  I mean – *really* thought about them?  They think all day long, processing all of the packets in and out of your company’s WAN or internet connection, and hardly ever complain.  But can [...]

From DownLoad Squad: It’s only been a couple of weeks since Windows 7 was released, but Microsoft’s new OS has already captured a larger percentage of the market than Apple’s OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and Linux (yes, all of Linux). This doesn’t come as a huge surprise, considering how many Windows users were clamoring [...]