Robert Lemos

Robert Lemos interviews Kevin Finisterre, founder of security startup Digital Munition, who created the three recent versions of the InqTana worm to raise awareness of security in Apple’s OS X. Finisterre discusses his reasons for creating the worms, the problems with Mac OS X security, and why he does not fear prosecution.
SecurityFocus

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Two worms and an exploit for Apple’s operating system hardly threaten consumers’ computers, but should act as a wake-up call for Mac users.
SecurityFocus

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Technology companies at the RSA Security Conference expound on the privacy benefits of online services that authenticate users based on the least amount of information possible.
SecurityFocus

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Falling prey to online identity theft takes only a few minutes, but the cost can be high.
PC Magazine

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Armed with client-side honeypots and a low-cost team in India, a group of MIT graduates aims to create a system to warn Web surfers about the seedier sites, and outright malicious servers, on the Internet.
SecurityFocus

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With the move to Intel processors and a larger share of the market, Apple’s Mac OS X could find itself a more popular target of attack, security professionals say.
SecurityFocus

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Community-led efforts sometimes deliver security fixes before developers. Should you trust these solutions, or will they make your systems less secure?

As 2005 wound down, security professionals were worried. A major Microsoft Windows vulnerability had come to light that compromised computers if users did as little as visit a malicious Web site or view images with malicious code embedded. Attacks exploiting the flaw—a vulnerability in the handling of the Windows Meta File (WMF) format—had begun appearing by New Year’s Day.

Compared with the speed of events, Microsoft responded slowly. It presented a workaround that worked only in some cases and advised worried users to update their antivirus programs. Microsoft’s patch wasn’t available until it was fully tested, on January 6.

The episode was the most significant “zero-day” attack to date. So called because security professionals have no window (zero days) to respond to a vulnerability before an attack arrives, zero-day attacks have become a significant threat in the last few years. Though it’s understandable that Microsoft would release only a well-tested patch, this was cold comfort to security-conscious users wondering if the next image they viewed would be the one to compromise their systems.

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Security experts urge companies to clean their networks of a malicious mass-mailing computer virus, before compromised systems reach the first trigger date and start deleting eleven types of files.
SecurityFocus

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