Robert Lemos

Broken Exploit? Not so Fast

Attackers don’t always get it right. Many times, their attempts to exploit a program or a computer system go awry. The result: A crash.

So, when Bojan Zdrnja, a Croatia-based handler for SANS Internet Storm Center, looked at a PDF document submitted to the volunteer group of security experts, he didn’t think it odd that it merely seemed to crash Adobe’s Acrobat Reader. To Zdrnja, the document clearly had been altered, but not in a way that could have exploited Acrobat or the operating system.

UnsafeBits

PhotoDNA scans images for child abuse

Internet service providers may have better success at scanning their networks to actively seek out illicit images of child abuse, thanks to technology donated by Microsoft and Dartmouth College.

On Wednesday, the software giant and the well-known college announced that they had developed a software program to match modified images to the original by using a form of robust hashing that can ignore certain types of changes, such as resizing, cropping and the inclusion of text. The team donated the program, dubbed PhotoDNA, to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

SecurityFocus

Breaking the Botnet Code

Networks of compromised computers controlled by a central server, better known as botnets, are a Swiss Army knife of tools for online criminals. Hackers can use these co-opted systems to churn out spam, host malicious code, hide their tracks on the Internet, or flood a corporate network to cut off its access to the Web.

Whenever a new botnet appears, researchers race to reverse engineer the software it installs on a victim's machine, and to decode the way each bot communicates with the controlling server. Because these communications are often encrypted, such analyses can take weeks or months. Now researchers from the University of California at Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University have created a way to automatically reverse engineer the communications between compromised computers and their controlling servers.

Technology Review

Researchers Hijack a Drive-By Botnet

By infiltrating a criminal computer network aimed at infecting visitors to legitimate websites, university researchers have gained firsthand insight into the scale and scope of so-called "drive-by downloading." They found more than 6,500 websites hosting malicious code that redirected nearly 340,000 visitors to malicious sites.

Drive-by downloading involves hacking into a legitimate site to covertly install malicious software on visitors' machines or redirect them to another site.

In an unpublished paper, researchers at the University of California at Santa Barbara describe a four-month study in which they connected their servers to a collection of compromised computers known as the Mebroot botnet.

Technology Review

Privacy Plug-In Fakes out Facebook

Social networks are rife with examples of users failing to understand the privacy implications of posting sensitive information online.

In February, for example, school officials in Wisconsin suspended a teacher who posted on Facebook a picture of herself pointing a gun at the camera. In April, the Swiss insurance company Nationale Suisse fired an employee after she called in sick and then posted updates on the same site. Others have raised concerns about users handing so much personal information to social-networking companies themselves.

Now, researchers at the University of Waterloo in Ontario have developed a browser plug-in to help users keep their information private from prying eyes and from social-network providers as well.

Technology Review

A New Language for Phone Networks

Scientists love the cell phone. Researchers have used the ubiquitous device as a portable polling station, a tracking device, and a sensor. Now, computer scientists want to use mobile phones to exchange data without using the phone's network, instead of communicating directly with cellular towers, base stations, and the occasional wireless network.

That's the vision of a group of computer scientists who believe that spreading data virally could open up a whole new manner of applications on peer-to-peer mobile device networks, known more formally as "pocket-switched networks." Such an ad hoc network--sort of a Sneakernet on steroids--could allow victims of a natural disaster to pass messages from one person to another even if the cell towers are destroyed. In another scenario, visitors to specific locations could have important information forwarded to them via the local folks' devices. And groups of friends could poll each other on where to eat dinner that night, without using the Internet.

Technology Review

Week in Review: UnsafeBits Blog, Aug. 24 to Aug. 30

Here is a list of my posts on the UnsafeBits blog hosted by MIT's Technology Review for the week of August 24:

• The Tricky Task of Timing Exploits
• The Danger in Web Database Flaws

Week in Review: UnsafeBits Blog at Technology Review

Here is a list of my posts on the UnsafeBits blog hosted by MIT's Technology Review for the week of August 17:

• Taking on Security with Beckstrom's Law
• Georgian Cyberattacks Traced to Russian Civilians
• Different Countries, Different Scams
• Antivirus' Multiengine Mess

Antivirus Protection Gets Social

People often rely on their circle of friends for support. Now one start-up company hopes to harness those social connections to create and deliver security software that will protect users from computer viruses and other digital threats.

On Wednesday, start-up Immunet announced its first product, Immunet Protect, a program that checks downloaded files against a directory of malicious software, such as viruses and Trojan horses. The company joins a handful of others in turning much of its detection capabilities into a service offered over the Internet, or the "cloud." Yet, the real difference, say its founders, is the software's ability to protect digital communities--those users connected together via social networks such as instant messaging, Facebook or Twitter.

Technology Review

Week in Review: UnsafeBits Blog at Technology Review

Here is a list of my posts on the UnsafeBits blog hosted by MIT's Technology Review for the week of August 10:

• Forensic Analysis Reveals Details of Twitter Attack
• Constant Churn Makes Viruses Harder to Catch