May 28, 2004

By Gregg Keizer TechWeb News

Authorities in Canada and Taiwan this week brought charges against a teen for creating a worm and arrested a 30-year-old engineer for building a destructive Trojan horse, respectively.

WeekEnd Feature:
Hackers, Crackers and Gaps in the Wall

by Ian Thompson, CCSP Staff Editor
May 15, 2004

This week has been a bit of a whirlwind. Not only have I had it up to here with some of the silly stuff going on at work, but also the Google news doohickey has come up trumps again. I mean, only last week we were all under a barrage of Sasser-related shenanigans, rewinding clocks (if we knew that this was a work-around) and patching lsass on affected PCs. Good ‘ol Windows 98, s’what I say to that one…

GSM Phone Hijacking?

by Paul Laudanski, AKA Zhen-Xjell
April 20, 2004

I've been a faithful GSM cellphone subscriber for years. Never had any issues. In fact, I was on the CDMA network for a couple years on a business cellphone and received SPAM SMS pages on occasion, but never on my GSM provided cellphone. Until now, and my Motorola Cellphone was hijacked!

Anonymous writes "NovaServe has detected an apparent cross-site scripting exploit that has been launched via www.mirabela.net from russian cyberspace. The site lists http://big-big.com as its admin home and the curious can find the identities of the hackers portrayed on this page.
The exploit tries to inject new files into the My_eGallery folders exploiting an apparent bug in My_eGallery. Users are advised to ban the following IP's as a first step in safe-guarding their installations.
80.96.
66.218.79.186
Updating the script to version 2.79 is also advised.

The following is the content of the injection script found at mirabela:"

Hackers: who are they and how can they be stopped?

'If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.'

This classic quote from the 2500 year old Chinese book on military strategy, The Art of War by Sun Tzu, has been more recently applied to many areas of business.

In the IT world, perhaps it is appropriate to the most talked-about issue in the industry today - the fight against cybercrime.

State agency warns of security breach
By Ina Fried
CNET News.com
February 13, 2004, 10:06 AM PT

Some California workers may have had their salaries and other personal information compromised after someone gained unauthorized access to a state agency's computer.

Infiltration of files seen as extensive

By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff
1/22/2004


Senate panel's GOP staff pried on Democrats
WASHINGTON -- Republican staff members of the US Senate Judiciary Commitee infiltrated opposition computer files for a year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing on copies to the media, Senate officials told The Globe.

Homeless Hacker Pleads Guilty

Lamo could face five years in prison, hefty fines.

Paul Roberts,
IDG News Service

Adrian Lamo, the so-called homeless hacker, pleaded guilty this week to charges that he broke into the internal computer network of The New York Times.

Electronic Voting Firm's Site Hacked
By Ted Bridis,
AP Technology Writer
December 29, 2003

WASHINGTON (AP)—A company developing security technology for electronic voting suffered an embarrassing hacker break-in that executives think was tied to the rancorous debate over the safety of casting ballots online.

More, Worse Cyberattacks Seen Coming in 2004
by Paul Roberts

The New Year will offer weary network administrators little respite from a new generation of Internet worms, viruses and targeted hacks that appeared in 2003, according to security experts.


In 2004, malicious hackers will continue to take advantage of security weaknesses in popular communications protocols such as Remote Procedure Call (RPC), while improvements in hacker tools will shorten the time that technology vendors and their customers have to respond to new vulnerabilities, according to comments by leading security researchers and corporate security experts at the InfoSecurity 2003 Conference and Exhibition in New York City last week.