You may want to think twice before forwarding that Pamela Anderson JPEG. UK-based Content Technologies, which was acquired by Baltimore last week, has launched Pornsweeper, its e-mail filtering program that detects pornography in e-mail attachments. It looks for graphics files that are "flesh-coloured". Content, which claims a 90% accuracy rate, has made an absolute fortune with its content-scanning products, selling its Mimesweeper to 6 000 customers and selling out to Baltimore for 700 million sterling. See, there is still money to be made out of IT.
The greatest threat in the history of the Internet is being coordinated out of the US, says the CERT Coordination Centre, the US`s government-funded computer security watchdog.
Ian Melamed, MD, Ian Melamed Secure Computing
Dotadult.co.uk, which provides a search engine that hunts down sex-related sites, has found that 40% of all searches using the engine were conducted from the office. Peak times were lunch hour and early evening, and London firms, telecoms and IT companies are the heaviest users.
The greatest threat in the history of the Internet is being coordinated out of the US, says the CERT Coordination Centre, the US`s government-funded computer security watchdog. Hackers have taken control of hundreds of computers connected to the Internet. They are exploiting vulnerabilities in Unix systems and preparing denial-of-service attacks similar to those which plagued Amazon.com and eBay earlier this year. The attackers are ready to launch a serious assault, according to the Centre, which adds that the situation "poses a significant threat to Internet sites and the Internet infrastructure". Reports of infections are coming in at the rate of two to five a day. Some 560 hosts at 220 Internet sites worldwide have been named as part of a Tribe Flood Network 2000 DDoS network. Tribal Flood networks allow an attacker to control an army of "zombie" computers remotely; the bandwidth of all those computers can then be brought to bear on a single target Web site, flooding it with traffic and shutting it down. Most of the compromised machines are running Linux. Is nothing safe? And it`s not just theory - many Web sites have been nailed already, leading to speculation that the attackers are marshalling themselves for a major onslaught. What fun!
Microsoft`s latest operating system variant is vulnerable to denial-of-service attacks which can crash users` machines, and make them to reboot their PC involuntarily. The flaw affects Windows Millennium Edition and Windows 98 and 98 Se when running WebTV for Windows. Want to know how to do it? Send a UDP packet to a PC; it can cause the computer to crash or generate various blue screens. Microsoft has been advised of the problem, but has not responded.
Wonder if he backed up? Irwin Jacob, CEO of IT giant Qualcom, turned his back for a moment and his notebook computer was stolen. He was attending the Society of American Business Editors and Writers Conference. And gone with the notebook are all the company`s secrets. How easy espionage can be.
Cyber bounty hunters, take note: dot-com company Bidbay is offering $25 000 for information leading to the prosecution of the person responsible for an attack on its Web site this month.
Further evidence that GSM cellphones are vulnerable to attack: imagine this. A local attacker can set up a rogue cell tower in your area to trick your phone into thinking that it is in a foreign country that doesn`t support encryption. Your conversations and data will then be open to interception. Could never happen, could it?
Do they have nothing better to do? One Piffy, a member of the self-named RootShell Hackers, has defaced over 720 Web sites as a protest against racism. Claiming to be a 13-year-old-boy, Piffy defaced mainly Korean-based Web sites.
The wheels of justice grind exceeding slow, but sometimes, they grind to conclusion. The author of 1998`s Chernobyl virus has been arrested in Taiwan and may finally be punished. Chen Ing-Hau`s invention caused an estimated $250 million worth of damage in South Korea alone. In between releasing the virus and his arrest, Chen had landed a job at a software company.
You`ve no doubt heard plenty about the application service provision (ASP) wave. Well, guess what? A UK survey conducted by silicon.com for systems integrator Logical has found that ASP will not live up to its early promise unless the security problem is dealt with. Steve Moxey, director of infrastructure for Logical, says: "Security continues to be fundamental to e-business. If you can`t trust customers` suppliers and partners, then e-business ceases to happen." Now, will somebody out there start to listen?
Sources: Silicon.com, Computerwire, Newsbytes, AP, ZDNet and MSNBC.
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