Hackers attack iPhone via SMS

Security experts at the Black Hat conference say hackers can break into an iPhone to intercept text messages, and deliver spam and malware, states CRN.

Charlie Miller, Independent Security Evaluators researcher, and Collin Mulliner, a PhD student at the University of Berlin, demonstrated during a Black Hat presentation that hackers can break into an iPhone via the SMS protocol to launch a denial-of-service attack, or take control of a victim's phone.

"It's lots of fun to kick friends off the network, but it's even more fun to own their phone," Miller said, while demonstrating the exploits on both the iPhone and Android.

Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has introduced a Web site providing a centralised information resource on the asteroids and comets that, relatively speaking, whiz by Earth on a daily basis, reports eWeek.

Asteroid Watch shares data and surveys on the asteroids and comets passing close to Earth.

The Near-Earth Object Observation Programme, commonly called Spaceguard, also plots the orbits of these objects to determine if any could be potentially hazardous to Earth.

Adobe has released a patch for a critical Flash Player problem that could let attackers take over people's computers through content viewed in a browser, says cnet.

The vulnerability affected a file that shipped with Flash Player 9.x and 10.x for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, and with Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat 9.x for Windows, Macintosh and Unix.

Adobe said it fixed the problem in a security advisory, and Adobe's Matt Rozen posted a note on Twitter that directed people to download the patched version from Adobe's Flash download site.

Security vendor Symantec's first quarter financial results show a 13% drop in revenue, to $1.44 billion, from last year's $1.65 billion, reports Computing.co.uk.

Adjusted for currency and an extra week in the first financial quarter of 2010, Symantec said the figure represented a 4% drop. But net income took a bigger dive, to $73 million, from last year's figure of $172 million, a 57% fall.

Symantec chief executive Enrique Salem said although the firm was pleased with the performance of the consumer business, corporate clients proved tougher this year.