Security

On the surface, April 1 came and went without a peep from the dreaded Conficker megaworm. But security experts see a frightening reality, one where Conficker is now more powerful and more dangerous than ever.

In the first minute of April 1, Conficker did exactly what everyone knew it was going to do: It successfully phoned home for an update. And while it was fun to imagine what nasty payload that update may have included (it was fun, wasn’t it?), the result was not outwardly catastrophic; rather than a blueprint for world domination, the update contained instructions on how to dig in even deeper.

Looks like it might be time to install TrueCrypt for all of my files.

Unfortunately, I’m not shocked by this. But I’m still mad has hell about it!

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Normally when I see articles such as this where spam volumes have dropped between 40-75%, my BS meter starts to peg on high. But more articles are coming out stating that 500,000 bots have been bagged.

Surprisingly, we have seen the drop here at the office. We have a store and forward service and we have various statistical tools to serve us a graph of the volume. Check this out!

A new security hole in the Internet Protocol is potentially the most severe ever discovered, according to a presentation by security experts Anton Kapela and Alex Pilosov. The two have revealed that the inherent nature of the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), which is essential for optimizing and routing traffic on the Internet, allows a hacker to redirect traffic to his own servers and forward it along without interrupting connections or otherwise immediately exposing the attack. The method would allow a malicious user to either spy on unprotected traffic or alternately ‘poison’ the data with altered code before it reaches its destination.