Hack Blogspot

Is there a possibility for Twitter to be related to rogue? It looks that the answer to this question is YES. Security experts from Websense have recently detected a new Twitter-related spam campaign spreading rogueware. Let's find out the whole truth about this threat together. First of all, it has to be noted that the attack starts with a spam message purportedly being sent by Twitter and coming with the subject line "Reset your Twitter password". Victimized users are asked to click on the provided link or paste it into the browser. Websense claims to have detected about 55,000 cases of this malicious Twitter spam campaign. So what happens if the recipient clicks on the provided link? As it may be expected, that is where the real malicious attack begins. The link asks the victimized user to download an executable called password.exe. This is a malicious file and drops on the infected system rogue anti-virus application called Protection Center. An interesting thi...

In 1998, a hacker told Congress that he could bring down the Internet in 30 minutes by exploiting a certain flaw that sometimes caused online outages by misdirecting data. In 2003, the Bush administration concluded that fixing this flaw was in the nation's "vital interest." Fast forward to 2010, and very little has happened to improve the situation. The flaw still causes outages every year. Although most of the outages are innocent and fixed quickly, the problem still could be exploited by a hacker to spy on data traffic or take down websites. Meanwhile, our reliance on the Internet has only increased. The next outage, accidental or malicious, could disrupt businesses, the government or anyone who needs the Internet to run normally. The outages are caused by the somewhat haphazard way that traffic is passed between companies that carry Internet data. The outages are called "hijackings," even though most of them are not caused by criminals bent on destruction...

Thanks to the media, the word “hacker” has gotten a bad reputation. The word summons up thoughts of malicious computer users finding new ways to harass people, defraud corporations, steal information and maybe even destroy the economy or start a war by infiltrating military computer systems. While there’s no denying that there are hackers out there with bad intentions, they make up only a small percentage of the hacker community. The term computer hacker first showed up in the mid-1960s. A hacker was a programmer — someone who hacked out computer code. Hackers were visionaries who could see new ways to use computers, creating programs that no one else could conceive. They were the pioneers of the computer industry, building everything from small applications to operating systems. In this sense, people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were allhackers — they saw the potential of what computers could do and created ways to achieve that potential.

A malicious software program has infected the computers of more than 2,500 corporations around the world, according to NetWitness, a computer network security firm. The malicious program, or Botnet, can commandeer the operating systems of both residential and corporate computing systems via the Internet. Such botnets are used by computer criminals for a range of illicit activities, including sending e-mail spam, and stealing digital documents and passwords from infected computers. In many cases they install so-called “keystroke loggers” to capture personal information.

Evaluating your company's security vulnerabilities is the first step toward preventing costly data losses that could compromise both information and your company's reputation. A so-called ethical hacker could help. It’s just a USB drive, casually dropped by an employee entrance, in the cafeteria or next to a cubicle. But what happens to that drive can tell worlds about your company’s IT security. An employee wanders by, picks up the drive and, out of curiosity, sticks it in the computer at his or her workstation. The drive contains infected code that compromises your system. Evaluating your company's security vulnerabilities is the first step toward plugging those gaps and preventing costly data losses and security breaches that could compromise both information and your company's reputation. For some small to mid-size businesses, evaluating security is a requirement of doing business with government agencies, credit card companies or health-related companies.

When people talk about hacking and social networks, they're not referring to the com­mon definition of hacking, which is using malicious code or backdoors in computer networks to damage systems or steal proprietary information. Hacking into social networks requires very little technical skill. It's much more of a psychological game -- using information on personal profiles to win a complete stranger's trust. This second type of hacking is called social engineering. Social engineering uses persuasive psychological techniques to exploit the weakest link in the information security system: people [source: SearchSecurity.com ]. Examples of social engineering scams could be: Calling a systems administrator posing as an angry executive who forgot his password and needs to access his computer immediately. Posing as a bank employee and calling a customer to ask for his credit card number. Pretending to lose your key card and kindly asking an employee to let you into the office...