Category: Security

  • You can never rely on encryption

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    Tom Raftery
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    Like most people in Ireland I listened to the story of how the Irish Blood Transfusion Service (IBTS) had a laptop stolen in New York with the details of 171,000 blood donors on it, not least because, as a blood donor, there is a good chance some of my data is involved. The IBTS has…

  • BT Broadband users can be hacked!

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    Tom Raftery
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    James Galvin posted a couple of weeks ago about a recently published exploit which made hacking Eircom’s wireless routers trivial. As Eircom are the largest provider of residential broadband in Ireland, this is potentially a big deal. As Joe Drumgoole commented at the time: they have inadvertently created Ireland’s largest free WIFI network. Good man…

  • Chinese Military launch cyber attack on the Pentagon?

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    Tom Raftery
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    The financial Times is reporting today that the Pentagon’s computers were hacked by the Chinese Military in June of this year! If it is true then this is the first publicised attack on US computer systems by the Chinese Military since the Titan Rain attacks of 2003. According to the article: The PLA regularly probes…

  • Google launches phishing blacklist api

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    Tom Raftery
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    I see on the Google Security Blog that Google have launched a Safe Browsing api.  In other words, Google are making available its dynamic blacklist of phishing and malware sites so ISPs and web app coders can check against it. This should help ensure unwitting users are notified before they browse to to unsafe sites…

  • Airport security is a joke

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    Tom Raftery
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    Not that we haven’t known that for some time but it was recently drilled home to me on my flight back from Madrid last week. My son Enrique has asthma. He got quite bad with it earlier this year when we were in Spain and a Spanish doctor prescribed a cough suppressant called Expectu to…

  • Urgent update to WordPress

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    Tom Raftery
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    WordPress was updated to 2.1.2 overnight after it was found that one of their download servers was compromised and malicious code introduced into version 2.1.1 to include code that would allow for remote PHP execution! From the WordPress site: What You Can Do to Help If your blog is running 2.1.1, please upgrade immediately and…

  • More bad news for Vista

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    Tom Raftery
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    According to an article in InformationWeek, a privilege escalation vulnerability has been found in Windows Vista. The vulnerability was reported to Microsoft by eEye Digital Security on the 19th of January. Marc Maiffret, Chief Hacking Officer of eEye said: with this vulnerability, you can elevate yourself to system-level access. Any normal user can do anything…

  • Symantec CEO profits while company burns!

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    Tom Raftery
    in

    Good buddy Dennis Howlett has uncovered, through some clever financial detective work (Dennis is a former accountant), some very dodgy dealings. It seems that the CEO of Symantec, John Thompson, made $1.5m profit on the sale of Symantec shares very shortly before the announcement to the market of losses by Symantec (and the inevitable share…