Scientific American’s March issue has an intriguing article which explores the efforts of digital activists to circumvent corporate and governmental control over the Internet. The aim of the moment is to configure and build a decentralized mesh network that cannot be blocked, filtered or turned off. Egypt’s Internet shutdown during last year’s Arab Spring played a significant inspirational role. Image: Scientific American Magazine With a “shadow” network configured, activists
AT&T recently released a film from its archive called “Computer Security: You Make The Difference“. While you might chuckle at the 1990′s music and production values – the truth is this – many of basic issues that the video (which is a series of films stitched together) attempts to illustrate are still with us today, 22 years
Avi Rubin, a Computer Science professor at Johns Hopkins University, recently gave an informative (and quite fun) presentation at TEDxMidAtlantic. Rubin’s talk summarized the results of efforts to hack various devices. Have you every wondered if you could wirelessly brake a car? TEDxTalks: YouTube
Cryptome.org is a website that has focused on publishing information about freedom of speech, cryptography, spying, and surveillance. In many ways, Cryptome is similar to Wikileaks – except it has been operating since 1996. The site is run by a New York -based architect called John Young. Cryptome has just announced it has been hacked. The hack planted an attack script on every page
Breaking: a faction of Anonymous has released an MP3 recording of an FBI conference call which took place on January 17th. During the call, which is currently posted on YouTube, members of the USA’s FBI can be heard discussing several Anonymous and LulzSec related cases with investigators from the UK. Today’s leak helps explain just how “Anonymous Sabu” (leader of the LulzSec group) appeared
We’ve been seeing cases of malware that first debuted on other operating systems being ported over to Android. Here’s another trojan that fits the bill. Opfake was first found on Symbian and Windows Mobile. In its latest incarnation on Android, the trojan (still) appears to be an Opera Mini app…whose only permission request is to send SMS messages: Turns out the app (we detect it as Trojan:Android/OpFake.D) sends the
Amidst my usual adventure with Android malware analysis, I saw this snippet of code while skimming through a particular sample’s class modules. Figure 1 Late last year, I was looking deeper into Portable Network Graphics (PNG) image format, especially about the fields that hold textual information. Upon seeing the code, it immediately triggered my suspicion as to why would the application need to check for the existence of the
Facebook is recently doing a decent job at keeping survey spam posts at bay (all things considered). So, what’s an entrepreneurial Facebook spammer to do? Well, some have tweaked their master plan, and have expanded their use of “cloud” services. Using Amazon’s S3 file hosting service solves quite a few problems for these perpetrators. Number 1, Amazon’s S3 web service is pretty inexpensive to set up, therefore they
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Many of the sites that we blogged about on Monday are still offline after being targeted by DDoS attacks. Hackers have promised to continue until the 26th. According to Polskie Radio: “Over a thousand people gathered in Warsaw, Tuesday evening, to oppose the anti-internet piracy ACTA agreement, which PM Tusk confirmed that Poland will sign on Thursday.” The signing is scheduled to take place in Tokyo, Japan. #Insert
There’s breaking news coming out of Poland. Hackers, reportedly associated with Anonymous, have been attacking Polish government websites to protest this week’s scheduled signing of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). ACTA is an intellectual property treaty. Poland announced on January 19 that it would sign the treaty on January 26, 2012. A Twitter account called @AnonymousWiki called for action against the Polish government. All of this
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We’re sure that most of you have at least heard of SOPA. Major websites such as Wikipedia have blacked out sections of their content today to raise awareness. In some locations, Google has blacked out its logo. The concern of many speech and privacy advocates is that SOPA, which stands for Stop Online Piracy Act, greatly expands the legal authority of US
Brod, a researcher on our Threat Research team has been tasked with tracking emerging Mac based threats. Microsoft Excel is one of the tools he uses to chart variants. From April to December 2011, there have been several dozen new Mac threats. Well, that’s nothing when compared to Windows malware — but it’s definitely something when compared to the number of
Yesterday, we stumbled across this ad from an Android-related site:Clicking this led to a malicious Android Market:Samples found here are detected as Trojan:Android/FakeNotify.A.As usual, other malicious sites are hosted on the same IP address as the malicious Android Market. One site that came to our attention claimed to unlock hidden features of the phone. This same site was also found to be promoted
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For the fifth year now we are arranging a course on malware (malicious software) analysis in co-operation with Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland. The first lecture is on January 18th by our Chief Research Officer, Mikko Hypponen. If you are studying at Aalto, we’d be glad to see you on the course! If you have been following the threat landscape, you may have noticed
An Android application package (APK) can include multiple modules; one or more of these modules may be an advertisement SDK. That’s pretty normal nowadays, as many Android developers currently use such modules to compensate for providing their products to users for free. So what happens if the app is clean, but the ad module is fishy? When the user accepts and grants permission for
Now here’s something that you don’t see everyday, a YouTube video in which a young woman advertises DDoS services, with a smile. “Hello, Hackers.” The video links to a forum thread that lists the attacker’s rates: Just $2 per hour… Also, easy payment options.
Today we’ve been reading through a 208 page European Commission report called: Special Eurobarometer 359, Attitudes on Data Protection and Electronic Identity in the European Union (PDF). One thing is very clear. European attitudes on digital privacy and identity vary greatly by culture, and even adjoining countries have some interesting differences. Which country’s views most reflects your own? Click here for the full image.
The 28th Chaos Communication Congress (28C3) is currently underway in Berlin and on Tuesday, researcher Karsten Nohl gave a presentation called: Defending mobile phones. If you have an hour, it’s worth watching. Initial press reports focused on Nohl’s revelation that hackers can potentially sniff numerous phone IDs and network authentications from an advantageous point, and because network authentications aren’t frequently refreshed (depending on the network operator), an attacker
It’s almost end 2011. What with Christmas recently passed, and New Year coming up, there’s naturally a lot of well wishes and holiday greetings being messaged around. Looks like someone’s decided to join in (a little late) – and also do a bit of data harvesting at the same time. Spyware:Android/AdBoo.A appears to be one of those programs that lets you send
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There’s a run of ZeuS (aka Zbot) trojans currently targeting several Finnish banks. And naturally, our Threat Research team has been working on related cases. Interestingly, they’ve discovered some new ZeuS functionality that hints of SpyEye.This version of ZeuS 2.x (Zbot.AVRC) has two new commands it will accept: user_activate_imodule and user_restart_imodule.SHA1:
