today in the news

[Paul Vixie <paul () vix com>]

http://news.com.com/2010-7355_3-6097678.html?part=rss&tag=6097678
"Perspective:  Zero-day Wednesdays"

        Somewhere--perhaps in the United States, but more likely, somewhere in
        China--a man walks out of a nondescript building, casts his eyes upon
        the urban landscape around him after spending an eight-hour day
        staring at a computer screen, and lights a cigarette. 

        He does not know his bosses by name or by face; he knows only that he
        is paid, and paid pretty well, for his research. Like a legitimate
        computer-security researcher, he uses automated testing tools against
        Microsoft Office software, probing for buffer overflows, pointer
        errors or negative integers in Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Unlike a
        legitimate security professional, he does not report what he finds to
        Microsoft.

        ...

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/24/1442238
"Sophos Reveals Latest Spam-Relaying Countries"

        "For the first time in more than two years, the United States has
        failed to make inroads into its spam-relaying problem.  The U.S.
        remains stuck at the top of the chart and is the source of 23.2
        percent of the world's spam. Its closest rivals are China and South
        Korea, although both of these nations have managed to reduce their
        statistics since Q1 2006. The vast majority of this spam is relayed by
        'zombies,' also known as botnet computers."

        ...

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/22/1612257
"Why Popular Anti-Virus Apps 'Don't Work'"

        Avantare writes "ZDNet Australia has a writeup about why AV apps don't
        work. The reason given is because the malware authors are writing code
        that will get around the signatures of the application by testing
        their code on the most popular anti-virus software before release."
        This comes as a follow up to another article detailing the sad state
        of anti-virus software currently on the market.

        ...

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/20/042253
"Banner Ad on Myspace Serves Adware to 1 Million"

        An anonymous reader writes "Washingtonpost.com's Security Fix blog
        reports that a banner ad running on MySpace.com and other Web sites
        used a Windows security flaw to push adware and spyware out to more
        than one million computer users this week. The attack leveraged the
        Windows Metafile (WMF) exploit to install programs in the
        PurityScan/ClickSpring family of adware, which bombards the user with
        pop-up ads and tracks their Web usage."

        ...

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/18/0237221
"Open Source Malware Search Engine"

        chr0.ot writes "Metasploit creator HD Moore has released an
        open-source search engine that finds live malware samples through
        Google queries. From the article: 'The new Malware Search project
        provides a Web interface that allows anyone to enter the name of a
        known virus or Trojan and find Google results for Web sites hosting
        malicious executables.' The tool then searches for actual malware
        signatures and uses the signature output from ClamAV to find the name
        of the malware. This is then used in conjunction with a PE signature
        matching method to form a Google query. Afterwards the malware can
        then be downloaded directly from Google."

        ...
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