Security and the Net

 
So, like me, you’ve probably been wondering about this DNS bug the whole world has been talking about. What is it? How does it affect the average internet user? And how do you protect yourself from this?
First: a quick DNS introduction
 
To understand this issue, you need to know a little bit about how DNS works. [...]

A quick update about the “NASA hacker”: as expected, Gary’s lawyers have filed an appeal with the European Court of Human Rights to try and stop his extradiction. Good luck Gary!

A colleague sent me these links earlier. To sum it up twitter-style:
OMG twitter hacked XSS LOL
Well actually the message was a bit longer, but you get the point. Anyway, once I got to look at it the problem was fixed alreay. Not in 90 seconds, mind you, but 90 minutes is still pretty impressive. 
Anyway, notifying [...]

I’ve been meaning to write a short summary about the DNS vulnerability that’s been hot news for the past few weeks. While preparing that I stumbled upon this report about a new attack that is being used. It appears that this is subtly different than the attack that was released earlier:
Moore said he and others were [...]

I guess you’ve all read the latest news about the “NASA hacker”: he gets extradited to the US. He is seen as a dangerous criminal:
Mark Summers, an official representing U.S. interests in the proceedings against McKinnon, said in British court that McKinnon’s actions were “intentional and calculated to influence and affect the U.S. government by intimidation [...]

Amongst the news about the slowing economy, I noticed this bit of good news: you might be seeing less spam! Apparently, the crew behind the popular Neosploit toolkit are throwing the towel because their hacking tool doesn’t produce enough revenue. 
This might be the beginning of a very good development; as people are struggling to pay [...]

… won’t work. 
There were lots of reports today about internet censorship for foreign media during this years Olypmic by reporters that were already annoyed because of the high costs for their filtered connection. Apparently this is only becoming an issue now that reporters are having problems accessing their news sources sources of background information. According to [...]

As most of you might have noticed, Google has been beefing up the security features of their Gmail service. They recently added two important options:
The first is the “last login” screen, that will show you the last time you logged in, and allows you to check for suspicious activity such as session hijacks.

The other is [...]

For the first time in years there is a new “0-day” exploit for Oracle databases (this one). I can’t find where this was originally posted, but it seems that whoever discovered this vulnerability didn’t notify Oracle that this bug existed before the exploit was in the wild.
Let me be very clear about this: security researchers generally [...]

 
By some strange coincidence, Wordpress already entered the title for the first post I was going to write…
 
Which shouldn’t come as a surprise: anybody who has ever been in a programming course knows this sentence by heart. Which is a strange thing when you stop to think about it; any modern programming language contains many [...]