Saumil's Infosec Blog

IT security firm, Sophos, has warned Twitter users on a new attack that has led to thousands of accounts being compromised by hackers using a Web 2.0 botnet. The hijacked accounts are later used to spread money-making spam campaigns.

The security firm found out that fellow members of the micro-blogging network had posted messages disguised as humorous inks, but were actually aimed to phish passwords credentials from unsuspecting users.
 
These messages were accompanied with clickable links which...

Imagine that a widely downloaded, malicious smart phone application has triggered a national security crisis and brought the country’s telecommunications and electronic infrastructure to a standstill. This scenario was only make-believe: the East Coast still has power and Midwestern factories are functioning. But the threats from cyber exploits against the national and economic security of the United States is very real, according to former senior government officials who participated in a ...

Western governments are facing a potent and ill-understood new threat from terrorists and hostile powers in the shape of cyber warfare, military and security experts have warned.

Network attacks, a British government report says, are "growing in seriousness and frequency". And in a timely reminder of the emphasis that states and corporations alike are placing on the problem, Google and the National Security Agency were yesterday said to be finalising the details of a co-operative deal aimed ...

What is believed to be the country's biggest hacker training site has been shut down by police in Central China's Hubei province.

Three people were also arrested, local media reported yesterday. The three, who ran Black Hawk Safety Net, are suspected of offering others online attacking programs and software, a crime recently added to the Criminal Law. A total of 1.7 million yuan ($249,000) in assets were also frozen.

According to the provincial public security department of Hubei, the closu...

“Carry out all my demands or the entire country’s electricity will be cut off.” Is this another line from a suspense film, or is it a palpable threat made possible with a computer keyboard? “Today, there is a growing trend amongst hackers around the world to threaten national infrastructures for ransom,” says Dr. Yaniv Levyatan, an expert in information war at the University of Haifa.

If someone still thinks that this is science fiction, Dr. Levyatan notes how just recently, in Nov...

China to US: shut up about "so-called Internet freedom"

In the wake of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's major speech yesterday on Internet freedom, a speech in which she called out countries like Egypt, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Iran, and China, most governments have yet to respond. China, however, was quick to reply after dealing with the Google issue for a week already. 

Here's what has happened in 24 turbulent hours.

Wide open. It didn't take China long to respond to Clinton's call to te...

GPS

A couple of weeks ago a friend told me that someone she knew had their car broken into while they were at a football game. Their car was parked on the green which was adjacent to the football stadium and specially allotted to football fans. Things stolen from the car included a garage door remote control, some money and a GPS which had been prominently mounted on the dashboard.  

When the victims got home, they found that their house had been ransacked and just about everything worth any...

Cyberterrorism is a new terrorist tactic that makes use of information systems or digital technology, especially the Internet, as either an instrument or a target. As the Internet becomes more a way of life with us,it is becoming easier for its users to become targets of the cyberterrorists. The number of areas in which cyberterrorists could strike is frightening, to say the least.

The difference between the conventional approaches of terrorism and new methods is primarily that it is possib...