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Posts about viruses, worms and other kinds of malicious software
We’ve all been trained how to spot phishing emails: check the sender address, hover over links to see where they go, etc. But that’s a lot of work and mental effort. And, given that most emails aren’t phish, almost all wasted. So can we do it better? A fascinating paper by Rick Wash looked at […]
Having acted as programme chair for the FIRST Security and Incident response conference last year, I also got to co-edit the special conference issue of the ACM journal Digital Threats: Research and Practice (DTRAP). FIRST sponsored the journal, so our issue is open access, available for anyone to read. Topics covered: Using power consumption to […]
The recent TF-CSIRT meeting in Zurich included a talk by the Swiss telecoms regulator (like ours, called Ofcom, though their ‘F’ stands for Federal!) on the law covering websites in the .ch domain that distribute malware, normally as the result of a compromise. Under this law a designated authority can order the temporary or permanent […]
An interesting paper from ENISA and the NATO Cyberdefence Centre illustrates the narrow space that the law allows for incident response, and the importance of ensuring that new laws don’t prevent incident response teams from protecting networks, systems, their users and information against attack. By comparing the details of German and Estonian law, the report […]
There was an excellent line-up of speakers at Janet CSIRT’s conference this week. Lee Harrigan (Janet CSIRT) discussed how the team are now monitoring Pastebin for signs of security problems affecting Janet sites. Pastebin can be a useful place to share large files, however some users apparently don’t realise that things posted to the site […]
Malicious software, generally shortened to malware, is involved in a wide variety of security incidents, from botnets and phishing to industrial sabotage. Analysing what malware does and how it can be detected, neutralised and removed from infected computers is an important part of keeping networks and computers secure. However there are many millions of different […]
Given the outcome of previous hearings on copyright infringement, the court’s conclusion this week that the UK’s major ISPs should be ordered to block access to The Pirate Bay was no surprise. However the judgment raises an interesting technical issue. In a previous hearing, it had been pointed out that there was a way to […]
A bot is a program, maliciously installed on a computer, that allows that computer and thousands of others to be controlled by attackers. Bots are one of the major problems on the Internet, involved in many spam campaigns and distributed denial of service attacks, as well as allowing attackers to read private information from the […]