Hackers

The race is on to develop a working exploit for MS-12-020 - A serious vulnerability in Microsoft's Remote Desktop Protocol which was patched earlier this week.

The vulnerability affects all current versions of Windows (though the service is usually disabled by default and there are other methods of mitigating the risk). While Microsoft originally predicted that it would take approximately 30 days for an exploit to surface, it appears that the timeframe may be cut shorter. Much shorter. 

Arstechnica has gone through the trouble of testing Anonymous-OS - a live bootable Linux distribution which the “official” Anonymous group has denied having any affiliation with.

The UK Home Secretary Theresa May has approved the extradition of a 23-year-old computer studies student to the United States to face charges of breaking copyright law.

Despite being a teenager when running TVShack.net, Richard O'Dwyer who has never been to the US before or even used servers located in the US, is being extradited merely because authorities in the States claim that the content featured on his site was made in the US.

The Vatican has confirmed that its website has suffered a second attack in a little under six days however declined to comment further on the event.

The Anonymous hacker collective claimed responsibility for the attack on Monday, which cut off access to the Vatican website for several hours and also tampered with data on the Vatican Radio computer system.

The Trustwave 2012 Global Security Report has just been published, identifying various areas of vulnerabilities that threaten data security.

The report which studied more than 300 data breaches occurring over the year 2011 and across 18 countries, observes that cyber attacks continue to rise (no surprises there) and that hackers are increasingly going after business customer records (read, where the money is).

Director-general of the BBC's Persian service, Mark Thompson, said the BBC had suffered a "sophisticated cyber attack", most likely perpetrated by the Iranian government.

The attacks included attempts to jam satellite feeds of the British Broadcasting Corporation services into Iran and an automated phone jamming attack that swampped lines at its London office.

Back in December of last year when Anonymous hacked into security think tank Stratfor, one of its claims was the theft of 200GB worth of data, including e-mails and client credit information.

Now, the FBI saying that between December 6, 2011 in February 2012, “at least $700,000 worth of unauthorized charges were made to credit card accounts that were among those stolen during the hack”.

Boston-based Web security firm Trusteer has uncovered a new scheme to raid online banking accounts. In this newly discovered method, the bad guys steal the mobile device SIM details during an online transaction, get the existing SIM canceled and replaced with a new one.

Multifunction printers offer an interesting attack vector that can be used to gain a foothold into an internal corporate network. In this podcast, Deral Heiland talks about the attacks that can be mounted against multifunction printers and shares some security best practices and mitigation techniques.

Symantec can confirm that the source code for 2006 versions of Norton Antivirus posted by Anonymous is authentic.