Networking

The Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) today gave $5 million in research grants to companies contracting to beef up security around the nation's computer and telecommunications systems. The grants issue from the Critical Infrastructure Protection Grants Program, which funds research on ways to prevent cyber-attack on the nation's most essential networks, such as the electrical grid and the air traffic control system.

The Sendmail mail delivery subsystem is vulnerable to multiple local attacks that lead to information loss, information leaks and mail system compromise.

The mail system privileges compromise affects Sendmail 8.12.0. Other problems affect all versions up to 8.12.0.

L33tdawg: The entire advisory is attached in the read more.

RAZOR Advisory: Multiple Local Sendmail Vulnerabilities
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One of the first moves in America's new war on terrorism took place Sept. 5, six days before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The target: a Richardson, Texas, company called InfoCom that hosts Arabic Websites.

An 80-man terrorism task force launched a three-day raid, crashing 500 Internet sites, freezing bank accounts, and copying information from the company's hard drives....

Fear Along the Firewall

America's computer databases and satellite navigation systems are vulnerable to attack.

By Richard Behar FORTUNE

Computer security firm SecurityFocus said it is not the author of an e-mail and file attachment claiming to be a fix for the recent Nimda worm. In a warning posted to the company's "Incidents" mailing list yesterday, the San Mateo, Calif.-based company said it believes the attachment could be a Trojan horse program that could damage users' systems if opened. SecurityFocus said the e-mail claims to come from it as well as from Cupertino, Calif.-based antivirus firm TrendMicro Inc.

For many companies the phrase "increased security" simply means asking the reception staff to ensure that all visitors are issued with a pass. However, as businesses around the world face the prospect of terrorist attacks, Richard Whitby, head of consultancy at Global Continuity plc, explains what else we can do to minimise the risk.

There are ONLY 13 root servers, dispersed throughout the world which serve as the key way stations in the routing of Internet messages and other traffic. When a Web browser tries to reach a site such as www.yahoo.com, it has to ask the root server to locate the corresponding Internet protocol address -- a string of numbers that is, in Yahoo's case, 204.71.200.33.

U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) today called for the formation of a National Emergency Technology Guard (NET Guard) to mobilize as a technological equivalent of the military’s National Guard in times of national crisis, including terror attacks and natural disasters. To complement other disaster response efforts, Wyden suggested that U.S. information technology (IT) companies could organize and lead a national volunteer response team to quickly reactivate and safeguard the nation’s communication capability and infrastructure in times of critical need.

A group of U.K.-based hackers has cracked computers at the AlShamal Islamic Bank in Sudan and collected data on the accounts of the Al Qaeda terrorist organization and its leader Osama bin Laden, Kim Schmitz, a flamboyant German hacker/businessman, has claimed. Schmitz, who has offered a $10 million reward for the capture of bin Laden, told Newsbytes that the information has been turned over to the FBI. Bin Laden, a millionaire Saudi exile whose base is now Afghanistan, is suspected of being the driving force behind the deadly Sept.

A resurgence of the Nimda worm failed to materialize Friday, leaving unfulfilled warnings that several security companies made this week.

The e-mail component of the worm, which sends infected messages to each entry in an infected computer's Outlook address book, reactivates 10 days after the original infection. That part of the program had antivirus researchers and security experts worried that the Nimda worm was again set to spread quickly.

But Friday morning, 10 days after the first infections started to take hold, few signs heralded a return of the worm.

Researchers may have found a cyber-time bomb in the code for the Nimda worm that is set to re-activate itself exactly 10 days after its first occurrence.

Code in the Nimda worm that orders the program to send infected email could cause a resurgence, security experts warned on Thursday.

Several security researchers dissecting copies of the worm found code that would reactivate the program 10 days from the time the host computer was originally infected.