Archive for 'Law & enforcement' Category
20th anniversary of the Morris Worm indictment
On July 26 1989, the first U.S. indictment for spreading malware was issued.
The Morris Worm, the first Internet worm, was released by Cornell grad student Robert Morris back in November 1988 that infected maybe 10% of Internet-connected machines. It exploited a vulnerability in Sendmail and fingerd to propagate itself.
The worm didn’t do anything intentionally malicious, [...]
Helix forensics CD now payware
Oh no! Helix, the most popular compilation of forensics software on a bootable CD became payware only in February 2009. Now a $15/month subscription is required.
Previously, anyone could download and use the ISO for free, which lead to wide adoption… for example, the SANS forensic course uses it, and it was the tool of choice [...]
150 million bots
The majority of the estimated 600 million computers attached to the Internet are home computers, with no one to secure or clean them up when they become compromised. Right now, entire underground economies exist for buying and selling access to trojaned home computers for criminals to broadcast spam, flood targets offline, or just plain old [...]
Read the rest of this entry...Data security and the Patriot Act
Here in Canada the province of Nova Scotia just enacted a law intended to protect citizens from the U.S. Patriot Act. The law purports to solve the problem, but to me it looks worse than useless.
According to the press release, under this new law "the minister of Justice must be notified if there is a [...]
Court declines to suspend Spamhaus domain
Good news for Internet email worldwide: a district court in the U.S. has rejected a motion from a spammer to suspend the spamhaus.org domain name. According to a press release by ICANN, the court rejected the motion as being " too broad to be warranted under the circumstances".
No kidding. As I discussed previously, such [...]