TechBlog

rockpapershotgun.com: This just came in from Valve: “The PC version of the product will be powered with Steamworks for both the digital and tangible versions of the game and, as with all Steamworks titles, offline play will also be supported along with Auto-Updating, Achievements, and more. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 will also support dedicated servers on day 1.” Better, I suppose. The game is out November 8th. ...

Web of Trust (WOT), the world’s leading website reputation rating service, and Mail.ru Group, Russia’s largest Internet company, have partnered together to improve online protection for 300 million people using Russia’s leading free e-mail service, Mail.ru. All links contained in emails received by Mail.ru users are checked through WOT’s reputation database to warn users from following untrustworthy links that could lead to scams, identity theft, malware and other online threats. ...

SophosLabs: Imagine the scene. You buy a second-hand laptop using it to, among other things, have secret sexy video chats with your significant other. Unbeknownst to you, naked photos of you are being taken by a company hired to track down the stolen laptop. Ouch. This is what has happened to Ohio-based Susan Clements-Jeffrey and her boyfriend. Absolute Software is in the business of helping people recover their computers. Fair enough. But is taking nude snaps of the person using the stolen laptop a step too far? ...

SophosLabs: Julianne Hough is famous in the United States not just for being an actress and country music singer, and dating “American Idol” host Ryan Seacrest, but also for having won ABC’s “Dancing with the stars” TV show twice. So, hardly the kind of woman who you would think would need to resort to a cheap publicity stunt to raise her profile. But no doubt there are skeptics who are right now wondering if the news that her mobile phone was “hacked” and one hundred of her private photographs published on the net is nothing more than a way of gaining attention. ...

Read it yourself… 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 ———- Forwarded message ———- From: J.H. Date: 2011/8/29 Subject: [kernel.org users] [KORG] Master back-end break-in To: [email protected] —–BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE—– Hash: SHA1 Afternoon Everyone, As you can guess from the subject line, I've not had what many would consider a “good” day. Earlier today discovered a trojan existing on HPA's personal colo machine, as well as hera. Upon some investigation there are a couple of kernel.org boxes, specifically hera and odin1, with potential pre-cursors on demeter2, zeus1 and zeus2, that have been hit by this. As it stands right now, HPA is working on cleaning his box, and I'm working on hera (odin1 and zeus1 are out of rotation still for other reasons), mainly so that if one of us finds something of interest, we can deal with it and compare notes on the other box. Points of interest: – – Break-in seems to have initially occurred no later than August 12th – – Files belonging to ssh (openssh, openssh-server and openssh-clients) were modified and running live. These have been uninstalled and removed, all processes were killed and known good copies were reinstalled. That said all users may wish to consider taking this opportunity to change their passwords and update ssh keys (particularly if you had an ssh private key on hera). This seems to have occurred on or around August 19th. – – A trojan startup file was added to rc3.d – – User interactions were logged, as well as some exploit code. We have retained this for now. – – Trojan initially discovered due to the Xnest /dev/mem error message w/o Xnest installed; have been seen on other systems. It is unclear if systems that exhibit this message are susceptible, compromised or not. If you see this, and you don't have Xnest installed, please investigate. – – It \*appears\* that 3.1-rc2 might have blocked the exploit injector, we don't know if this is intentional or a side affect of another bugfix or change. – – System is being verified from backups, signatures, etc. As of right now things look correct, however we may take the system down soon to do a full reinstall and for more invasive checking. – – As a precaution a number of packages have been removed from the system, if something was removed that you were using please let us know so we can put it back. – – At this time we do not know the vector that was used to get into the systems, but the attackers had gained root access level privileges. That's what we know right now, some of the recent instabilities may have been caused by these intrusions, and we are looking into everything. If you are on the box, keep an eye out, and if you see something please let us know immediately. Beyond that, verify your git trees and make sure things are correct. – – John ‘Warthog9' Hawley Chief Kernel.org Administrator —–BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE—– Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Fedora – http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAk5a5U0ACgkQ/E3kyWU9dif+1ACfYPlgq/keFrFO77AmQVduKGwx TAcAnRAu6nHt74+5aC+fPeb8aT0hcy2K =Semd —–END PGP SIGNATURE—–

Google: Today we received reports of attempted SSL man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks against Google users, whereby someone tried to get between them and encrypted Google services. The people affected were primarily located in Iran. The attacker used a fraudulent SSL certificate issued by DigiNotar, a root certificate authority that should not issue certificates for Google (and has since revoked it). Google Chrome users were protected from this attack because Chrome was able to detect the fraudulent certificate. ...

BetaNews.com: Panda Security has released Panda Cloud Antivirus 1.9.1 Beta, a preview of its forthcoming 2.0 release. The beta sees Panda’s lightweight free cloud-based antivirus tool add firewall protection for the first time. The new firewall is community based, which means it’s capable of detecting known processes and settings appropriate levels of protection for them without bothering the end user with a pop-up alert. The new firewall is visible from a new tab on the Panda Cloud Antivirus interface. ...

Blogger Buzz: As you may have heard, things are starting to look a little different across many Google products—and today, Blogger is the next product to get a makeover. It’s been a few years since we made major updates to Blogger’s look and feel, and there’s a lot more to these changes than just shiny new graphics. We’ve rewritten the entire editing and management experience from scratch so it’s faster and more efficient for you—and easier for us to update and improve over time. ...

Gmail Blog: The great thing about web apps is that you can access all of your information on the go, and we’ve introduced ways to use Google Apps on a variety of devices like mobile phones and tablets. But it’s inevitable that you’ll occasionally find yourself in situations when you don’t have an Internet connection, like planes, trains and carpools. When we announced Chromebooks at Google I/O 2011, we talked about bringing offline access to our web apps, and now we’re taking our first steps in that direction. Gmail offline will be available today, and offline for Google Calendar and Google Docs will be rolling out over the next week, starting today. ...

Mozilla Security Blog: Mozilla just released an update to Firefox for Desktop, Thunderbird and SeaMonkey. Updates are now available for: Firefox for Windows, Mac and Linux (final release) Firefox for Windows, Mac and Linux (3.6.21 final release) Firefox Aurora for Windows, Mac and Linux Firefox Nightly for Windows, Mac and Linux SeaMonkey (2.3.2) Thunderbird (6.0.1) We strongly recommend that all users upgrade to these releases. If you already have Firefox, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours. Users can also manually check for updates if they do not want to wait for the automatic update. ...