Security

theregister.co.uk wrote: A Brit who distributed a Trojan horse that posed as a patch for popular shoot-em-up game_Call of Duty_ has been jailed for 18 months. Lewys Martin, 20, of Deal in Kent, used the malware to harvest bank login credentials, credit card details and internet passwords from the compromised Windows PCs of his victims. Martin then apparently laundered the credentials via underground cybercrime forums, earning $5 or less for every credential, directing proceeds of his criminal activity towards an offshore account in Costa Rica, funds which remain beyond the reach of UK police. ...

The H-Online: Version 7.7.2 of QuickTime for Windows has been released to address a total of 17 security vulnerabilities in the media player. According to Apple, these include integer, stack and buffer overflows, as well as memory corruption issues, all of which could be could exploited by an attacker to crash the application or execute arbitrary code on a victim’s system. For an attack to be successful, a user must first open a malicious web site or a specially crafted file. ...

The H-Online: RealNetworks is warning users about multiple security vulnerabilities in its RealPlayer media player application for Windows; the company says that none of the, now fixed, holes are known to have been used to compromise systems. The released update, version 15.0.4.53 of RealPlayer, closes three security holes. One hole is related to ASM RuleBook parsing that could be exploited by an attacker to remotely execute arbitrary code, another is a memory corruption problem related to MP4 file handling in the QuickTime plugin used by RealPlayer, and the third is a buffer overrun in the Media parser. ...

The H-Online: As previously announced, Microsoft has released seven bulletins to close a total of 23 vulnerabilities on its May Patch Tuesday. The total number of bulletins belies the scope of the patches, however, as the combined update MS12-034 closes various holes in numerous products. The reason for this is a critical hole in the code for processing TrueType fonts that was exploited by the Duqu spyware last year. The hole was closed in the Windows kernel on the December Patch Tuesday; however, Microsoft has since used a code scanner to track down the vulnerable code in numerous other components; among them is the gdiplus.dll library, which is used by various browsers to render web fonts. ...

The H-Online: The updates to PHP versions 5.3.12 and 5.4.2 released on Thursday do not fully resolve the vulnerability that was accidentally disclosed on Reddit, according to the discoverer of the flaw. The bug in the way CGI and PHP interact with each other leads to a situation where attackers can execute code on affected servers. The issue remained undiscovered for eight years. The best protection at present is offered by setting up filter rules on the web server. However, the RewriteRule workaround described on PHP.net is also, according to security expert Christopher Kunz, inadequate. He suggests a slightly modified form of the rule as an alternative. ...

The H-Online: Adobe has released a security advisory relating to an object confusion vulnerability which allows an attacker to crash the player or take control of an affected system. Adobe says that there are reports of this vulnerability being exploited in the wild as part of targeted email-based attacks which trick the user into clicking on a malicious file; this exploit only targets Flash Player on Internet Explorer on Windows, though the vulnerability exists on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Android versions of the player. ...

TheHackerNews: Google got Pwned ? NO Few Algerian Script Kiddies try to spread fake rumors that they Hack and Deface the Giant Search engine “Google Iranian” domain http://www.google.co.ir/ . As the screenshot shown a Algerian flag on it and Page Titles : **“**H4Ck3D By vaga-hacker dz and DR.KIM”. As mentioned by hacker, the team include hackers named : “V4Ga-Dz,Dz0ne,DR-KIM King-Dz,BroX0 aghilass elite jrojan password kha&mix wasim -dz” . It is not confirmed that, either these are member from some Anonymous Hackers but they try to use Anonymous Hackers Tag line : We Dont Forget , We Dont Forgive, Expect Us! to get some publicity. ...

SophosLabs: According to reports, Iran has started making its own anti-virus software. It is said that experts from Shiraz Computer Emergency Response Team of APA (Academic Protection and Awareness) of Iran have been working on the project to help better protect the country’s digital defenses. Of course, Iran is no stranger to malware. It found itself thrust into the spotlight in 2010 when the infamous Stuxnet worm was widely reported to have infected industrial plants (including nuclear plants) in the country with the seeming intention to target and sabotage SCADA systems. ...

Symantec Connect: Customers of popular email service providers have been a common target for phishers for identity theft purposes. Phishers are constantly devising new phishing bait strategies in the hope of stealing user email addresses and passwords. In April 2012, Symantec observed phishing pages that mimicked popular email services in an attempt to dupe users with attractive storage plans. Customers were flooded with fake offers of free additional storage space for services such as email, online photo albums, and documents. In the first example, the phishing site was titled “Welcome to New [BRAND NAME] Quota Verification Page”. According to the bogus offer, the additional storage plan ranged from 20 GB to 1 TB per year, at no extra cost. The phishing page boasted that the free additional storage plan will help customers prevent loss of data and the inability to send and receive emails due to exhausted storage space. It also stated that the plan will auto-renew each year and the customer can choose to cancel at any time by returning to the same page: ...

The H-Online: Google has released a new update to the stable 18.x branch of its Chrome web browser to close a number of security holes found in the application. The update, labelled 18.0.1025.168, addresses a total of five vulnerabilities, three of which are rated as “high severity” by the company. These include use-after-free problems in floating point handling and the XML parser; all of these bugs were detected using the AddressSanitizer. As part of its Chromium Security Vulnerability Rewards program, Google paid a security researcher by the name of “miaubiz”, who is number three in the company’s Security Hall of Fame, $1,000 for discovering and reporting one of the float handling problems. Two medium risk problems related to IPC validation and a race condition in sandbox IPC have also been corrected. ...