Security

FoxNews: International hacking group Anonymous took at least 10 Australian government websites offline briefly Tuesday in a series of escalating attacks over proposed changes to privacy laws. The Australian arm of the group has warned it will continue the attacks on “.gov.au” sites until plans to force ISPs to store user data and make it further available to security services are shelved. The attacks started after Prime Minister Julia Gillard answered policy questions via webcam in an online Google+ Hangout session on Saturday but the sites targeted so far are all run by the Queensland State Government. ...

h-Online: A file with 11 million password hashes belonging to users of the online games platform Gamigo has been circulated on the internet. According to an analysis by ZDNet, 8.2 million different email addresses are also part of the 478MB file. Around 3 million of these belong to users from the US, 2.4 million are German addresses and 1.3 million are supposed to originate in France. The list also includes corporate email addresses from companies such as IBM, Siemens, Deutsche Bank and the German insurance company Allianz. ...

h-online: The TeamViewer developers have released updates for a potential security vulnerability discovered in the remote access tool. The company recommends that users install the security updates immediately. Versions 5 to 7 of the Windows, Mac OS X and Linux editions of TeamViewer Full and TeamViewer QuickSupport are affected. The flaw does not appear to have been discovered in TeamViewer Host. The company has not offered any details of the vulnerability, but updated editions of the software can be obtained from the TeamViewer Download page. The new version can simply be installed over the previous installation. ...

Independent: If you’re a fan of fake Rolex watches and cheap Viagra look away now. A huge spam botnet responsible for an estimated 18 billion messages a day has been taken out by security researchers. The four year old botnet – known as Grum – is believed to have been responsible for around 18% of the world’s spam emails. A botnet is a cluster of infected computers used by cybercriminals to send a variety of spam emails – often offering cheap Viagra, fake watches or unusual dating solutions. ...

The Smoking Gun: Christina Aguilera contends that the recent hacking of her e-mail account had stripped her of a “feeling of security” that now “can never be given back,” according to a victim’s impact statement submitted to a U.S. District Court judge in Los Angeles. The singer’s statement was prepared in advance of the sentencing of Christopher Chaney, the Florida felon/online stalker who has pleaded guilty to illegally accessing the e-mail accounts of more than 50 victims (many of them Hollywood figures). ...

Mashable: Sophos’s NakedSecurity blog outlined the threat on Wednesday. The company’s SophosLabs intercepted a “spammed-out email campaign” which was designed to spread malware. Sophos provided the following example: The blog notes that the email address above misspells “Facebook” as “Faceboook.” The link takes the user to a malicious iFrame script, which exposes the user’s computer to malware. However, within four seconds, the user’s browser is directed to a presumably innocent Facebook page like the one below to act as a smokescreen. ...

H-Online: Spammers are currently sending large volumes of spam to users of cloud storage service provider Dropbox. The H’s associates at heise Security have so far received four different pieces of German-language spam at an email address used solely to register with Dropbox, and some of their readers have reported the same problem; similar reports can also be found on the Dropbox forums. In almost all cases, the spam is for suspicious-looking online casinos. ...

This article is copied from Softpedia: Researchers from Symantec, Kaspersky and Seculert **have all come across Madi (Madhi), a relatively new piece of malware that mainly targets organizations from the Middle East. ** Before we take a look at Madi and compare it to other infamous Trojans such as Stuxnet, Duqu, or Flame, let’s take a quick look at its name. According to Wikipedia, Mahdi is considered to be the redeemer of Islam who will rid the world of tyranny, injustice and wrongdoings. ...

Late last week, NVIDIA confirmed that the database for its forums web site had been broken into by unauthorized third parties, with data from more than 400,000 registered users affected. A hacker group calling itself “Team Apollo” has now claimed responsibility for the breach which caused NVIDIA to take the site down. As proof, they have published email addresses and password hashes for approximately 800 users from the database on Pastebin, with more, apparently, to follow. If the data proves to be genuine, NVIDIA’s statement that the password hashes were salted would be contradicted: the database excerpt includes the hash b018f55f348b0959333be092ba0b1f41 three times in the list, the result of md5('nvidia123'). ...

Malware has been spreading on Android mobile phones that takes control of certain email accounts to create a “botnet” to send out spam, a security researcher says. Microsoft security engineer Terry Zink says the malware has infected phones of users’ Yahoo email accounts to send out spam messages. “We’ve all heard the rumors, but this is the first time I have seen it – a spammer has control of a botnet that lives on Android devices,” Zink said in a blog post on Tuesday. ...