The Registry reports that malware may have been a contributory cause of the crash of Spanair flight JK 5022 crashed in August 2008. The flight crashed moments after taking off from Madrid’s Barajas Airport on a scheduled flight to Las Palmas with 172 on board.
According to the Registry, the airline’s central computer which registered technical problems on planes was infected by Trojans at the time of the fatal crash and this may have resulted in a failure to raise an alarm over multiple problems with the plane.
KrebsOnSecurity.com reports Adobe Systems Inc. today issued software updates to fix at least two security vulnerabilities in its widely-used Acrobat and PDF Reader products. Acrobat and Reader users can update to the latest version, v. 9.3.4, using the built-in updater, by clicking “Help” and then “Check for Updates.”
Krebs writes that “today’s update is an out-of-cycle release for Adobe, which recently moved to a quarterly patch release schedule. … More information on these patches, such as updating older versions of Acrobat and Reader, is available in the Adobe security advisory.”
KrebsOnSecurity reports Apple has released a series of patches to correct security vulnerabilities in several of its products:
KrebsOnSecurity is reporting that hundreds of thousands of Web sites parked at NetworkSolutions.com have been serving up malicious software thanks to a tainted widget embedded in their pages. The problem has been traced to the “Small Business Success Index” widget, an application that Network Solutions makes available to site owners through its GrowSmartBusiness.com blog. Network Solutions has a history of weak security controls that put visitors to its customers web sites at risk of malware infection. See, e.g., our April 19 blog post.
The report is a reminder to employ defense-in-depth on business and home computer systems, including
While nothing you do will make you 100% secure, there’s a lot you can do to minimize the risk of attack.
Suppose you call up your banker and ask him to send someone over to pick up a cash deposit. An hour later, a woman who identifies herself as having been sent from the bank arrives at your office. You ask for her credentials and she shows you an ID Card that says she works at the bank. Do you give her the deposit?
Suppose, instead of calling your banker, you go online to your bank. The web page in your browser; it’s like Sally. She [the web page] says she’s from the bank .. you can even see her “ID card;” the “https:” in the browser window and the “closed lock” in the browser. That lock is something we’ve learned to trust from the earliest days of the web.
Now comes a story in the New York Times that, perhaps, it’s time to adjust our thinking. According to the Times, “those sites which are typically identified by a closed lock displayed somewhere in the Web browser, rely on a third-party organization to issue a certificate that guarantees to a user’s Web browser that the sites are authentic. But as the number of such third-party “certificate authorities” has proliferated into hundreds spread across the world, it has become increasingly difficult to trust that those who issue the certificates are not misusing them to eavesdrop on the activities of Internet users, the security experts say.”
The article quotes Peter Eckersley, a senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an online civil liberties group, as saying “It is becoming one of the weaker links that we have to worry about.”
According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, more than 650 organizations can issue certificates that will be accepted by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox, the two most popular Web browsers. Some of these organizations are in countries like Russia and China, which are suspected of engaging in widespread surveillance of their citizens.
The Times reports that Eckersley identified Etisalat, a wireless carrier in the United Arab Emirates, as the weakest link in the “trust chain.”
Stephen Schultze, associate director of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. is quoted as saying “I think it is a really big deal,” but “is not a reason to panic and stop doing online banking or e-commerce. But it is a bad enough problem that it should be receiving a lot more attention and we should be trying to fix it.”