Sunday, September 03, 2006

ActiveX security faces storm before calm

Using a custom-built data fuzzing tool, the security researcher pinpointed more than 100 vulnerabilities in the ActiveX controls included with the default installation of Microsoft's Windows XP operating system. Data fuzzing tools combine knowledge of the input parameters accepted by a software package with a tenacious and systematic mangling of the data to discover how applications react to various permutations, whether valid or invalid.

Source : http://www.securityfocus.com/news/11403

Operation Fastlink


'Operation Fastlink’ Is The Largest Global Enforcement Action
Ever Undertaken Against Online Piracy" states the headline of the USDOJ press release. Operation Fastlink conducted by the FBI, coordinated by the FBI Cyber Division, and the U.S. Department of Justice, coordinated by the Computer Crimes and Intellectual Property Section (CCIPS) of the Criminal Division with assistance from the BSA, RIAA, MPAA, and ESA to name a few. They targetted large gropus and some well known organizations such as Fairlight, Kalisto, Echelon, APC, Class and Project X.

April 21st operation fastlink started and within 24 hours Operation Fastlink seized more than 200 computers including 30 servers used for storage. This took place across over 27 states in the USA and foreign searches in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Netherlands, Singapore, Sweden, Great Britian, and Northern Ireland.

Update
FLT (Fairlight) Busted - News Articles: 1 | 2
Photos of Bust: 1 | 2 | 3


A member posted a link to a documented giving some details of what happens, how to deal with it and protect against it. This document has been mirrored here.

Virus writers target upcoming Windows scripting language

An Austrian group of virus writers has published new proof of concept malware code that targets the forthcoming Windows Powershell technology.

The MSH/Cibyz worm doesn’t exploit any vulnerability in the scripting tool. Instead it's similar to batch-type viruses written in Javascript or Visual Basic (VB) that instruct a system to install malware after a users executes the script.

Source : http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2161396/virus-writers-target-upcoming

L.A. Police Arrest 4 on Piracy Charges

"Los Angeles police early Thurday arrested four men who allegedly produced 5,000 illegal copies of movies, making one of the city's biggest crackdowns on piracy to date.

The arrests were announced by Police Chief William J. Bratton at the news conference at the Grove shopping plaza, a few yards from the multiplex where police officers earlier this month made law banning videotaping inside movie theaters.

Attended by top officials, studio executive and labor union representatives, the news conference was design as a high-profile show of force in the film industry's efforts to battle the global piracy problem it claimed siphoned more than $3 billion a year from it coffers."

EliteTorrents shut down by U.S. customs and FBI

New york times wrotes:
"EliteTorrents, a well known and one of the most used BitTorrent sites has been shut down today by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Here is the entire press release...

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Acting Assistant Attorney General John C. Richter of the Criminal Division, Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for Immigration and Customs Enforcement Michael J. Garcia, and Assistant Director Louis M. Reigel of the FBI's Cyber Division today announced the first criminal enforcement action targeting individuals committing copyright infringement on peer-to-peer (P2P) networks using cutting EDGE file-sharing technology known as BitTorrent. "