Security

In a surprise move, Microsoft has announced it will offer a free anti-virus and security solution from the second half of next year.

It will stop selling OneCare, its all-in-one security and PC management service, from the end of June 2009.

The new software, code-named Morro, will be a no-frills program suited to smaller and less powerful computers.

The software will be free to download and will support Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7.

The move comes as sales of the OneCare subscription service are flagging - reportedly because the anti-virus marketplace is already flooded with big-name players such as Symantec and McAfee.

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Apple finally rolled out a software update to fix the much-heralded Domain Name System (DNS) security flaw, but it seems the celebration may have been premature. The Cupertino, Calif.-based vendor rolled out Security Update 2008-005, a fix that Apple said plugs several security holes, including its implementation of the BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain) server, which left users of its Mac OS X operating system susceptible to the DNS flaw disclosed earlier this month.

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If you haven’t heard about the current DNS vulnerability, here is a Reader’s Digest-like summary. Security guru Dan Kaminsky found a vulnerability that could give the bad guys a relatively easy way to redirect Internet traffic. For example: You might think you are logging on to Bank of America’s Web site. But instead, some hacker may have just exploited a domain name system vulnerability and is now in control of your identity.

Kaminsky deserves credit for finding this flaw and alerting the Internet community so it could fix the problem. This effort is well under way, but according to an article in yesterday’s New York Times, Kaminsky believes that 41 percent of all DNS servers are still vulnerable, meaning that no one has patched these systems with new software that closes this gaping security hole.

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That’s the word from security researcher Dan Kaminsky, who recently presided over an unprecedented effort to coordinate a fix for a DNS vulnerability across more than 80 software and hardware vendors.

And now the danger flare has been fired to warn computer users everywhere that the risk is real. Technical details about how one might exploit the vulnerability have been disclosed.

The domain name system translates domain names, like “informationweek.com,” into numeric IP addresses and vice versa. The DNS flaw, if exploited, allows what is known as DNS cache poisoning. This involves remapping domain names to different, potentially malicious servers.
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The disclosure from major vendors generated a good deal of concern, but how widespread is the actual danger and what can be done?

With DNS so vital to the operation of the Internet, security threats to it need to be taken seriously. But when it comes to the recent disclosure of a multivendor DNS cache poisoning issue, who really is at risk? And will the Internet collapse if the issue isn’t fixed?

Experts say that while the new DNS cache poisoning issue is very serious, DNS has been threatened before — and the core structure of the Internet name servers remains ready for such challenges.

“This is the type of attack against DNS that we anticipated years ago would be theoretically possible,” VeriSign CTO Ken Silva told InternetNews.com. “And this is not the first instance of cache poisoning that has been reported, as there were similar issues in the late 90’s.”

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As IT groups spawn new virtual machines at a breakneck pace, security is too often an afterthought. Can VMware’s dominance of the enterprise server virtualization market buy us some breathing room? Our survey on the state of VMware security revealed some startling facts: Just four in 10 consider hyperjacking a realistic threat, and nearly half take a laissez-faire approach to virtual machine provisioning and management. Some even let business units deploy VMs with no oversight, perhaps because 20% assert that VMs are safer than physical servers.

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Microsoft has warned Web surfers about a Safari vulnerability that could put Windows users at risk. The flaw was one of three first found by researcher Nitesh Dhanjani. One of the bugs Dhanjani found was serious enough to be kept secret until a fix is found. However, Apple said it does not consider the problem Microsoft has drawn attention to a security issue.

A flaw in Apple’s (Nasdaq: AAPL) Safari Web browser has caught the attention of Microsoft’s (Nasdaq: MSFT) security team. The software maker has released an advisory for Windows XP and Windows Vista users running Safari, informing them that Microsoft has begun investigating a vulnerability discovered two weeks earlier by Nitesh Dhanjani, a security researcher.

One of three bugs Dhanjani found in connection with Safari, the flaw exposes PC users to a “carpet bomb” attack, allowing potentially malicious files to be downloaded to and run on a PC without the owners’ consent.

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‘Bluetooth’ Tracking System

Engineers have created a method that uses pervasive Bluetooth signals from cell phones and other wireless devices to constantly update how long it takes vehicles and pedestrians to travel from one point to another.

The method envisioned by engineers at the Indiana Department of Transportation represents a potentially low-cost leap in technology to provide information for everything from the speed of the morning commute to the sluggishness of airport security lines.

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Most all modern home computer users are switched on to the fact they have to protect their computer from nasties: anti-virus, anti-spam, firewalls have all entered the common vernacular. If you don’t use ‘that’ operating system from Redmond though does this still apply? And what packages should you use?

The short answer is yes, computer security is everyone’s responsibility. Ok, the case can be made that if your computer is used for a dedicated purpose and does not interact with a network or have any other connections made to it and it does not ever read any floppy disks or CDs or other media that it need not run any such applications.

However, such a computer would most likely be found as a back office financials system or running specialised scientific software in a laboratory. You most definitely wouldn’t be using it to read e-mail, browse the web, read iTWire or do your banking.

For those computers more prudence is required. We all know Microsoft Windows attracts virus writers and malware like faeces attracts flies whereas Linux users rarely get engaged in any debate on whether one anti-virus system is too bloated compared to another.

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The focus for delivering malware infections has shifted from email to web pages Sophos, the anti-malware company, has just published its latest quarterly security report (PDF), and says:

From January to the end of March 2008, Sophos identified an average of more than 15,000 newly infected webpages each day. Most worrying for computer users, is the fact that the majority of these poisoned sites — 79 percent — are found on legitimate websites that have been hacked. February saw the website of UK broadcaster ITV fall victim to a poisoned web advert campaign which targeted both Windows and Mac users, while in March a Euro 2008 football ticket website was hacked by cybercriminals in an attempt to infect unwary fans. In contrast, just one in every 2500 emails is now infected, compared to one in every 909 in 2007.

What’s also new is that the number of threats hosted in the US jumped to 42% while the number hosted in China tumbled to only 30%, putting the US on top in the race to infect users’ machines. (I seem to recall that one excuse for China’s position was the amount of out-of-date and unpatched pirate software. What’s the US’s excuse?)

“About 1 percent of web requests now deliver an infected page, most of which are legitimate websites belonging to people just trying to earn a living,” says Carole Theriault, senior security consultant at Sophos.