July 30, 2007
Head For the Hills! Protect Your Computers! It's BLACKHAT/DEFCON!!!
Yes, the drumbeat of potential security threats is getting louder as Black Hat goes into session, followed by the some-what-less professional and more drama-scene laden DEFCON.
At Black Hat, Sipera's (www.sipera.com) VIPER lab is going to demo a VoIP exploit through an enterprise softphone, showing how hackers can take control and delete/steal data from a laptop. They are also going to review various Wi-Fi/dual-mode phone threats presentation on Wednesday. Expect to see a lot of headline grabbers on that presentation.
There's a whole day's track at Black Hat dedicated to VoIP/voice security on August 1. I'll have to make nice with the PR people at B-H and see if they'll send me the hardcopy conference notes (Nico! Oh, Nico!...)
Posted by dmohney at 11:13 PM | Comments (0)
July 18, 2007
A unique way (well not) to spot SPAM
I have an interesting window on spam through the news@vonmag.com alias.
The news@vonmag.com alias is used for press releases -- not my private mail -- but spammers and evil-do-ers will send everything from "Your classmates at
The most amusing e-mails to news@vonmag.com get are the ones that say "You have subscribed to this newsletter via opt-in" -- what junk. I've never put down news@vonmag.com as a contact e-mail address and none of the other editors subscribed to it would have a reason to put it down as an opt-in address (and if they have, well, it could get ugly).
Now, if I had a little more free time on my hands (ha!), I'd write a spam-filtering program against the junk that shows up at news@vonmag.com. Do that after I cure the common cold...
Posted by dmohney at 11:49 AM | Comments (0)
July 08, 2007
This week's .PDF blitz
If you've received a blitz of spam e-mails with .PDF attachments, hopefully you didn't open one.
I don't know what they do, and have no desire to personally find out, but it couldn't have been anything good.
A lot of people have assumed that .PDFs are "safe" but some reporters at the New York Times discovered that .PDFs can be used to carry "payloads" for snooping. Looks like someone in the generic world of evil-doers decided to take a crack at it.
*sigh*
Now the anti-virus/anti-spyware checker has to sweep another file type for another profile.
Posted by dmohney at 12:05 PM | Comments (0)