Recently Twitter.com was hacked and 310 confidential documents were taken from their Google Apps account.  These documents consisted of executive meeting notes, partner agreements and financial projections to the meal preferences, calendars and phone logs of various Twitter employees.   These documents were delivered to TechCrunch(.com) via email by someone who refers to themselves as “hacker Croll”.

Any individual or company with a shred of ethics would contact authorities and keep this information private.  TechCrunch on the other hand would rather use this information to get more links to their website.  So Mike Arrington  over at TechCrunch thinks leaking confidential documents is a great way to do this.  I for one think this is very unethical and don’t agree with their stance that this is what is considered news.

Twitter has responded to this incident with their own post.

What do you think?

Tags: Exploit, hackers, techcrunch, twitter

Author: Christopher

With Koobface spreading throughout social networking sites, Twitter has taken action by suspending accounts known to be infected with Koobface malware.  Koobface takes control of logged in social network sites to post messages on behalf of the victim to convince friends to click on a link.  These links direct the friends to malicious websites that attempt to infect the visitor.  Koobface also attacks users on Facebook and MySpace using similar techniques.  Previous variants of Koobface have attacked Bebo, Friendster, LiveJournal, and Hi5 according to CERT.
Previously Koobface would use trending topics like Michael Jackson to fool users to click on links to malicious sites when the link advertised a Michael Jackson video.  Koobface is being developed on a regular basis to bypass security software and avoid detection.  Koobface is also able to obtain data from infected users machines and is considered a dangerous threat.

Tags: CERT, koobface, Michael Jackson, social networking

Author: Christopher

Long considered to be malware and a threat to privacy and security, keylogging software has been found on Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 and Google Chrome. However, these keyloggers were not placed there by hackers—the companies put them there on purpose.

Google and Microsoft added keyloggers to their browsers in an attempt to improve searches for their users. Keylogging allows the browser to determine common or most likely searches based on the user’s past usage. They also store user log-ins and passwords for the user’s convenience, track activity to help determine the cause of errors, and employers use keyloggers to track employee productivity. While this is all very useful for the companies doing the tracking, it makes anti-malware protection more complicated, because the malware filters like Kaspersky cannot simply delete all keyloggers as they have up until this point.

Cyber criminals use keylogging to capture and record each keystroke you make to steal personal information like user IDs, passwords and anything else they can use to steal your identity. However, some companies are now using keylogging for more legitimate purposes.

In order to determine the best course of action regarding keyloggers, Kaspersky Labs, an industry leader in anti-malware protection, is seeking legal counsel. While they do not want to accuse legitimate companies of wrongdoing, they still want to provide the best and most comprehensive anti-malware protection on the market. If it were up to Eugene Kaspersky, CEO of the company, users would not stand for these privacy-invading programs to be present on their browsers and request the companies to remove them. “That would save us a lot of work, and we already have plenty to do,” he told Computer Weekly. Google is already reacting to the public’s aversion to keylogging by promising to keep the information anonymous, but Microsoft has made no such announcements as of yet.

What it all comes down to is this: is the convenience provided by keylogging worth compromising the security of your computer?

Tags: identity, Kaspersky, Keylogging, Malware

Author: Christopher