Salon wonders what would happen to Iraq's computers. Would the US unleash cyberwar tactics, or simply shut down the pipes?

Saddam Hussein could lose Internet access at the flip of a switch, and there's not much his geeks can do about it.

posted by mt at 08:48

Lest you forget to update your snort install:

The discovery and disclosure of a serious vulnerability in the Sendmail e-mail software by Atlanta based security giant Internet Security Systems (ISS) is starving another vulnerability of the attention it deserves.

posted by js at 15:25

It didn't take long folks - less than 24 hours. A Polish hacking group posted an exploit for the recent Sendmail bug affecting Red Hat and Slackware Linux distributions.
posted by mt at 09:24

Browsing can be a dangerous sport:

The security flaw affects version 6 of the Macromedia Flash Player, which was released a year ago this month and has been installed on an estimated 75 percent of personal computers worldwide, according to the company.

posted by js at 10:39

Slate debunks:

Yet here we are in 2003, and the cyberterrorism casualty list is still barren. Sure, some Serb hackers slowed down the NATO Web site during the Kosovo conflict, and a couple of Chinese hackers defaced sites in the wake of their country's embassy being bombed. But, honestly, did either incident get you quaking in your Keds?

posted by mt at 09:42

Wired reports on what many have known for some time - Google is one heck of a multipurpose tool.

"Google, properly leveraged, has more intrusion potential than any hacking tool," said hacker Adrian Lamo, who recently sounded the alarm.

More information intrusion, than network intrusion.
posted by mt at 09:25

A new Sendmail vulnerability:

The flaw allows an attacker to send a specially formatted e-mail that could take control of a mail server running Sendmail and execute a malicious program. At present, no attack tool that could exploit the vulnerability is known to exist, said Greg Olson, chairman and co-founder of Sendmail, the company that has created a commercial version of the software.

posted by mt at 13:44

Our routers are in trouble. Implicit trust = big trouble.

However, a misconfigured router, or one that has been compromised by an online intruder, can cause chaos by advertising itself as the best path to an unrelated network. That's because routers using BGP implicitly trust their neighbors on the Internet--they don't ask for any sort of digital identification. Using such digital forgery could allow an attacker to redirect traffic, to wiretap data, to create an information "black hole" and even to masquerade as another server, Dugan said.

posted by mt at 11:08