July 29th 2009
The LA Times, of all places, has an interesting tidbit about an incident in Northern Virginia. A construction crew in Tyson’s Corner cut a “classified” fiber optic cable. And the construction site was promptly visited by men in black SUVs.
Moreover, the cable cut was fixed that very day by AT&T personnel. Impressive response time, eh?
July 24th 2009
Cousin Jon sent me this Wired link: how to bypass iPhone’s 3GS encryption using jailbreaking tools. I haven’t paid serious attention to the iPhone (AT&T hasn’t had a strong signal in my town) but crypto bypass always gets my attention.
In fact, the weakness has nothing to do with protecting personal information on an iPhone. It’s all about third parties: Apple, the cell provider, and possibly an employer who provides/manages the iPhone.
If you’re not troubled by being limited to the iPhone Apps Store, then the threat’s relatively small, especially compared to desktop systems. Moreover, I doubt we’ll see real iPhone viruses as long as most people are happy with Apple’s app restrictions.
July 23rd 2009
Here’s a scary harbinger of things to come – the top Blackberry carrier in the United Arab Emirates developed its own “upgrade” and distributed it to its customers. The carrier’s upgrade contains spyware that apparently sends decrypted e-mails back to the vendor.
The vendor is 60% owned by the UAE government. (digg)
July 21st 2009
A couple of months ago I talked to an attorney at a regional law firm. He mentioned that some of his clients had lost tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars to fraudulent wire transfers. I surmised that it was due to rootkits that allowed someone to remotely perform a wire transfer. I also wondered if this was a local or widespread phenomenon.
Apparently it’s widespread. Here’s Brian Krebs talking about business bank accounts being wiped out in the Post’s Security Fix. Somebody is making a lot of money out of this.