The recent Comodo hack seems to be a lot more serious than initially thought with the latest information that the hacker was actually able to wipe a hard drive on the Comodo server. To quote the gloating hacker:
Some stupids in internet still cannot understand I’m behind the attack on SSL, talks about their small understandings about my hack and makes me nervous. I uploaded JUST 1 table of their ENTIRE database which I own. Also ask Comodo about my hack, ask them what I did to them. Let me tell you what I did: I was logged in into their server via RDP (remote desktop), they detected me and via hardware firewall, they added allowed IP for RDP, so I was no longer able to login via RDP.
UPDATE: It has now been confirmed that Samsung laptops do not contain keyloggers or spyware.
UPDATE: Samsung has issued a statement saying that the finding is false. The statement says the software used to detect the keylogger, VIPRE, can be fooled by Microsoft’s Live Application multi-language support folder. This has been confirmed at F-Secure and two other publications, here and here.
UPDATE: GFI Labs, the maker of VIPRE, has issued an explanation and apology for generating the false positives that led to these articles: “We apologize to the author Mohamed Hassan, to Samsung, as well as any users who may have been affected by this false positive.”
UPDATE: A Samsung executive is said to have personally flown from Newark, N.J., to Burlington, Vt., carrying two unopened boxes containing new R540 laptop computers. These units were immediately put under seal and details recorded for chain-of-custody records. At 17:40, Dr Peter Stephenson, Director of the Norwich University Center for Advanced Computing and Digital Forensics, began the detailed forensic analysis of the disks. The results are expected by Monday.
Original post:
There seems to be a claim (false, as it turns out) that Samsung installs a commercial keylogger called StarLogger on its laptops before shipping them out, apparently to “monitor the performance of the machine and to find out how it is being used.”
This was reported by Mohamed Hassan, MSIA, CISSP, CISA who bought two different models of Samsung’s laptop – the R525 and R540 models. If the report is true, it will be like a rehash of the Sony Rootkit snafu a couple of years back.
There was a book I read called “My Mercedes Is Bigger Than Yours” – which pretty much sums up what the book was all about: bragging rights as to whose car is “bigger”. In this case the practice, in some cultures, of using the model tag on a Mercedes -Benz car as an index of the economic and social power of its owner: for example, the Mercedes-Benz 200 designated the small rich while the Mercedes-Benz 500 SL announced the super rich. It was a typical intra-class war where your neighbor had to have a bigger and sometimes better car than the one you were driving.
AT&T Inc. and German telephone company Deutsche Telekom AG recently announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which AT&T will acquire T-Mobile USA from Deutsche Telekom in a cash-and-stock transaction currently valued at approximately $39 billion.
The lofty goals of this acquisition according to the AT&T Press Release are as follows:
Virtualization seems to be the buzzword these days and the software that makes its adoption painless for ordinary folks, in my opinion, is Oracle”s VirtualBox. It may not be “there” yet with VMWare, wherever “there” is, but for a basic testing lab, VBox does an awesome job. The software is free – no one asks … Read more
The recent Comodo hack seems to be a lot more serious than initially thought with the latest information that the hacker was actually able to wipe a hard drive on the Comodo server. To quote the gloating hacker:
There was a book I read called “
Mozilla released