A serious threat to our national security

That is really certifiable, on two levels. One that they did not install any kind of AV protection on the laptops sent into orbit and two that removable media can be carried into space without first being scanned for viruses. Lucky nothing critical on the ISS runs 'Doze.

I guess they thought the AV software would add mass to the laptop!

Someone in the UK recently bought a secondhand laptop containing 1 million unencrypted Natwest & Royal Bank of Scotland customer details including secret identity questions, DOB, mothers maiden name for a mere £35 on eBay. I reckon the banks need to be fined the black market price for a full identity theft of every ID x1000000 to discourage such sloppiness. Even that may not be sufficient deterrent.

And last week a contractor managed to lose a memory stick containing the personal details of every prisoner in the UK. The same contractor is responsible for the UK identity cards and master database :(

Regards, Martin Brown

** Posted from **

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| Zombie network explosion: long shadow cast by SQL injection surge? | Published Tuesday 2nd September 2008 | | The number of compromised zombie PCs in botnet networks has quadrupled | over the last three months, according to figures from the Shadowserver | Foundation. | | Shadowserver tracks botnet activity and the number of command and | control servers. It uses a variety of metrics to slice and dice its | figures based in part on the entropy of botnet infections. The clear | trend within these figures is upwards, with a rise in botnet numbers | of 100,000 to 400,000 (if 30 day entropy is factored into equations) | or from 20,000 to 60,000 (for five day entropy). | | Entropy of botnets is calculated on the basis that if no activity is | seen from a specific IP for a number of days - either 30, 10 or five - | then it is removed from the botnet count. | | Shadowserver figures suggest the number of command and control servers | has actually decreased over the last month, following a spike in | activity back in July. | | Security watchers at the Internet Storm Centre have a number of | explanations for the rise in the zombie population. | | It could be that experienced botnet herders have got better at keeping | control of compromised machines, or that more machines have been | infected. Not much by way of email malware activity has been | monitored, so if the latter explanation is true, then drive-by | download attacks are playing a bigger role in spreading botnet client | infestation. The recent rise in SQL injection attacks that plant | malicious scripts on vulnerable servers could be to blame, but there's | no hard data to support this plausible theory. | | Improved detection of web-based attacks may be needed to gauge the | extent of the problem, according to security watchers at the Internet | Storm Centre. | | "We are very good at tracking email-based malware (including | lead-the-user-to-the-bad-website variety) and certainly network based | attacks," writes ISC staffer John Bambenek. "Short of spidering the | web on a consistent basis, it gets difficult to find infected sites | for that malware. We at the ISC, and I'm sure many others, are working | on ways to honeypot pure web-based attacks to capture this malware, | but much work is left to be done."

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Guy Macon