-----Original Message----- From: NIPC Watch [mailto:nipc.watch@private] Sent: Friday, May 09, 2003 7:22 AM To: Information Technology Subject: [Information_technology] Daily News 5/09/03 May 08, Associated Press Microsoft admits Passport was vulnerable. Computer researcher Muhammad Faisal Rauf Danka of Pakistan discovered how to breach Microsoft Corp.'s security procedures for its Internet Passport service. The service is designed to protect customers visiting some retail Web sites, sending e-mails and in some cases making credit-card purchases. Microsoft acknowledged the flaw affected all its 200 million Passport accounts but said it fixed the problem early Thursday, after details were published on the Internet Wednesday night. Under a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) last year over lapsed Passport security, Microsoft pledged to take reasonable safeguards to protect personal consumer information during the next two decades or risk fines up to $11,000 per violation. The FTC's Jessica Rich said Thursday that each vulnerable account could constitute a separate violation - raising the maximum fine that could be assessed against Microsoft to $2.2 trillion. Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30330-2003May8.html May 07, Net4Nowt BT Email: 41% Spam and 1 in 220 has Virus. British ISP BT Openworld monitored mails sent by its customers between March 17, 2003 and March 23, 2003. Of more than 25 million emails scanned, nearly 11 million were detected and trapped as spam. This equates to a weekly average of 41 per cent. Thursday was the most popular day for spamming, with more than four million examples detected. Sunday polled the highest percentage of spam with the proportion rising to 51 percent of all messages sent. To make matters worse, the filters also detected over 113,000 viruses - one for every 220 mails sent. Source: http://www.ds-osac.org/view.cfm?KEY=7E44514A455C1E0A3A0F162820 May 07, National Journal IT officials emphasize need for emergency backup systems. Many government offices must do better at backing up their information systems to preserve important data and ensure "continuity of operations" in the event of a terrorist attack, several federal technology officials said on Tuesday at a homeland security conference sponsored by the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association. FEMA's continuity-of-operations plan for many other systems typically amounts to "a pile of tapes" containing archived data, said Robert Coxe, deputy CIO of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Redundant communications and information systems proved invaluable after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, according to Lt. General Harry Raduege of the Defense Information Systems Agency. He recalled that one military agency avoided major data losses during the Pentagon attack because its computer systems had "double backup" capabilities. But he said officials in another Pentagon organization had stored "everything they had" on only one system that was destroyed in the attack. "They lost every bit of that data," he said. Source: http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0503/050703td2.htm Internet Security Systems - AlertCon: 1 out of 4 https://gtoc.iss.net/ Last Changed 8 April 2003 Security Focus ThreatCon: 1 out of 4 www.securityfocus.com Last Changed 18 April 2003 Current Virus and Port Attacks Virus: #1 Virus in USA: WORM_LOVGATE.F Source: http://wtc.trendmicro.com/wtc/wmap.html, Trend World Micro Virus Tracking Center [Infected Computers, North America, Past 24 hours, #1 in United States] Top 10 Target Ports: 137 (netbios-ns), 6346 (gnutella-svc), 80 (www), 1434 (ms-sql-m), 445 (microsoft-ds), 113 (ident), 25 (smtp), 8627 (---), 139 (netbios-ssn), 9007 (---) Source: http://isc.incidents.org/top10.html; Internet Storm Center _______________________________________________ Information_technology mailing list Information_technology@listserv
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