-----Original Message----- From: InfraGard [mailto:infragard@private] Sent: Friday, August 08, 2003 9:11 AM To: Information Technology Subject: [Information_technology] Daily News 8/08/03 August 07, The Mercury News Hacker attack damages 2,000 computers at Stanford. Officials at Stanford University scrambled Thursday, August 7, to repair the damage from a hacking attack that has infected thousands of campus computers. Cedric Bennett, Stanford's director of information security services, said unknown hackers had exploited a newly discovered vulnerability in Microsoft's Windows operating system. About 10 percent of Stanford's 20,000 desktop computers that run Windows were affected. The attack placed a mysterious bit of computer coding on each of the infected machines, which Bennett said the hackers could later activate. University technicians have disconnected the infected machines, used by students, faculty and staff, from the campus network. Source: http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/news/local/6479603.htm August 06, York Daily Record Feds want Internet fraud complaints. In an attempt to shut down fraudulent Websites, the FBI, the National White-Collar Crime Center (NW3C) and the Federal Trade Commission have instituted Operation E-Con, "a coordinated initiative focusing on Cyber Crime in the United States and a number of other countries." Last year, Operation E-Con, which also utilizes the manpower and resources of 43 United States Attorneys' Offices, the Postal Inspection Service, the Secret Service and the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, served 70 warrants leading to 130 arrests and over $17 million in property seizures and recoveries. A quickly escalating problem for Internet users and legal authorities is "spoofing," where a con man masquerades as a trusted Web site using a seemingly valid e-mail address. The unsolicited e-mails direct consumers to a fraudulent site, typically a convincing mock-up of a genuine Web site, where users are asked to update their accounts by revealing bank, credit and personal information. Scammed Internet users should contact their local police and file a complaint with the Internet Fraud Complaint Center at http://www.IFCCFBI.gov. Source: http://ydr.com/story/technology/12067/ August 04, New Scientist Country-coded computer worms may be ahead. Jonathan Wignall of the UK's Data and Network Security Research Council highlighted techniques that worm creators might use to make their code spread more effectively during a presentation at the security conference Defcon 11 in Las Vegas, NV, on Sunday, August 3. One of these techniques could also limit a worm's geographic range, which would turn a computer worm into an effective weapon for information warfare, he said. Instead of attacking internet-connected computers at random it could be used to attack a specific country. After infecting a host computer, a worm normally scans randomly for further machines that could be infected. But Wignall says a worm could download a prepared list of internet protocol (IP) addresses to attack from a single server or a group of machines. This would prevent duplicate requests being sent to each machine, a common cause of bottlenecking with existing worm design. Nicholas Weaver, a computer scientist at the University of California in Berkeley says this is just one way that a worm could, in theory, be used to target a specific country. Another way is to avoid computers running a particular language, he says. Source: http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994016 August 04, Boston Business Journal Former Telecast Fiber worker pleads guilty to hacking. A former employee of Telecast Fiber Systems Inc. in Worcester, MA, pleaded guilty Friday, August 1, in federal court to breaking into the company's computer system and deleting valuable files, according to the U.S. Attorney's office. John Corrado, 35, agreed to pay $10,360, the estimated financial loss suffered by the company. His formal sentencing is scheduled for October 7 where he faces a maximum penalty of one year imprisonment and a fine of $100,000. The U.S. Attorney's office says that in July 1999, about one month after Corrado had stopped working for the company, he accessed the company's network server using a modem from a remote location. The files he deleted included those used for research and development as well as those used by sales reps to demonstrate company products. Source: http://boston.bizjournals.com/boston/stories/2003/08/04/daily11.html Internet Security Systems - AlertCon: 1 out of 4 https://gtoc.iss.net/ Last Changed 5 August 2003 Security Focus ThreatCon: 2 out of 4 www.securityfocus.com Last Changed 22 July 2003 Current Virus and Port Attacks Virus: #1 Virus in USA: PE_VALLA.A 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: 445 (microsoft-ds), 80 (www), 137 (netbios-ns), 1434 (ms-sql-m), 113 (ident), 139 (netbios-ssn), 0 (---), 41170 (---), 25 (smtp), 53 (domain) Source: http://isc.incidents.org/top10.html; Internet Storm Center _______________________________________________ Information_technology mailing list Information_technology@listserv
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