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'Biggest ever attack' slows internet

'Biggest ever attack' slows internet | cross pond high tech | Scoop.it

The internet around the world has been slowed down in what security experts are describing as the biggest cyber-attack of its kind in history.

A row between a spam-fighting group and hosting firm has sparked retaliation attacks affecting the wider internet.

It is having an impact on popular services like Netflix - and experts worry it could escalate to affect banking and email systems.

Five national cyber-police-forces are investigating the attacks.

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

Dooo yoouu feeeel the sloooow doooown?

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how to check if your Apple device UDID has been compromised by the AntiSec leak

how to check if your Apple device UDID has been compromised by the AntiSec leak | cross pond high tech | Scoop.it
If you're worried that you might own one of the 1 million Apple devices that have had their UDIDs leaked by AntiSec, reportedly from a breach of an FBI agent's laptop, our rockstar ...
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SSH Backdoors Found in Barracuda Networks Gear

SSH Backdoors Found in Barracuda Networks Gear | cross pond high tech | Scoop.it

A variety of the latest firewall, spam filter and VPN appliances sold by Campbell, Calif. based Barracuda Networks Inc. contain undocumented backdoor accounts, the company disclosed today. Worse still, while the backdoor accounts are apparently set up so that they would only be accessible from Internet addresses assigned to Barracuda, they are in fact accessible to potentially hundreds of other companies and network owners.


Barracuda’s hardware devices are broadly deployed in corporate environments, including the Barracuda Web Filter, Message Archiver, Web Application Firewall, Link Balancer, and SSL VPN. Stefan Viehböck, a security researcher at Vienna, Austria-based SEC Consult Vulnerability Lab., discoveredin November 2012 that these devices all included undocumented operating system accounts that could be used to access the appliances remotely over the Internet via secure shell (SSH).

 

Viehböck found that the username “product” could be used to login and gain access to the device’s MySQL database (root@localhost) with no password, which he said would allow an attacker to add new users with administrative privileges to the appliances. SEC Consult found a password file containing a number of other accounts and hashed passwords, some of which were uncomplicated and could be cracked with little effort.

Philippe J DEWOST's insight:

Oops. Looks like some have been around for almost 10 years...

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Babel phish: In which languages are internet passwords easiest to crack?

Babel phish: In which languages are internet passwords easiest to crack? | cross pond high tech | Scoop.it
In which languages are internet passwords easiest to crack?

DESPITE entreaties not to, many people choose rather predictable passwords to protect themselves online. "12345"; "password"; and the like are easy to remember but also easy for attackers to guess, especially with programs that automate the process using lists ("dictionaries") of common choices. Cambridge University computer scientist Joseph Bonneau has recently published an analysis of the passwords chosen by almost 70m (anonymised) Yahoo! users. One interesting result is shown below. The chart shows what percentage of accounts could be cracked after 1,000 attempts using such a dictionary. Amateur linguists can have fun speculating on why the Chinese do so well and the Indonesians do not. But one particularly interesting twist is how little difference using language-specific dictionaries makes. It is possible to crack roughly 4% of Chinese accounts using a Chinese dictionary; using a generic dictionary containing the most common terms from many languages, that figure drops only slightly, to 2.9%. Speakers of every language, it seems, have fairly similar preferences.
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