News and Opinion

Risky Business has scooped another Lizzie award for excellence in IT media at this year's Mediaconnect IT Journalism Awards.

The podcast edged out competition from other IT publishers and the ABC to take the award for Best Technology Audio Program for the third year running.

Big thanks go out to all the listeners who make Risky Business a viable media outlet, the guests who take the time to appear on the show and to the sponsors who keep a roof over my head.

Melbourne's Age newspaper is carrying a delicious little item today.

The long arm of the law has caught up with the alleged ringleader of the CabinCr3w hacking group. Over the last few months CabinCr3w have pwned a bunch of law enforcement websites, even doxing a bunch of officers.

Pretty ballsy stuff, right? You'd think if you're starting a war with law enforcement you'd have your opsec shit in order, yeah?

Well, apparently not!

I think it's safe to say that the Flashback malware is the first "big one" affecting Apple users.

Reports say up to 600k boxes have been hosed, and if recent statements out of Cupertino are any indication, Apple staffers are running around like the proverbial headless chickens trying to contain this outbreak.

It seems the Apple security team has taken a leaf out of Microsoft's book -- they're targeting Flashback's C&C servers and will issue a removal tool through its software update service.

The Australian government has announced the establishment of the Council of Registered Ethical Security Testers, or CREST.

CREST is a pretty big deal in the UK. Over there it's an extremely serious series of tests that can give hiring organisations a semi-reliable indication that a tester knows what they're doing. If you don't have your CREST certification, there's work you simply can't do.

But who knows what it'll morph into here -- the jury isn't just out, it hasn't even been empanelled yet. Government involvement isn't usually a good start.

Global law enforcement swooped overnight, arresting a handful of online miscreants who, between them, have generated more headlines than the rest of the online underground put together.

That's right, LulzSec has been comprehensively pwnt. Some were arrested yesterday in raids, others, arrested some time ago, had their indictments unsealed by the courts.

Symantec claims customers using its endpoint protection and antivirus products are not at risk following revelations the company's AV source code was stolen in 2006.

But when it comes to providing specifics, Symantec is guarded.

Following yesterday's blog post, Symantec has claimed recycled source code from its corporate antivirus product of 2006 makes up only 5% of current endpoint protection software.

But it won't say which 5%.

UPDATED WITH COMMENT FROM SYMANTEC BELOW

So it's happened -- a significant chunk of Symantec's source code has been made available online as a torrent.

This followed the release of a pretty loltastic Pastebin dump which purports to show e-mail negotiations between a Symantec staffer and the hackers who obtained the source.

An interesting news piece hit the wires overnight describing the 2010 breach of a handful of Verisign's corporate systems.

The story was broken by the Reuters news agency and is peppered with sensational quotes like a former NSA and DHS guy saying "ZOMG this will end the interwebz" despite the fact the guy knows about as much as we do about the breach. You can read the whole thing here.

McAfee Australia leaked 971 customer e-mail addresses in a botched e-mail marketing campaign last week.

The addresses of the recipients were placed in the visible TO field instead of the BCC field.

It's an all-too-common mistake, made especially embarrassing for McAfee because it's not the first time in recent memory something like this has happened.

Infosec reporter Brian Krebs published a splendid post a couple of days ago that apparently unmasks 760 victims of the same group that owned RSA.

I've had a look through the list and pulled out all the Australian organisations I could find. From the looks of things this list was compiled by observing computers connecting back to evil C&C in China. That would explain why there are so many ISPs listed -- it's likely it wasn't the ISPs that got pwnz0riz3d, it was their customers.