Infosecurity rounds up the week's news
A security researcher has come up with a proof-of-concept attack that enables malicious executables to be remotely injected into clean PDF files.
The March report on electronic threats from BitDefender claims to show that trojans continue to get top billing – topping the IT security vendor's list with 13% of total global malware is Trojan.AutorunInf.Gen, a generic mechanism designed to spread through removable devices.
Government psychologist Tanya Byron has called for a fresh review into regular and mobile internet usage by minors, suggesting that the social networking industry should have an accepted code of conduct in order to protect under-age users.
Tech vendors, interest groups, and academics have formed a coalition advocating for modification of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which they claim is severely out-of-date.
Microsoft has discovered a slew of bugs in Office 2010 by building what amounts to a legitimate botnet for software testing. Engineers within Microsoft have created a grid-style system that employs unused computing time on internal PCs to run fuzz tests against its software.
eBay is the victim of a phishing attack that uses its own compromised server, according to email filtering company Red Condor.
IBM is working with the US Federal Aviation Administration on research to secure the US civilian aviation system from electronic attack.
Social gaming networks are becoming a fruitful space for spammers thanks to socially promiscuous users, according to research published by anti-malware company BitDefender.
Vietnamese speakers have been targeted in an attack that researchers are describing as politically motivated.
Malware adaptation rates are getting faster, according to a report from Blue Coat Systems. The average lifespan of malware dropped to two hours last year, from up to seven hours in 2007, it said, adding that this has had a significant effect on the effectiveness of software patches.
The European Union (EU) has launched an ambitious project that seeks to deal with all aspects of technology privacy for citizens of its member countries.
Security software company Codenomicon has released a network analysis tool that lets administrators visualize network traffic.
Records from the city council's social services department have been found on an unencrypted USB stick in Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent. The stick was handed in by an IT consultant to the local newspaper, the Sentinel, on Friday, after he apparently found it lying on the pavement.
Legislation that seeks to protect the nation's electricity grid from any form of attack has been passed by the Energy and Environment Subcommittee.
Research just released by Symantec claims to show that targeted attacks are on the rise, with email originating from China and RAR attachments being a major source of security problems.
A self-confessed computer hacker who pleaded guilty to some of the most serious card account hacking and ID frauds in US history, has been sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Convicted criminal mastermind Albert Gonzalez – the man behind the infamous hack of TJX's computer systems and more than 130 million payment cards – has been jailed for 20 years.
In an interesting analysis of the migration of local systems to the cloud, and the transition from desktop to laptops, netbooks and mobiles, Justin Foster, a software architect with Trend Micro, says that an unexpected transformation is taking place at the heart of server workloads and mobile device...
Protests against the UK's Digital Economy Bill are increasing, with organised protests taking place in London, Manchester and Sheffield, Infosecurity can report.