Will Boeing's 787 be safe from hackers?
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Before Boeing Co.'s new 787 jetliner gets the green light to fly passengers, the aircraft maker will have to prove that offering Internet access in the cabin won't leave the flight controls vulnerable to hackers and hijackers.
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(InfoWorld) - A stolen laptop at The Boeing Co. has pushed a widely watched tally of U.S. data breach victims past the 100 million mark. On Tuesday, Boeing disclosed that files containing Social Security numbers, names and home addresses of 382,000 current and former employees were compromised in early December when an unencrypted laptop was stolen from an employee's car. That disclosure pushed the total number of data breach victims on the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse Web site to 100,152,801, said Beth Givens, director of the consumer advocacy group. Privacy Rights Clearinghouse has been tracking data breaches since February 2005, whenÂ ChoicePoint disclosedÂ that thieves had stolen information on 163,000 victims from the company's database. The ChoicePoint incident was remarkable because although the data broker was obligated to disclose the theft to victims living in California -- the only state with a beach notification law on the books -- it decided to notify everyone, Givens said. "That was the first time, to the best of our knowledge, that a breached entity decided to disclose the event to individuals nationwide," she said. "That was a watershed event," she added, "because other entities that had experienced breaches started disclosing the situation to individuals nationwide" Since the ChoicePoint incident, data security has been in the spotlight, andÂ breaches at the U.S. Department of Veteran's AffairsÂ and, most recently, Boeing and theÂ University of California-Los Angeles, have received national attention. Givens believes that the actual number of names that have been compromised since ChoicePoint is probably much higher than her tally. "I think the number 100 million is largely a fictional number, but what it really indicates is that this is a very significant problem," she said. She couldn't say whether all the publicity has made consumers any more secure. "It's quite obvious from the listing that we've compiled that we're in a very leaky boat when it comes to data security," she said. "I don't think that consumers can feel confident about the protection that their personal information receives."
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Vulnerabilities could allow attackers to gain remote control of a system, security company says.
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Ken Dunham of iDefense called the availability of the Cabir source code on ominous sign. &quot;Whenever you see the source code available on the underground, the more likely it is to be exploited,&quot; he said.
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Dreamliner crash and burn? A former Boeing engineer claims the 787 Dreamliner is unsafe, and that in the event of a crash its innovative composite material fuselage would "shatter too easily and burn with toxic fumes", the Seattle Times reports.â¦
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Microsoft may be the biggest target out there for hackers. Here's what the company does to protect itself from the continuous onslaught of probes and intrusion attempts.
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Also: High security built right into $100 laptop's OS. Read these stories and more from around the Web at News.com Extra.
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When security flaws are exposed in air travel, why not applaud?
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Jason Larsen is a computer hacker with a twist. His goal is not to wreak havoc, but to boost security for America's pipelines, railroads, utilities and other infrastructure.
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The Web site for Indian antivirus vendor AvSoft Technologies has been hacked and is being used to install malicious software on visitors&#39; computers, security researchers said Thursday.The download section of AvSoft&#39;s S-cop Web site hosts the malicious code, according to Roger Thompson, chief research officer with security vendor AVG. &quot;They let one of their pages get hit by an iFrame injection,&quot; he said. &quot;It shows that anyone can be a victim.... It&#39;s hard to protect Web servers properly.&quot;The technique used on the site has been seen in thousands of similar hacks over the past few months. The attackers open an invisible iFrame Window within the victim&#39;s browser, which redirects the client to another server. That server, in turn, launches attack code that attempts to install malicious software on the victim&#39;s computer.The malicious software is a variant of the Virut virus family.The iFrame pages are commonly used by Web developers to insert content into their Web pages, but because it is possible to create an invisible iFrame window, the technology is often misused by hackers as a way to silently redirect victims to malicious Web sites.AvSoft, based in New Delhi, sells an antivirus product called SmartCOP and has sold a second antivirus product called Smartdog. The company, which is not well-known in the U.S., also specializes in recovering data lost due to virus attacks. The company could not be reached for comment Thursday afternoon.That data recovery service could come in handy for some, as Virut is known as a &quot;parasitic infector&quot; virus that is extremely difficult to remove. &quot;It infects all of your programs on your local hard drives, and then it starts hitting your network drives as well the first time you run,&quot; Thompson said.Fortunately, the malware used to install Virut exploits only well-known bugs, meaning that users who are running antivirus software on fully patched systems will probably not be infected by the attack in its current state, security experts say.Nobody knows how the malware got onto the Web site in the first place. News of the hack was reported on the Full Disclosure security discussion list on Thursday.McAfee Security Research Manager Dave Marcus believes that the site was compromised by exploiting a Web programming error, most likely in the site&#39;s SQL or PHP code. Security experts say that criminals have written automated programs that scour the Web for these types of flaws and then automatically infect sites, making this an increasingly common problem.
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If a concerted cyberattack is coupled with a physical attack, will the system hold up? VeriSign CEO Stratton Sclavos talks about what's being done to prepare.
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Intrusion prevention capabilities in IOS can be circumvented by hackers, putting companies at risk of attack.
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NEW YORK - Business travelers will be able to surf the Web securely on long-distance flights by combining services from Boeing Co.
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Windows XP is a safe and secure operating system. Really, it is--as long as you don&#39;t connect it to the Internet. To be fair, other operating systems, including Linux and Mac OS X, are vulnerable to online attacks, too.
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Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 Update 3 limits how much damage a hacker could do. The company said the release is ahead of schedule and not a reaction to any specific threat.
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Home net hardware could come under attack from malicious hackers, say security researchers
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The facts of web servers don't necessarily match the myths when it comes to security.