Study: Supercomputer clusters shortchange security
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Group says popular technique threatens U.S. security by sidelining other approaches more suited to decryption and the like.
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Single Packet Authorization fills the gaps in port knocking.
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A CALIFORNIAN company announced two different versions of cluster workstations which, it claims, will give supercomputer abilities for professionals who need to number crunch in a non-trivial way.
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Unpatched Windows machines are vulnerable to latest adware attack
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I have recently subscribed to several different grid-computing projects. How secure is grid computing?
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Thin-client computing has been around for a decade, but the rising costs of updating software and installing security patches on networked personal computers is sparking renewed interest
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There is something rather antiquated about many of the server clusters used today by engineers, scientists and media fiends. Their high-powered computing machines are often cobbled together over many days
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Grid architecture aims to protect corporate networks from interior security threats.
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Reports of vulnerabilities found by some peer-to-peer file sharers prompt patch.
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HypervisorShield, a new service of Catbirdâs V-Security suite, extends security protections to the hypervisor layer in a virtual environment.
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The growth of supercomputing as an enterprise IT option is one of the highlights of this week's SC2004 Supercomputing Conference, which kicks off tomorrow in Pittsburgh.
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(InfoWorld) - A security researcher has found a serious vulnerability in an aging yet widely used software program used for the Internet's addressing system, prompting the software's maintainers to retire the affected version. The flaw within Berkeley Internet Name Domain 8 (Bind 8) software could misdirect users to a fraudulent Web site even if a user typed in the correct URL (uniform resource locator), wrote Amit Klein, chief technology officer for security vendor Trusteer. Klein discovered the problem. Users are being advised to upgrade to Bind 9.4, the latest version of the software, which underwent an architectureÂ rewrite to improve security. The software, looked after by the Internet Software Consortium (ISC), is free to download. ISC issued an interim patch, but due to other weaknesses in the software, ISC is also ending support for Bind 8. "It's never easy to retire a product," wrote the organization in an advisory. "The security issues of Bind 8 are many, and seven years after the release of Bind 9, ISC must devote our efforts to maintaining and enhancing the current version." About 14 percent of the DNS servers on the Internet in 2006 were still using Bind 8, according to Infoblox, which conducts an annual survey of DNS servers. "Bind 8 is still a very popular DNS server nowadays, thus this attack applies to a big part of Internet users," Klein wrote. In a research paper, Klein described a weakness in the algorithm Bind 8 uses to generate transaction IDs, apparently random serial numbers that allow it to spot whether someone is trying to supply it with false information in respose to queries. The weakness makes it possible to observe a few queries and then predict the transaction ID in the sequence, Klein wrote. Using that information, an attacker can then send erroneous information to the DNS server, "poisoning" the address stored against a particular domain name in its memory cache. Thus, traffic intended for a certain Web site from users of that DNS server can be diverted to another server containing a fraudulent site, a deception known as "pharming." Although Bind 9 has a better transaction ID algorithm, it could also be vulnerable, Klein wrote. Â
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The rise of customized malware is forcing security software vendors to change their tactics quickly and begin using customers' machines as their initial line of threat detection intelligence, according to a new report from Yankee Group.Echoing recent comments made by industry leaders like Symantec -- which is considering white-listing techniques, among many other emerging plans, to thwart the trend toward so-called server-side polymorphism -- Yankee Group Analyst Andrew Jaquith writes in a new research note that "herd intelligence" will be one of the most effective ways for vendors to detect and address increasingly customized threats.By turning their customers' endpoint devices into malware collectors that can funnel information about new attacks back into their global networks of threat sensors and scanning technologies, Jaquith said, security applications vendors may make faster progress in stemming the tide of lower profile, smaller volume threats.As malware authors have begun enlisting more malware toolkits and other technological means to create a greater number of attack variants than can be found and processed by honeypots and signature-based security software tools, the analyst said, it will become vital for vendors to aggregate threat data using customers' computers.Some smaller vendors, including ESET, Panda Security, Prevx, and Sana Security, have already begun working in such a fashion, turning their deployed endpoints into collectors.Larger vendors looking to add that type of technology to their pallets could seek to acquire one of those vendors, Sana in particular, to advance their plans more rapidly, Jaquith contends.The idea is simple, according to the analyst. If attackers are going to attempt to create different attacks for nearly every individual user, then security software vendors must use their customers' machines as their eyes and ears for discovering and addressing those variants.On the flip side, as the vendors amass information about new attacks, they can simultaneously help other customers determine whether new applications or Web sites are dangerous or safe to use, the analyst said."When an unknown binary attempts to execute, the client-side agent sends detailed telemetry information to a remote centralized server and asks whether it is good, bad, or unknown," said Jaquith. "The server makes a disposition decision based on all the collective history accumulated by the herd. By pooling information about all executing programs across its installed base, the herd makes smarter decisions and can confer immunity faster to new variants."As part of the effort, security vendors may also need to begin sharing more of that information with their rivals to create a larger network effect for thwarting malware on a global basis, according to the expert.It may be hard to convince rival vendors to work together because of the perception that it could lessen differentiation between their respective products and services, but if the process clearly aids on the process of quelling the rising tide of new malware strains, the software makers may have little choice other than to partner, he said."By turning every endpoint into a malware collector, the herd network effectively turns into a giant honeypot that can see more than existing monitoring networks," said Jaquith. "Scale enables the herd to counter malware authors' strategy of spraying huge volumes of unique malware samples with, in essence, an Internet-sized sensor network."Herd intelligence is not without its downsides However, despite the advantages of moving to a herd mentality model, the expert recognizes that there might be significant obstacles for vendors to overcome in making such a transition -- including the cost of shifting away form their existing malware signature creation and distribution methodology.Among the biggest issues for anti-malware vendors to consider is the issue of false positives as many legitimate or nefarious programs may be misclassified by one vendor or the other, and behavior detection-based tools will still be needed to keep an eye out for sites and applications that have been compromised.Customers may represent another hurdle, Jaquith said, as not all companies will initially be comfortable with sharing the necessary level of access with vendors, and some may fear that such a system could offer new opportunities for data loss. Prevx, for one, is already dealing with the issue of privacy by guaranteeing that the only information being sent over its pipelines from customer PCs is related to executable files.An even larger problem could be the "data glut" generated by the herd anti-malware networks."Telemetric data provided by herd endpoints will be substantial," said Jaquith. "Anti-malware vendors will need to spend significant millions of dollars of capital to create scalable infrastructures to collect, process, and store data furnished by endpoints."The white lists of legitimate applications maintained by anti-virus vendors will also need to be updated frequently to address the release of approved programs and patches, a process that will require even additional levels of cooperation between many different types of software makers, he said.Along similar lines, Symantec researchers recently detailed a new program through which they are gathering detailed information about software applications installed onto the computers of customers using its desktop anti-malware suite.Using an opt-out participation model, the experiment studies the behavior and distribution details of individual programs to help make recommendations to users about which programs they decide to install or avoid."Right now, this is just a long-term research project, but we hope that as we get more users involved in the system, we can truly get a better idea of what is on people's computers so that we can identify malicious software based on the demographics of who is using it versus what it does," said Carey Nachenberg, a senior member of Symantec's Security Research team."We're hoping to get more clarity through the large base of users we have," he said. "By collecting this data, we should be able to get the most comprehensive view of the usage patterns to derive reputation information for everything they use."
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Networked multifunction devices share PC vulnerabilities to worms, hackers.
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Get exploited on time The world of multi-core cpus we have just entered is facing a serious threat.â¦
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Suites designed to provide intrusion protection and detection for hosted servers for small and medium-size businesses.
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Newly updated. This article provides insight into the Metasploit Framework, a very useful tool for the penetration tester. Part two of three.