Raytheon: Rival lured staff, stole technology
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Raytheon Co. , the world's biggest missile maker, sued rival FLIR Systems Inc. , accusing it of usurping lucrative contracts by luring away workers, infringing four patents, and stealing technology used in infrared cameras.
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(InfoWorld) - They just don't make malware like they used to. Or at least like they did earlier this year. Even low-quality malware, however, is taxing the resources of security companies, since it is being detected in ever-higher numbers. Over the last six months, the technical creativity of malware has fallen along with the ability to cause massive damage, such as that created by the MyDoom and Sasser worms of years past, wrote Alexander Gostev, senior virus analyst for Kaspersky Lab, in a recent report. Gostev's lab intermittently sees highly technical malware, but most is "the same unending stream of Trojans, viruses and worms," he wrote. In many cases, hackers simply take existing malware and create variants, by tweaking the older code to evade antivirus software. At times, the process is simple trial and error. Malware writers use online scanners such as Virustotal , which check to see if their new code will be detected by antivirus software, said Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer for F-Secure. If the code is detectable, they can make a slight modification and run it through the scanner again. "I'd like to tell you that we're winning this war," Hypponen said. "But frankly, I'm not so sure. We need new kinds of solutions." Because much of the code is not new, it tends to remain effective for shorter periods of time before antivirus companies detect it. Still, the time it takes to identify and create a signature for a new virus, which can range from a few minutes to a few hours, is often long enough for hackers to infect computers. "Antivirus companies are working at the limits of their capabilities in terms of speed," Gostev wrote. To be sure, some malicious hackers are doing creative work. This year saw some sophisticated phishing attacks, and virus writers have been branching into relatively new areas like instant messaging and social networking sites, noted Christopher Boyd, security research manager for FaceTime Communications. But the trend overall, he said, has been "quantity over quality." Kaspersky Lab in Moscow is on the front lines of the battle. Its analysts added 2,000 signatures to their database in January 2005. Last month they added 10,000 signatures -- a five-fold increase, said Stanislav Shevchenko, head of the lab. The virus analysts work 12-hours shifts, pulling up screen after screen of rolling lines of code. Automated tools analyze some pieces of malware, but human analysis is still needed for others. A good analyst should process an average piece of malware within 5 minutes, Shevchenko said. But some of the rarer, more creative code is harder to crack. Polymorphic viruses -- ones that can change their byte sequences to throw off antivirus software -- can take up to a week to analyze, Shevchenko said. The signatures are added to a database used by Kaspersky's antivirus engine, which is licensed by other security vendors such as Juniper Networks, ClearSwift , and F-Secure. The increase in the volume of malicious code can be attributed in part to the impunity enjoyed by malware writers, said Eugene Kaspersky, head of antivirus research. Despite efforts by law enforcement agencies to strengthen international cooperation, most malware writers are never punished. "It's quite safe for them," Kaspersky said. "If they are clever enough, there is almost no risk for them at the moment." The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor to the country's KGB intelligence agency, frequently ask Kaspersky Lab for information, said Kaspersky spokesman Timur Tsoriev. The FSB, however, approaches Kaspersky less these days since the agency has bolstered its in-house expertise, Kaspersky said. Kaspersky said his lab focuses less on finding the root of criminal activity than protecting the company's customers. But the burden of rising online criminal activity directly impacts security companies, he said. "If there is no help from the police and if they don't reduce the number of criminals, I'm afraid the detection for all antivirus products will go down," Kaspersky said.
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p2pnet.net News:- Four ex-Microsoft employees from the Seattle-area have been charged with stealing software worth $32.4 million from the company.
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MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- Engineers Lan Lee and Yuefei Ge had drafted a business plan that they promised would roil the U.S. microchip industry. Using blueprints they allegedly stole from their Silicon Valley employer, the men proposed to reproduce a super-fast chip in China at a much lower cost.
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Burn baby burn Rayguns are, um, on fire lately, with the US Army dishing out early contracts in its monster truck laser cannon race, Boeing planning a rather unimpressive blaster-equipped Humvee and the famous American nuke-toasting jumbo jet continuing to make headlines. Now the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon war-nerd bureau which loves nothing better than a long shot, has joined in.â¦
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Raytheon Co.'s board, which docked the compensation of its chairman and chief executive, William H. Swanson, by about $1 million last year for committing plagiarism in a management booklet, has granted Swanson a $2.8 million performance bonus for 2006.
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'Hypersonic tech vehicles' for test in 2009 DARPA*, the wacky Pentagon research bureau where it's always white-coat-and-propellor-hat Friday, has doled out $6m (as part of a $40m "increment" to an earlier "other transaction") to US aerospace colossus Lockheed. The payment is in support of the renewed US military hypersonic-plane programme, variously known as "Falcon" or "Blackswift".â¦
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Defense giant Raytheon Co. , stepping up its makeover from parts supplier to prime contractor, is vying for a contract worth up to $6 billion to provide the Army and Air Force with a product not usually associated with an electronics company: a cargo plane.
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A small company claims that Cisco stole its intelligent routing technology, and the company's lawyer is looking for a big pay-out.
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Everyone knows that Microsoft is probably the single most powerful software company in the world. How strange it is therefore, to discover that the mighty giant is being shamed by a group of geek-like programmers
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A proposed technology for identifying the source of e-mail messages suffered a blow last week when a group within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) established to
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A corporate executive goes on the lam after being charged with paying hackers to virtually rub out the competition.
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No sense pointing the finger at Hewlett-Packard anymore; we have Congress and the FBI to do that. But I did want to discuss the âI didnât know what my employees/vendors/executive staff were doingâ defense -- which was, of course, made famous by Enron , so you have to know it just wonât do. Instead of looking backward, I spoke with a couple of experts on governance, privacy, risk, and compliance assessment about how companies can do the right thing in the future.
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By Ja'Rena Lunsford, The Daily Oklahoman  Feb. 13--Will Temple knew the call was a scam. On the other end was the voice of a Microsoft Corp. representative telling him he was the winner of a trip to space.
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Has this Salesforce gone to the Dark Side? Fools cross sabers to find out.
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It reads like a VIP list of failures â-ewlett-Packard, Toshiba, Intel, and Philips. Each of these technology powerhouses tried to conquer a promising technology
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Scammers and hackers are targeting the human factor in system setups. Part of a series on hot security topics.