News notes for this week

Some of the articles are already here, but here are some of the other things I’ve read as of late.

• Who Ran Leakedsource.com? Krebs on security

• This site as I was just curious what was there now, says it is down for maintenance or unavailable. I read Kreb’s article earlier on Feb 15, and it is a good one. I didn’t cover this in news notes, for the next upcoming podcast, however, Krebs always does a good job with these. Guess we’ll find out more later.

• This article caught my attention because it talks about web hosting services, and a number of places that have unix as a platform and how actors can take advantage of things to do a number of things to the computer including making it useless for its task.

• These two articles talk about the same thing, and i cover this in my news notes for the upcoming podcast. This is definitely of interest because of the fact that a huge number of devices can be potentially targeted because some aspects of the devices are public facing either by design, or by mistake. For those who don’t know, Shodan is a site similar to google, but they analyse ports and whats out there, where Google indexes web sites in general. The research is interesting, and an eye opener.

• This is a big ransomware headache, and what I read today from this article absolutely scares me. Two things stick out in regards to this article. First, it says it doesn’t toucch the program data, it only encrypts your files. It also says it checks three times for antivirus software. From my understand of reading these articles, ransomware won’t let you do anything else until you pay up, so your antivirus or other security software is useless. I wonder why they did this?

• RDP was talked about on Security Now, I don’t remember exactly what it does, but this definitely sounds bad. Are there better things to do?

• Finally, as we haven’t had enough with this ransomware, and now that the code is out, its only going to get worse. This is the next thing coming, where it can plant more stuff to worry about. This can’t get worse, can it?

If you have any comments on these, fire away. I’ll have more later.