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As seen on XKCD.COM!

Following on the $7 billion and a bit acquisition of mcAfee by Intel last month, it is now the turn of Arcsight, a data correlation engine, to get acquired by HP for $1.5 billion, a bargain then! This follows a trend for large non IT Security companies to step into the security field.

What I found interesting though is the difference in vocabulary used by the two companies, actually, by the Arcsight current CEO Tom Reilly. HP speaks about “acquisition”, which really it’s what it is; whereas Tom’s email to Arcsight clients speaks about a “merger”. I guess this is standard practise when the smaller party get “swallowed” by a bigger company.

I’d be interested to see what changes this “merger” will bring to Arcsight and if any of the HP Operation Manager technology (aka OpenView) will find its way in a future Arcsight ESM release… or vice versa!

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I have recently came across that Department of Defence website where they provide free and unclassified Windows Security Guides. From Windows 2000 to windows 7, they provide a set of checklist and “STIG” which stands for Security Technical Implementation Guides.

Having only checked the Windows 7 “STIG”, I found it a useful resource when one can get some ideas on how to secure/validate a windows 7 server configuration.

http://iase.disa.mil/stigs/content_pages/windows_os_security.html

The following article from Macworld describes a new patent from Apple to detect jail-broken iphone/ipad. It also gives an interesting security twist on that patent, where it is in theory possible to take hidden photos and voice recording of a potential thief, analyse the accelerometer data to define if the thief is walking, driving or even flying, get GPS location, etc.
http://www.macworld.com/article/153612/2010/08/apple_mobiledevice_patent.html

I also came across that app for the iphone, which does not go quite as far but highlight the fact people have already thought about this:
SpyTools for iphone

There is maybe nothing new about governments protecting their national hackers but this is a good example on how a hacker can openly operate in his own country and then get caught in another.
The article below also makes reference to an earlier case where a Russian hacker was lured to the USA and arrested through evidence gathered by the FBI hacking his computer back own.
I have always wondered how could such evidence stand in court, what would stop the FBI to plant some fake evidence?? How is hacking into the computer located in a different country be legal either?

Hacker’s Arrest Offers Glimpse Into Crime in Russia

According to the article below both companies’ board of directors have agreed a deal. With Intel looking at providing some “hardware-enhanced” security i wonder if we will one day see an AV aware CPU? :)

SC Magazine Article

A rather large selection of news as I missed last week weekly digest!

Are Anti Virus Obsolete?
I recently had a discussion with a work colleague who was claiming Anti Virus are not as good at preventing infections as they used to be, technology is moving fast and Anti Virus vendors seem to be playing catchup with more and more delay. He also stated that most AV only detects 20% of new viruses… A claim I haven’t been able to verify by doing a quick search on the Internet, so let’s just say I agree we are seeing more and more new viruses that we, as security professionals, have to inform the AV vendors about.

On that topic, the future of AV looks to be a difficult road ahead as discussed in a recent Kaspersky’s interview below, what I found the most interesting is the last paragraph were they mention a hacker who wrote a tool which gathered many security company IP addresses. The hacker then used this information to change the...
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WPA Cracking
An interestingreference on Schneier’s blog to an article describing a “in the cloud” service to crack WPA keys.It is the realisationofthe concept of distributed security cracking mentioned in 2008 by Chad Perrin, not sure if he was the first to introduce that idea.
http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/security/?p=4097

WPA2 Vulnerability – Hole 196
A new man-in-the-middle attack for WPA2 seems to have been found and recently demonstrated at the Defcon 18
http://www.airtightnetworks.com/WPA2-Hole196

World’s Top Malware
FireEye has produced a nice colourful report on the 20 top malware they found on the net with their technology. Although this could be guess, it is interesting that the top4 types of ...
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Working in IT Security I receive and get to read lot of security related articles. I will list here a summary of the ones I found the most interesting, the idea is to try publishing this list on a weekly basis… not sure I will always have the time to do so, hence why the subject of those posts will be numbered, and we start with week #1:

– Safari Vulnerability
An Auto-fill vulnerability in the Safari browser which allows attackers to get info from your personal contact details.
Reading the comments on that article, it is not clear if this could also affect other WebKit based browsers such as Chrome.
It may be best practise anyway to disable the auto fill option in any browsers you are using.
http://jeremiahgrossman.blogspot.com/2010/07/i-know-who-your-name-where-you-work-and.html

– New GSM-cracking softwar...
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