Stories about: The SANS Institute

A security researcher has developed malicious rootkit software for Cisco Systems' routers, a development that has placed increasing scrutiny on the routers that carry the majority of the Internet's traffic.

A security think tank says it has found a vulnerability in Apple's QuickTime multimedia player that can be exploited remotely to compromise Windows Vista PCs upgraded to Service Pack 1, as well as XP SP2.

The SANS Institute has formalised its association with Shearwater Solutions by appointing the company as its local ANZ representative, as well as bringing it on board to organize a SANS security training event in Canberra in June.

The SANS Institute has uncovered what they've termed a "rare gem" as far as computer security investigations go that sheds new light on how up to 20,000 Web sites have been hacked since January.

Corporations are woefully unprepared to counter attempts at corporate espionage, say experts who perform vulnerability assessments designed to uncover security weaknesses. US corporations lose as much as US$300 billion a year to hacking, cracking, physical security breaches and other criminal activity, according to Ira Winkler, author of Spies Among Us (Wiley, 2005) and president of the Internet Security Advisors Group, which performs espionage simulations and provides other services.

Washington politicians are frequently pilloried for moving too slowly to respond to emerging problems, and while the adage has proven true regarding the federal sector's response to cyber-security thus far, the US government is making slow progress in addressing the issue, experts maintain.

Hewlett-Packard has been selling USB-based hybrid flash-floppy drives that were pre-infected with malware, the company said last week in a security bulletin.

Security experts have warned that malicious Microsoft Excel documents are making the rounds via email, exploiting an unpatched Excel vulnerability that has been known publicly since January.

Microsoft issued four critical updates Tuesday that quashed 12 bugs in Office, the company's business suite, including a flaw in Excel that has been exploited by attackers for more than two months.

A noted ActiveX researcher Monday revealed a bug in RealNetworks' RealPlayer that could be exploited by attackers to hijack Windows machines running nternet Explorer.

A critical vulnerability in VMware's virtualization software for Windows lets attackers escape the "guest" operating system and modify or add files to the underlying "host" operating system, the company has acknowledged.