Hot on the heels of a US Air Force Colonel advocating building a bigger, badder and bolder bot-net (reported here on the Internet Patrol) comes news that seven of the twenty-six current members of NATO, the military alliance of democratic European and North American states, are to establish the Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre Of Excellence, in Tallinn, Estonia, taking further the work of NATO’s existing internal computer network defense team.

An intriguing and novel eavesdropping technique has been disclosed by a group of German scientists, who describe and demonstrate in their paper “Compromising Reflections, or How to Read LCD Monitors Around the Corner” how your monitor screen can be read from a distance, by pointing a telescope at its content reflected in nearby objects. Teapots, spoons, plastic bottles, glasses and even the surface of the user’s eye offer sufficient quality for text on the screen to be intelligible, even at long distance.

Security researchers have discovered another Windows Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability in Internet Explorer 7 (IE7). Thankfully, though the severity of this vulnerability is high, the chance of a successful exploitation is rather low. It is, however, glaringly simple for the hackers to attempt an exploit.

Google has responded to privacy concerns about people being recognized from Google StreetView map images, and begun deploying new face blurring technology to mask their identity. So those blurred faces you see aren’t an accident, or the result of the subjects having drunk too much the night before.

A top U.S. Air Force brass has recommended that the U.S. military create their own super bot-net to attack other bot-nets that are attacking U.S. military computer networks. One of the main problems with this idea, among others, is that it will fry thousands of computers belonging to innocent end-users around the world – users who have no idea that their home computer has been controlled remotely as part of a bot-net ring.

Paypal has announced that they are going to block the Apple Safari web browser, along with a few other browsers. The online payment service, purchased by eBay for $1.5B back in 2002, in the good old days of rampant Internet mergers and acquisitions, has become a frequent target of phishers and hackers. Anxious to recapture their good name and to offer to sellers and buyers alike a more secure environment, PayPal plans to discontinue support for web browsers that do not include anti-phishing capabilities. If this plan goes through, PayPal will block Safari and older versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and Netscape.

The way in which some of the US’ largest ISPs handle domain name typos, monetizing them through Barefruit, has opened a vulnerability that if exploited by phishers and hackers could be an open and unfettered conduit for the injection of their malicious payloads onto the Internet. Reported late last week by Dan Kaminsky, this particular security hole has been patched. The fundamental danger, though, remains.

It’s long been apparent to our readers that we at the Internet Patrol are not exactly blind fans of online gaming. And we don’t exactly holding up gambling sites as paragons of Internet virtue, either. So news from last week’s e-crime congress in London, bringing to light a
case of the bad (a gambling site) being brought to its knees by the
worse (a botnet), has us pondering the larger implications.

Microsoft has announced this week a security hole in MS Word – well, actually it’s in the Jet Database engine, but that creates a vulnerability in MS Word, which attackers can exploit to gain remote access and control of your computer. Nearly all versions of Windows, including XP, 2000 (2K) and many Windows Server editions, are vulnerable. In fact the only versions of Windows not vulnerable to this attack are Vista, and Windows Server 2003 SP2.

Reports emerged this week from a Holland-based internet security consultant, Dancho Danchev, of a new technique – known as poison Google links – being used by hackers attempting to use legitimate Google searches as a vector to smuggle malware onto the machines of unsuspecting users. So far the poisoned Google links all contain the string “IFRAME SRC=//” followed by an IP address, most recently and commonly 72.232.39.252, but that could change in a heartbeat.

According to a tip received by the Internet Patrol, the resident evil behind the throngs of social networking and other sites that are tricking people into logging into their AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, and Gmail accounts, and scraping their address book, has a name, and that name is Sigma Visual Technologies. Sigma Visual Technologies provides software that allows sites to get their users to import and email all of their contacts in their address books. Put another way, it lets these sites scrape and spam your contacts. In your name!

Those Valentine greetings that you are receiving, often in the guise of free e Valentine cards, may be sending you more than “Happy Valentines Day” greetings. In fact, they may contain a virus or two. Phony trojan Valentine greetings include subjects such as “Sent with Love”, “Our Love Will Last”, “Our Love is Strong”, “You’re the One”, “A Toast My Love”, “Falling In Love with You”, “Special Romance”, “Your Love Has Opened”, “Heavenly Love”, and “You’re In My Thoughts”.

A Salesforce.com security breach has lead to an untold number of Salesforce.com’s customers’ data being put at risk. According to sources, “the information in the contact list included individuals’ names, company names, email addresses, telephone numbers of Salesforce.com customers,” and the like.

A former AT&T technician, Mark Klein, has come forward saying that the government has a machine called a NARUS STA installed in a “secret room” at ATT, and is getting a carbon copy of all Internet traffic that goes through AT&T’s Internet servers. Not just some as defined in a warrant or as necessary for national security – but an exact duplicate of all traffic. The NARUS STA 6400 is a device designed to monitor, capture, and analyze Internet data and traffic (STA stands for “semantic traffic analyzer”).

Internet security company LinkScanner.com has reported that Alicia Keys’ MySpace page has fallen victim to malware. When you visit the Alicia Keys page, say, to look at Alicia Keys pictures, the malware attempts to download malicious software onto your computer. Such malicious efforts such as this against MySpace’s page for Alicia Keys fall in line with similar attempts againt other musicians on MySpace.