2007.01.17 Daily Security Reading
by Rodney Campbell on Jan.18, 2007, under Security
Rainbow table targets Word, Excel crypto
Swiss information-technology firm Objectif Sécurité announced last week that its latest pre-generated list of passwords and their hashes, known as a rainbow table, can now crack the standard encryption on Word and Excel documents in about 5 minutes on average.
The first HD DVD movie has made its way onto BitTorrent
The pirates of the world have fired another salvo in their ongoing war with copy protection schemes with the first release of the first full-resolution rip of an HD DVD movie on BitTorrent. The movie, Serenity, was made available as a .EVO file and is playable on most DVD playback software packages such as PowerDVD. The file was encoded in MPEG-4 VC-1 and the resulting file size was a hefty 19.6 GB.
DRM is not really about piracy
In a nutshell: DRM’s sole purpose is to maximize revenues by minimizing your rights so that they can sell them back to you… Like all lies, there comes a point when the gig is up; the ruse is busted. For the movie studios, it’s the moment they have to admit that it’s not the piracy that worries them, but business models which don’t squeeze every last cent out of customers.
Malware creates new challenges for anti virus vendors
Over the past few years those monitoring trends on malicious Internet activities have noticed a significant change. We are seeing a sizeable decrease in the media grabbing pandemic outbreaks of malicious software. Yet with less headlines on high risk infectors we are still seeing an increasing overall number of malware infections, it is this new breed of malware that is costing industry millions every year – yet no-one seems to know about them.
If a computer virus or email worm has ever infected your company, the PCs within your environment are prime candidates for further attacks. To protect your company, you should become familiar with these types of vulnerabilities, how they work, and how to detect and prevent these nuisances.
Do Away With HTML Based E-mail
Last week, Microsoft issued a patch to fix an extremely dangerous flaw in Windows that cyber crooks could use to break into your computer just by getting you to open an e-mail.
Review of 6 Rootkit Detectors
This issue became big last year when Sony released some music CDs which came with a rootkit that silently burrowed into PCs. This review looks at how you can block rootkits and protect your machine using F-Secure Backlight, IceSword, RKDetector, RootkitBuster, RootkitRevealer, and Rookit Unhooker.
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January 21st, 2007 on 5:01 pm
r.e. DRM is not really about piracy.
Another example of this is the Apple iPod DRM system. For the most part Apple isn’t so much concerned that customers may play pirated music on their iPods, but keen to prevent iPod customers migrating to alternative players once they get around to replacing their iPods.
By building up and purchasing a library of Apple i-Tunes purchased and DRM protected music, the customer is more or less forced to buy a second iPod . Either that or repurchase all your old tunes.
…and the easy-to-scratch surface of iPods only helps speed up the replacement cycle too.