News (10)

Hacked? Don't blame China, blame Denmark

Forget pointing the finger at China when government systems and defence contractors are compromised — it's the dirty work of Danish hackers, says Finnish security researcher, Mikko Hyppönen. Read more »

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Is whitelisting the new blacklisting?

The IT security industry has come to a frank realisation that the current approach to preventing malware is simply not working. Is whitelisting, which is the reverse of our current approach, the answer? Read more »

Has Windows Vista's UAC feature failed Microsoft?

Experts agree that Microsoft's Windows Vista is relatively well-protected but its security features — such as User Account Control (UAC) — have been highlighted by security experts as one reason why the operating system is far less popular than its predecessor, Windows XP. Read more »

Software should defend itself: Oracle CSO

Applications will have to defend themselves from attack in the future, according to Oracle's chief security officer Mary Ann Davidson. Read more »

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Is desktop security broken beyond repair?

At the AusCERT 2007 conference in Queensland last week, keynote speaker Ivan Krstić, who is the director of security architecture for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, told attendees that desktop security was fundamentally broken. We asked several security experts who attended the conference if they agreed and how the problem could be fixed. Read more »

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Microsoft admits Vista UAC prompts 'need work'

Scott Charney, head of Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing division, admitted this week that Windows Vista's User Account Control (UAC) prompts are not intuitive and confuse users. Read more »

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Web banking: It's time to write down your password

Banks should stop forcing customers to create long, alphanumeric passwords because they can't protect against today's threats, according to AT&T computing researcher William Cheswick Read more »

Telstra, CommBank, DoD in secret cyberwar games

In an unknown location, a handful of Australia's best known companies and government agencies are undertaking secret tests in a mock cyberwar, as the country's infrastructure comes under attack in a simulated online war named Cyber Storm II. Read more »

Sun patches dangerous Java vulnerabilities

Sun Microsystems says a Java security hole, which was called "as bad as it gets" by security experts, has now been patched. Read more »

AusCERT threatened by anti-cyberterrorism plans

The future of the Australian Computer Emergency Response Team (AusCERT) is uncertain after the government implemented plans to create a national computer emergency readiness team (GovCERT) to deal with cyberterrorism attacks. Read more »

Video (2)

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Why security appliances can make you less secure

Security appliances can introduce vulnerabilities into an organisation's network because they often include older operating systems and vendors rarely inform customers how to properly update them, according to Microsoft's Roger Grimes, who was speaking at the AusCERT 2008 conference. Read more »

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Charney: Customers the biggest hole in Microsoft's security

Microsoft customers need to better authenticate applications they install on their PCs, so the next challenge for Microsoft is to figure out how to provide that information, according to Scott Charney, the VP of Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing Group. Read more »

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  • Staff Crying, mooning and leaving

    In this week's roundup we see that continuous whining can get results, Linux users get 64-bit Flash and Moonlight previews, the latest in the Yahoo/Microsoft relationship and Senator Conroy ducks and weave in Senate Question Time. Read more »

    -- posted by Staff

  • Brendon Chase Sun eye Web developers with Netbeans 6.5

    Despite the recent employment axe hitting Sun the company has pushed out a new release of its Netbeans open source IDE with an eye to appeal more to Web developers. Read more »

    -- posted by Brendon Chase

  • Renai LeMay BarCamp buzz: Let the hacking continue

    Attending last weekend's BarCamp in Sydney, it was hard to escape the conclusion that a certain "dot-com bust" flavour had seeped into the kool aid previously being drunk by Australia's web 2.0 and early stage start-up sector. Read more »

    -- posted by Renai LeMay

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