The developers of Firefox released a new version this week to fix several security vulnerabilities. If you have Firefox configured to automatically download the latest version (the default), you should not have to do anything to get the update.
An article from CNet reports on how the Conficker worm got into some critical hospital systems. It’s written in a bit of an alarmist fashion but it does highlight the need to segregate critical systems from the Internet. On the other hand, the systems that got infected were pretty old (Windows NT and 2000). If you have to run your software on an older Windows system, please make sure it’s not in any way connected to the Internet (or connected to any other systems that are connected to the Internet).
The Conficker worm infected several hundred machines and critical medical equipment in an undisclosed number of U.S. hospitals recently, a security expert said on Thursday in a panel at the RSA security conference. Conficker spreads via networked computers as well as through removable storage devices and a hole in Windows that Microsoft patched in October, but these machines were too old to be patched, according to Sachs.
Researchers have found a very large botnet being operated out of the Ukraine that has infected over 1.9 million computers, including computers at 51 US government agencies. Computers are apparently getting infected when they visit a web site that has a trojan program that only 4 out of 39 anti-malware programs catch. The moral of this story is don’t download programs if you don’t know they are legitimate and don’t be scared into downloading any software by big warnings that pop up on web sites you visit.
Shalitin says it appears that the botnet operators may be buying and selling bots or portions of their botnet based on a communique Finjan discovered on an underground black-hat hacker forum in Russia.
A recent study said lost laptop computers cost companies an average of $50K/laptop. The figure includes “laptop replacement, data breach cost, loss of productivity, investigation cost, and other variables.” How much would it cost your business if one of your laptops went missing?
Consulting firms, law firms, financial services, healthcare, pharmaceutical, education, and technology are companies which would take the biggest financial hit from a lost notebook, according to the study. Tech firms top the list when just factoring the cost of IP loss and lost productivity.
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