As most are seeing Twitter has been in the new alot lately showing both it’s good and bad uses. Here is an interesting story about how police might or might not want to use it and the difference between authorized and unauthorized use:

“Plenty of government agencies are dipping their toes into the Twitter waters these days, but when we found the Denton Police Department’s Twitter page this afternoon, we knew we’d found something truly special.”

To See the rest of the story here – Click Here

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If you have not heard tomorrow the net could be hit by a major virus / worm that could compromise your security by taking over your machine and make you part of an evil BOTNET – The security experts over at EEYE have written this about the potential issues and given some nice ways to prevent and or detect if you are infected:

http://www.eeye.com/html/conficker/index.html

Conficker Worm Overview

Introduction

The Conficker worm is a very formidable threat to modern-day networks. The worm uses multiple methods to infect remote systems, and utilizes a very advanced P2P architecture in order to communicate with other infected systems. Furthermore, it has shown signs of an advanced update mechanism that would allow infected systems to rapidly received updates in order to evade detection or to be used in some malicious manner.

Below is a visualization of the propagation and communication mechanisms currently seen within Conficker infections.

As depicted above, Conficker is a very powerful threat utilizing a blend of exploits and functionality issues within the Microsoft Windows Operating System, while also utilizing human propagation means via thumb-drive sharing. The worm has been identified on millions of workstations, servers, and laptops throughout the world.

Suggested Actions

Administrators are strongly urged to utilize the Free Conficker / MS08-067 Detection Utility available for download here:

http://www.eeye.com/html/downloads/other/ConfickerScanner.html

This utility allows network administrators to rapidly assess their networks in order to find hosts that are infected by Conficker, or are missing the most critical patch necessary to blocking Conficker network propagation attacks.

Free Protection Utility

Users are also urged to use a powerful host-based protection suite with anti-virus, such as eEye’s Blink Personal or Professional. In addition to the detection of the Conficker worm, eEye Digital Security’s Blink Endpoint Protection Platform can effectively protect hosts, even if they are not patched, from the propagation of this worm. Using protocol based IPS analyzers, Blink can detect and stop the malicious traffic associated with MS08-067 and block the worm from self propagating. For installations that are already infected, Blink’s multi layer antivirus engine will remove the Conficker worm and provide protection until a permanent remediation is performed on the host. Free trials are available for Blink Professional here, and a free version of Blink is available for personal use here.

Maintain Microsoft Updates

Users and administrators are strongly urged to maintain all of the latest patches from Microsoft and all other software vendors with applications on endpoint systems. This can be easily maintained by using eEye’s Retina Network Security Scanner to identify all vulnerabilities on a network. Windows users can also enjoy the benefits of this vulnerability assessment by using eEye Digital Security’s Blink Endpoint Protection Platform to perform a vulnerability assessment of the host system on which it is installed.

References The HoneyNet Project:
http://www.honeynet.org/papers/conficker/
Felix Leder and Tillmann Werner Analysis:
http://iv.cs.uni-bonn.de/wg/cs/applications/containing-conficker
Microsoft Advisory - 967940
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/967940.mspx
Microsoft Malware Protection Center:
http://tinyurl.com/absz6f
Microsoft Security Bulletin MS08-067:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS08-067.mspx
SANS - Internet Storm Center:
http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=5860
Shadowserver Foundation:
http://www.shadowserver.org/wiki/pmwiki.php?n=Calendar.20090212

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This is the start of multiple articles on the internet and identity theft. I will also be discussing ways to prevent and or solve and mitigate issues you might already have on your computers.

To start a bit about my background and why you might want to think about this advice as well rounded and tested before just believing that I know what I am talking about.

I have been heavily involved in IT for my company for many years now to include network administration and IT infrastructure on top of normal day to day duties. The funny part of all this is I had to learn how to be a tech guy pretty much overnight when we decided it was time to connect all of our employees.

So how do you become a tech IT wizard overnight, well you don’t and on top of that you cannot even expect to be able to grasp all the information you will need. Here is how I did it, I simply concentrated on what I knew how to do, supplemented that with items I knew I could learn quickly and then joined forces with an expert for the items I had no idea how to do. It makes much better business sense to sub out for services you might never really need to do again. Another incredible resource for internet security knowledge is: Security Now! located at www.GRC.com

(Read the article)

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We ran across this article the other day and it seems that GPS in the very near future might be able to assist you with your safety.

Honda’s new GPS warns drivers when they’re about to leave their car in places where it is likely to be stolen, broken into or otherwise vandalized. The new technology, available from today if you live in Japan, links to local police stations and provides crime ratings by location, and if area is particularly dangerous it issues an alert. No indication of when or if this’ll come to the US. Originally posted at: InventorSpot

Well as you can imagine this system brings to the surface a huge potential for argument of what and where “High Crime” neighborhoods are and what constitutes a “high Crime” neighborhood but as technology moves forward it seems we will be seeing much more integration with this type of technology to add to our arsenal of items to help keep us safer in today’s world.

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