Operation n

This highlights the need to be very weary off anything you can get free. Public terminals at Heathrow airport allowed attackers to install software (keyloggers, backdoors, trojans, etc). RedOracle were informed by an Italian hacker (prego) and passed it on to the terminals’ owners, Spectrum Interactive. They have provided full information advisory.

Anyone that is perceived in a bad way or are controversial in the public eye are more liable to attacked than anybody else. This is commonly known as ‘Hacktivism’.This is the case with both the RIAA and Church of Scientology. It doesn’t help that was a lack of security controls on the RIAA website, which allowed attackers to use SQL injection to wipe data off their website.

A growing trend in websites is web analytics. This can monitor user activities to indicate what get used and what doesn’t. Google has its own analytics package. These days you really should throw on a proxy to see what it is happening. You have to be careful. Evidently Sears had a little christmas spyware surprise through this technique.

…you can go to the data centre and brute-force your way in as these criminals did by posing as policemen to burgle a Verizon data centre. It’s a worry. My feeling is people get ideas from media influences such as shows like 24, Spooks, CSI.

Here something that I revisited whilst doing some reconnaissance work for a test. It was noted that paterva was a useful data mining tool indeed. However, in late August, it was forced to change its name from evolution to maltego due to threats of legal action from Novell. Maltego download and web interface can be found here.