PDFs, China and PC Security
Tuesday, 20 April 2010 07:53 | Author: TommyRay | 
Like what you do and do what you like. I guess that's why I decided to do programming instead of security where college is concerned. But as far as importance, security is definately something to not just consider but act upon. It's defending you, your rights, your privacy. Because somewhere, someone likes to do harm and will attack.
Do you use PDFs? Well, where the internet is concerned, downloading suspicious PDF files (By suspicious it's meant 'unknown' or 'unverified' sources and content authors) is the top method hackers use. Do you use Inernet Explorer? Well, that's the second method of intrusions and infections. IE had a reported 45 vulnerabilities. (Flash and Active-X are the 3rd and 4th.) Perhaps you use Firefox instead? Firefox had 169 vulnerabilities! But don't be too alarmed. It seems IE is much more exploited simply due to the popularity and more widespread use of it.
Developers patch these vulnerabilities quite fast usually, most within a single day. Although Safari took the longest at 13 days. Vulnerabilities are not seen as mistakes, applications are developed so they 'work' with built in security methods. It takes an attacker looking for weak spot to expose the vulnerability to the creators alot of the time, and alot of time, they do.
Who is doing all this malicious attacking? China? Russia? Nope, it's the United States, believe it or not, along with a second running China and right behind in 3rd place is Brazil. These are the top three countries that house the most problematic hackers. Google faced such threats and had problems with China recently, as you may have heard in the news.
Gaia is what users use to sign in with Google and a variety of services online, and was compromised in a 2 day attack in December of 2009. It began when an employee of Google in China visited a corrupted website that ultimately allowed access to a key group of computers used by developers. It was stated it was "a highly sophisitcated and targeted attack" that was aimed at gathering data about human rights activists. Google shut down the China site and redirected people to a Hong-Kong based site with uncensored Chinese language searching.
And that's one of the "Big Boys" out there being attacked. Symantic reports that there is nearly 6.8 million distinct bot-infected computers worldwide. One of them could very possibly be yours! So while you're thinking about it, make sure you have your computers security handled. Antivirus running okay? When was the last Full Scan performed? Firewall look good? Do Windows Updates to be sure you're all set there, too. Use a Flash Drive at work or school? Bet you don't scan it when you plug it in back at home. Scan those, also!
Last Updated (Tuesday, 20 April 2010 08:03)