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News

• In Pictures: 7 social engineering scams and how to avoid them

  Even the most savvy IT professionals can fall victim to social engineering attacks. Here’s how to recognize these threats and avoid falling prey to them.

• Mystery malware nukes US city's Windows PCs

  Malicious code that mysteriously found its way onto an internal virtual print server took out nearly 800 computers used by the City of Norfolk, Virginia, last week.

• Anonymising project TOR issues update after server breach

  The TOR Project is advising users to upgrade to a new version of the software following a hack that compromised three of its servers.

• Hacker hits Adobe Illustrator with new attack

  Adobe Systems' security response team is scrambling to fix a newly disclosed bug in its Illustrator software, even as it readies another security patch for next week.

• Major websites hit with growing web attack

  A blossoming web attack, first reported by security researcher Dancho Danchev earlier this month, has expanded to hit over a million web pages, including many well-known sites.

• QuickTime bug opens XP, Vista to attack

  Security researchers warn that attack code targeting an unpatched bug in Apple's QuickTime has gone public, and added that in-the-wild attacks against systems running Windows XP and Vista are probably not far behind.

• Storm over Estonia rekindles NZ internet protection debate

  The major attack last month on the Estonian internet domain and government websites has kindled energetic debate among InternetNZ members over whether and how to respond.

• Local researchers offer free security service

  New Zealand’s Honeynet Alliance is offering a free service for webmasters. The local project is part of the global, non-profit Honeynet Project, a research organisation dedicated to improving the security of the internet at no cost to the public.

• Hackers selling IDs for US$14, Symantec says

  Identity thieves are offering a person's credit-card number, date of birth and other sensitive information for as little as US$14 over the internet, says a new report on online threats released this week.

• Kiwi Honeynet researchers probe internet bad guys

  By putting out honeypots — easily compromised computers designed to trap attackers — four volunteer researchers in New Zealand are trying to find out what makes cyber-criminals tick.

• Maxnet weathers SkankyFlat DoS attack

  A disgruntled poster on community website SkankyFlat is thought to be behind a spate of denial of service (DoS) attacks that caused severe outages for Auckland ISP Maxnet.

• Researchers: SMS attacks could cripple cellphones

  Hackers armed with a moderately sized network of zombie computers theoretically could knock out cellular service throughout the US, say security researchers at Pennsylvania State University. In a report published this week, the researchers explained how such an attack could exploit weaknesses in Short Message Service (SMS), which is used to send and receive text messages between mobile phones.