Site Guesses Your Gender via Browsing History

This is a pretty old issue, but this is an interesting new implementation of an old idea. Using your browser history and by matching your browsing habits the site attempts to guess your gender with a weighting system according to the gender demographics for a list of fairly popular sites.

It’s not super accurate unless you are really stereotypical in your Internet usage habits, and it won’t work if you don’t accept any cookies and flush everything regularly.

Source:
http://www.darknet.org.uk/2008/07/site-guesses-your-gender-via-browsing-history/

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DNS Cache Poisoning Issue Update

Ok, we have a confirmed instance where the DNS cache poisoning vulnerability was used to compromise a DNS server belonging to AT&T. This PCWorld article covers the incident. The original article makes it sound as though the Metasploit site was ‘owned’ by this incident when really the issue was that the AT&T DNS server was compromised and was providing erroneous IP addresses to incoming queries.

Source:
http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=4801&rss

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The Real Dirt on Whitelisting

It’s déjà vu all over again. Whitelisting technology has enjoyed a resurgence of interest lately, with antivirus companies such as Symantec, McAfee, and Microsoft planning to add it to their blacklisting-based malware detection tools and some enterprises even dropping AV altogether in favor of whitelisting alone. All thanks to the proliferation of botnets, stealthier malware, and the near-epidemic in data breaches that have led vendors and enterprises to search for something other than the standard approach of blacklisting known threats.

Whitelisting, the concept of which dates back to the mainframe days of locked-down and controlled applications, lets only approved and authorized applications run on user machines. Today whitelisting is becoming a first layer of defense in some organizations, says Tom Murphy, chief strategist for Bit9, which sells a whitelisting solution. “Over time, what we see is an erosion of value for blacklisting because more machines will be using whitelisting,” he says.

Murphy predicts that within two years, most every machine will have some element of whitelisting security, whether it runs blacklisting-based antivirus software or not. And AV vendors are starting to jump on board: Bit9 recently announced that Kaspersky Lab, for instance, is now using its Global Software Registry database of clean, whitelisted applications to build out some of its technology.

Source:
http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=160433

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Gmail Shows “Never Send It To Spam” Filter

Google’s webmailer Gmail has an apparently* new filter function named “Never send it to Spam”. Ticking this should ensure that a certain email – with criteria you define, like by entering your friend’s name in the “From” field – will not be accidentally sorted into the spam folder. It’s a nice option to have as last resort, like when you identified certain types of good mail which never see the inbox, even though naturally most of the time we’d like to have Gmail figure it out for us automatically, I guess (e.g. to perhaps not flag something as spam which someone we talked to before sent to us, unless we flagged their messages as spam later on).

Source:
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2008-07-30-n67.html

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Exploit Reveals the Darker Side of Automatic Updates

A recent study of Web browser installations showed that far too few are up to date with the latest security patches. And browsers aren’t alone; as my dear old mum can attest, it can be hard to keep up with OS and application patches when all you want to do is use your computer for work. It should come as no surprise that many PCs are vulnerable to security exploits that could otherwise be prevented.

Firefox got top marks in the browser study because of its automatic update feature, which notifies users of the latest patches as soon as they’re available. A growing number of vendors are using a similar approach, automatically checking for updates whenever you use their software. But now it turns out that automatic updates aren’t always all they’re cracked up to be. A new exploit called Evilgrade can take advantage of automatic updaters to install malicious code on unsuspecting systems, and your computers could be more vulnerable than you think.

Evilgrade is designed as a modular framework that accepts plug-ins capable of mounting attacks on a variety of software packages that employ their own auto-update procedures. Currently-supported targets include the Java browser plug-in, WinZip, Winamp, OpenOffice.org, the LinkedIn Toolbar, iTunes, and Mac OS X, among others. Still more plug-ins are liable to be developed in coming months.

The exploit works by pretending to be a genuine upgrade site and sending malicious code when your software was expecting a patch. The code might be anything, from a Trojan horse to a keylogger that intercepts passwords and user accounts.

Source:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/149105/2008/07/exploit_reveals_the_darker_side_of_automatic_updates.html?tk=rss_news

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