On October 25, 2007, Elcomsoft Co Ltd. inMoscow, Russia filed for a US patent on a reportedly new passwordrecovery method that makes use of a video card's graphics processingunit (GPU). Elcomsoft credits the February 2007 release of the NVIDIACUDA C-Compiler and developer's kit for providing the necessarylow-level GPU access they needed to make this cryptographicadvancement. The newest NVIDIA GPUs act as multiprocessors that utilizeshared memory, cache, and multiple registers. The newest graphics cardsutilize fixed point calculations, relatively massive amounts of memory,and multiple processing units. They differ significantly from acomputer's central processing unit (CPU) in terms of theircryptanalytic processing capabilities and Elcomsoft claims to haveleveraged newer GPU architectures to improve brute force passwordcracking by a factor of 25.

Statistics from Elcomsoft state that the new method can be used toexhaustively crack an eight character pseudo-...

Recent reports have shown thatTrojan.Bayrob is scamming people again. The latest victim lost over€5,000 to the scam but luckily was able to track down where the moneyhad been sent. Unfortunately the final destination for the money was aWestern Union outlet in Greece, after having been first sent through amoney mule in the US.

Once Trojan.Bayrob is executed on a user’s system it can interceptall traffic to eBay. It can then show the infected user any contentthat it chooses instead of the real pages and it can also alterinformation that is shown to the user from the real pages.Trojan.Bayrob is used to scam people who are trying to buy cars oneBay.

The attack is a targeted attack and as such it is difficult toestablish the exact methods that are used to distribute the Trojan;however, from evidence gathered thus far the attack works in a mannersimilar to the following:
• The attacker posts an auction on eBay.
• This auction is used to gain...

Last Friday I had the opportunity tomoderate a panel - Political Phishing – A Threat to the 2008 Campaign?- held as part of the Anti-Phishing Working Group eCrime Researchers Summit hosted by Carnegie Mellon CyLabin Pittsburgh, PA. Our panelists were Rachna Dhamija from HarvardUniversity, Chris Soghoian from Indiana University , and Pat Clarke ofJackson/Clark Partners. We had some great discussion on the potentialimpact of Internet-borne threats to the upcoming US PresidentialElection. The timing could not have been more appropriate. As theprimaries get closer, and the Internet continues play a central role infundraising and communication, the likelihood of Internet-borne threatsimpacting the election increases.

It also happens that this subject is one that I had myself beenresearching as part of another effort – a soon to...

It has recently been discovered thatBaoFeng Storm, a movie player written in Chinese and widely used inChinese-speaking countries, contains multiple buffer-overflowvulnerabilies, some of which are being actively exploited. Thevulnerabilities are related to the ActiveX control used by the softwareand a vulnerable computer simply needs to browse a Web site, whichcontains exploit code, to be compromised. Successful exploitation thenallows remote execution of arbitrary code in the context of theapplication using the ActiveX control (in this case Internet Explorer)and allows the attacker to take full control of the compromisedcomputer. Failed exploit attempts may lead to denial-of-serviceconditions, possibly resulting in the browser crashing.

The vulnerabilities have been confirmed in version 2.7.9.8 and betaversion 2.7.9.9, although other versions may also be affected, and atthe time of this writing the vulnerabilities remain unpatched. SecurityFocus have...