ilamont/network security

From the page: "A rootkit that hides from Windows on the hard drive's boot sector is infecting PCs, security researchers said today. Once installed, the cloaking software is undetectable by most current anti-virus programs.

The rootkit overwrites the hard drive's master boot record (MBR), the first sector -- sector 0 -- where code is stored to bootstrap the operating system after the computer's BIOS does its startup checks. Because it hides on the MBR, the rootkit is effectively invisible to the OS and security software installed on that OS."

From the page: "Another disgruntled former employee has returned seeking retribution. Iâ€m not sure how long it was before this network engineer was able to gain access to his former employerâ€s (Pentastar Aviation, LLC) computer records, but he ended up wiping out payroll and personnel records to the tune of thousands of dollars. "

From the page: "About 325 Tier 1 merchants, those defined as processing more than 6 million card transactions a year, had until Sept. 30 to show they had implemented all of the required controls. But according to estimates from analyst firm Gartner Inc. and observers in the payment industry, a good half of them are unlikely to have made the deadline for a variety of reasons."

From the page: "Some of the world's top network engineers are engaged in a research effort that could lead to the most radical redesign of the Internet's underlying routing architecture since it was developed in the 1980s.

The Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) is searching for a new routing architecture that would improve the Internet's ability to scale to support potentially billions of new users in developing countries."

From the page: "The Plano, Texas, company, which operates a pair of data centers that hold the physical servers it manages for clients, said the break-in happened sometime Monday night. "The Layered Technologies support database was a target of malicious activity on the evening of 9/17/2007 that may have involved the illegal downloading of information such as names, addresses, phone numbers, e-mail addresses and server log-in details for [5,000] to 6,000 of our clients," the firm's CEO, Todd Abrams, wrote on the company blog Tuesday."

From the page: "According to the Post, visitors to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial site who searched for causalities by date were redirected to a page that displayed the Turkish flag, a short video, and messages in both Turkish and English. Among the latter was one in Turkish that in translation read: "Is there any equal or likeness to our martyrs at Gallipoli?""