May 15th, 2009 
Mourad Ben Lakhoua Widespread outages involving several Google services–including search, Google Docs, and Gmail–were caused by an upgrade gone awry inside of Google, according to engineers. Dmitri Alperovitch, vice president of threat research for McAfee, said that Google this morning attempted to make changes to key Internet routing numbers–known as autonomous system numbers–as part of its ongoing transition [...]
May 14th, 2009 Mourad Ben Lakhoua The cleanup cost for fixing a bug in a homegrown Web application ranges anywhere from $400 to $4,000 to repair, depending on the vulnerability and the way it’s fixed. Security experts traditionally have been hesitant to calculate the actual cost associated with bug fixes because there are so many variables, including the severity of the [...]
May 14th, 2009 Mourad Ben Lakhoua Computer zombies are out to get you. That may sound like a tagline from a bad B movie, but there’s truth behind it. A “zombie” in the computer lexicon is a computer that has been taken over by a piece of malicious software planted by a hacker typically for the purpose of secretly sending out [...]
May 13th, 2009 Mourad Ben Lakhoua Microsoft is set to test Windows 7′s update mechanism by issuing as many as 10 fake updates for the operating system over the coming week. It will be the second time that Microsoft has released phony updates for Windows 7. In February, it tested the beta by delivering five bogus patches. People running Windows 7 [...]
May 12th, 2009 Mourad Ben Lakhoua Sysinternals have announced lately three applications updates on there blog: Autoruns v9.5: This update to Autoruns, a powerful autostart manager, adds display of audio and video codecs, which are gaining popularity as an extension mechanism used by malware to gain automatic execution. PsLoglist v2.7: This version of PsLoglist, a command-line event log display utility, now [...]
May 12th, 2009 Mourad Ben Lakhoua Saudi Arabia is launching a new crackdown on cybercrimes, including fraud, in the kingdom, it emerged on Sunday. A specialised department to look into online criminal activity will be formed in all the criminal investigation and criminal evidence departments in the country, it has been announced. Lt Gen Saeed Al-Qahtani, the director general of Public [...]
Posted in Cybercrime 
Tags: Arab World, Cybercrime, International, Saudia Arabia, Security 
No Comments » May 11th, 2009 Mourad Ben Lakhoua Cases of malware attacks around the world are continuing to rise, new research has suggested. The study by security firm Fortinet found that certain countries are being targeted, with attacks on China coming in at the top of the list. A 45 per cent increase in malware attacks was recorded in the Asian country in [...]
