Security Threat Report: 2010

The first decade of the 21st century saw a dramatic change in the nature of cybercrime. Once the province of teenage boys spreading graffiti for kicks and notoriety, hackers today are organized, financially motivated gangs.

In the past, virus writers displayed offensive images and bragged about the malware they had written, now hackers target companies to steal intellectual property, build complex networks of compromised PCs and rob individuals of their identities.

2009 saw Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites solidify their position at the heart of many users’ daily internet activities, and saw these websites become a primary target for hackers. Because of this, social networks have become one of the most significant vectors for data loss and identity theft.

New computing platforms also emerged last year, and shortly thereafter fell victim to cybercriminal activities. What was lost was once again found in 2009, as old hacking techniques re-emerged as means to penetrate data protection.

By understanding the problems that have arisen in the past, perhaps internet users can craft themselves a better, safer future.

Learn more:

• Read the full report
• Attend the on-demand webcast
• Watch and learn how malware spreads

Nmap - the popular free scanning tool has had a new release.

Nmap ("Network Mapper") is a free and open source (license) utility for network exploration or security auditing. Many systems and network administrators also find it useful for tasks such as network inventory, managing service upgrade schedules, and monitoring host or service uptime. Nmap uses raw IP packets in novel ways to determine what hosts are available on the network, what services (application name and version) those hosts are offering, what operating systems (and OS versions) they are running, what type of packet filters/firewalls are in use, and dozens of other characteristics. It was designed to rapidly scan large networks, but works fine against single hosts. Nmap runs on all major computer operating systems, and official binary packages are avalable for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. In addition to the classic command-line Nmap executable, the Nmap suite includes an advanced GUI and results viewer (Zenmap), a flexible data transfer, redirection, and debugging tool (Ncat), and a utility for comparing scan results (Ndiff).

It offers more than 150
significant improvements, including:
 o 30+ new Nmap Scripting Engine scripts
 o enhanced performance and reduced memory consumption
 o protocol-specific payloads for more effectie UDP scanning
 o a completely rewritten traceroute engine
 o massive OS and version detection DB updates (10,000+ signatures)

The Nmap 5.00 source code and packages for Linux, Mac, and Windows are
available for download at the usual place:

http://nmap.org/download.html