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US military's offensive operations in cyberspace to shoot Hackers The US military is now legally in the clear to launch offensive operations in cyberspace, the commander of the US Strategic Command has said. The Pentagon has just sent a report to Congress where it says that it has the right to retaliate with military force against a cyber attack. Air Force General Robert Kehler said in the latest sign of quickening U.S. military preparations for possible cyber warfare that "I do not believe that we need new explicit authorities to conduct offensive operations of any kind". US Strategic Command is in charge of a number of areas for the US military, including space operations (like military satellites), cyberspace concerns, 'strategic deterrence' and combating WMDs. " When warranted, we will respond to hostile acts in cyberspace as we would to any other threat to our country ," the DoD said in the report. " All states possess an inherent right to...

Patches Released for BIND Denial-of-service Vulnerability There's a new vulnerability in the popular BIND name server software that is causing various versions of the application to crash unexpectedly after logging a certain kind of error. The Internet Systems Consortium (ISC), an organization that maintains several software products critical for Internet infrastructure, has released a patch for an actively exploited denial-of-service vulnerability in the widely used BIND DNS server. The internet Systems Consortium (ISC) have described the problem as follows: An as-yet unidentified network event caused BIND 9 resolvers to cache an invalid record, subsequent queries for which could crash the resolvers with an assertion failure... Affected servers crashed after logging an error in query.c with the following message: "INSIST(! dns_rdataset_isassociated(sigrdataset)) More details are available in their advisory . As of this posting, ISC had not revealed the underlying problem,...

Worlds first windows 8 Bootkit to be released at MalCon It is amazing how fast security measures are bypassed by hackers. it seems Windows 8 is now Malconed! Peter Kleissner has created the world's first Windows 8 Bootkit which is planned to be released in India at the International Malware Conference MalCon. An independent programmer and security analyst, peter was working for an anti-virus company from 2008 to 2009 and was speaker at the Black Hat and Hacking at Random technical security conferences. While his main operating fields are Windows security and analysis of new malware, his recent Important projects include the development of the Stoned Bootkit, a research project to subvert the Windows security model. A bootkit is built upon the following broad parts: Infector Bootkit Drivers Plugins (the payload) And as put by peter, those parts are easy to split up in a criminal organization: Teams A-D are writing on the different parts. If you are doing it right, Team D (th...

Acunetix Web Vulnerability Scanner 8 BETA Released The next stage in the evolution of Acunetix Web Vulnerability Scanner has arrived — WVS 8 BETA! Many of you have been biting their nails in anticipation of this Beta, so sit tight and read on for the next most important stage in the evolution of Acunetix WVS. Version 8 of Web Vulnerability Scanner has been optimized to make life easier at every stage of a security scan. WVS is easier to use for web admins and security analysts alike: enhanced automation, ability to save scan settings as a template to avoid reconfiguration, and multiple instance support for simultaneous scans of several websites. WVS 8 also ushers in a new exciting co-operation between Acunetix and Imperva: developers of the industry's leading Web Application Firewall. Download Acunetix WVS Version 8 BETA

Stuxnet 3.0 to be possibility released at MalCon ? Malware coders and security researchers are increasingly looking at MalCon malware convention to show-off their latest creations and research. We were pretty shocked to see in a twitter update today from MalCon, that one of the research paper submissions shortlisted is on possible features of Stuxnet 3.0. While this may just be a discussion and not a release, it is interesting to note that the speaker Nima Bagheri presenting the paper is from IRAN. For refreshing your memory, Stuxnet is a computer worm discovered in June 2010. It targets Siemens industrial software and equipment running Microsoft Windows.While it is not the first time that hackers have targeted industrial systems,it is the first discovered malware that spies on and subverts industrial systems, and the first to include a programmable logic controller (PLC) rootkit. What is alarming is the recent discovery (On 1 September 2011) of a new worm - thought to be related...