News about Linux security, security alerts and exploits

 Panda trials Linux anti-virus software, Oct 31, 2006

Security company Panda has launched a beta version of Panda DesktopSecure for Linux.

Exploit code has been published for a security flaw in Nvidia's Linux graphics driver that could let a remote intruder take over a system.

The proprietary, closed source binary driver from Nvidia has torn open a security hole in Linux through which ill-intentioned individuals can plant arbitrary program code and then execute it with root rights.

It has proven to be the year of living dangerously, if you are using a computer that's attached too the Internet - not so much if you're using a Linux-based machine.

Venture-funded Israeli startup Yoggie Security Systems is readying a tiny, Linux-based remote access device designed to protect Windows XP laptops. The credit-card-sized Yoggie Personal Security Gatekeeper has two Ethernet ports, and runs sophisticated firewall, VPN, and monitoring software on a hardened Linux kernel, the company says.

With its latest entry into the Linux desktop market, Novell plans to make Linux more secure and make that security easier to manage, company officials said at the LinuxWorld conference.

With Microsoft Corp.'s Office suite now being targeted by hackers, researchers at the French Ministry of Defense say users of the OpenOffice.org software may be at even greater risk from computer viruses.

Mozilla Corp. on July 26 started urging Firefox users to install a newly released version of the browser, v1.5.0.5, which includes some essential security fixes.

Windows, Linux or Mac -- does operating system or platform matter to hackers? Not necessarily, according to research from Fortify Software, an application security provider.

Hackers have borrowed the same open-source development techniques used to build Firefox, Apache, and Linux as they collaborate on malware projects, a security company's researchers claimed Monday.

The Debian GNU/Linux project today admitted a hacker had compromised one of its internal servers.

Antivirus vendor Trend Micro is claiming that open-source software is inherently more secure than proprietary software such as Microsoft Windows.

Linux is insecure. Open source is insecure. Windows is insecure. All software is insecure.

PostgreSQL users have been put in a potentially sticky situation by a serious security flaw made public last week.

Linux software provider Red Hat issued a security advisory for a number of its products, addressing a series of kernel vulnerabilities in the operating system software.

Philip Zimmermann, developer of the pretty good privacy (PGP) encryption algorithm, has released a public beta for Zfone, a new product for encrypting VoIP conversations.

Ever since Dan Geer was fired in 2003 from @stake.com for being an author of a paper on negatives of a computing monoculture, I've seen article after article recommending that administrators do away with their computer monocultures as a way of minimizing or defeating malware and hackers. A computer monoculture is a paradigm that says if all your computers are of one type or OS platform, you are more at risk for malicious attack due to all the commonalities the attacker can use.

A U.S. government-sponsored open-source bug hunt has resulted in more patches and security alerts.

Germany's Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) will present several new open source-based desktop and security applications on Wednesday at a local Linux event.

Linux company Ubuntu has issued an update for the Mozilla browser that fixes exploits which could be used phishing, denial of service (DoS) or other security attacks.

Marcel Holtmann has reported a vulnerability in the Linux Kernel, which can be exploited by malicious, local users to bypass certain security restrictions.

The list of serious unpatched vulnerabilities in Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser keeps getting longer and longer.

Hackers have released a sample code for a virus that could infect both Linux and Windows PCs.

A pair of security bugs in cryptography software could allow an attacker to insert content into a digitally signed message or forge signatures on files.

There is a file that contains all the installation logs : /var/log/installer/cdebconf/questions.dat In this file, there is all the questions asked to the user abd all the user's answers. So, near the end of the file, we can find the user created during the installation... and its password (not hidden).

The most popular open-source software is also the most free of bugs, according to the first results of a U.S. government-sponsored effort to help make such software as secure as possible.

Some vulnerabilities have been reported in the Linux kernel, which can be exploited by malicious, local users to cause a DoS (Denial of Service).

Received wisdom would have it that transparency makes systems more secure by allowing anyone to view the underlying software code, identify bugs and make peer-reviewed changes.

Media reports circulating about the threat posed by a Linux worm called Mare.D have been written off as little more than the result of a "slow news week" by one leading antivirus expert.

Security experts today warned of a Linux network worm that exploits holes in the Mambo content management system and the PHP XML-RPC library.

As expected, archrivals Sun, Red Hat and Novell unveiled major security improvements for their respective Unix and Linux platforms this week.

In side-by-side tests of Microsoft Internet Explorer and Firefox, IE proved to be far more vulnerable to spyware infections. Most of the exploits that leveraged IE vulnerabilities to plant spyware were based on ActiveX and JavaScript.

A report warns of security vulnerabilities, raising the question of whether the open-source model can provide bulletproof software

While identifying Microsoft as the source of most IT security vulnerabilities, respondents to a SearchOpenSource.com survey also found holes in Linux and open source software (OSS) security.

Phisher phobia has gripped IT users and administrators, thanks to some highly publicized phishing successes -- and some users and admins should be more worried than others. But phishers can be beaten, says Lance James, author of the new book, Phishing Exposed

A serious vulnerability has been found in the popular KDE open-source software bundle.

Cyber-security and computer experts from the government and law enforcement are increasingly concerned with malicious code that runs on Linux and Apple Computer Inc.'s Mac OS X operating systems and threats posed by devices such as iPods and Xboxes.

Grisoft's Antivirus product AVG is being made available free to Linux home users, according to its Australian distributor Avalanche Technology Group.

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