Hack & Hackers

[Rasputin]

Hackers can Hijack PCs With Firefox Add-Ons

Hackers can drop malicious code into systems running Mozilla Corp.'s Firefox when the browser is armed with any of several high-profile add-ons, including Google Toolbar and Yahoo Toolbar, a researcher revealed today. Mozilla has acknowledged the risk posed by some extensions.

Christopher Soghoian, a Ph.D student at Indiana University, outlined how "man-in-the-middle" attackers, especially in public wireless networks, could disguise malware as a Firefox extension and surreptitiously plant their code in lieu of a normal update to one of the vulnerable extensions.

The bulk of Firefox extensions -- small plug-ins that add features or functionality, and are almost universally created by volunteer developers or hobbyists -- are hosted and updated from Mozilla's own SSL-secured site, and are not vulnerable to this attack, Soghoian said. A number of broadly used third-party extensions, however, update from their own unsecured servers.

"It's sort of a compounding of errors," Soghoian said. "Mozilla didn't tell developers that they should update from a secure link; they erred in assuming everyone would know to do that. But the add-on developers are at fault for not using a secure server."

Mozilla revised the documentation for crafting and maintaining Firefox extensions after being contacted by Soghoian to post a prominent warning that urges developers to host updates on a SSL-secured site.

Public wireless access points, like those at airports and coffee shops, would be the most likely scene of an attack, because it's relatively easy there for a hackers' laptop to mimic a legitimate update server. But Soghoian warned that other locales would be just as dangerous.

"Any network where you're not running the show puts you at risk," he said. "If you're using your neighbor's wireless, for example." Users of the Tor anonymity network would also be vulnerable, Soghoian added. "There you're trusting your DSN to someone you don't know."

He listed Google Toolbar, Yahoo Toolbar, Del.icio.us Extension, Facebook Toolbar, AOL Toolbar, Ask.com Toolbar, Netcraft Anti-Phishing Toolbar, and PhishTank SiteChecker among the at-risk add-ons, but couldn't come up with an exhaustive catalog. "I didn't have time to test every extension," he said, "so I went to Download.com and looked at the top 20."

Ironically, some, such as Netcraft's, are designed to protect users against threats. "Users think 'I'm gonna make myself safer' by installing this extension, but they end up putting themselves at risk."

One vulnerable extension -- the eBay-created, Mozilla-sanctioned add-on for French, German, and British online auction users -- was shifted to a secure server within days, Soghoian said.

Other vendors contacted by Soghoian, however, were less responsive.

"It was really frustrating. Firefox was fantastic, but some of the other firms, they either ignored my e-mails or didn't reply," Soghoian said. He fingered Google Inc. as especially uncooperative. Between April 16 and May 24 he sent Google's security team five e-mails, but received only one reply, on May 25, that said the group was working on a fix that was to be deployed before today. As of today, however, Google Toolbar was being served from an unsecured URL.

"This was really eye-opening," said Soghoian, who interned with Google's Application Security Team last summer.

"Vendors should be doing everything possible to encourage researchers," he said. "They should be encouraging us to come to them rather than sell the vulnerabilities to iDefense or Tipping Point. Ignoring researchers isn't the best way to encourage an open dialog."

Soghoian recommended that until affected extension vendors release secure updates, users should either remove or disable all Firefox extensions and toolbars that have not been downloaded from the official Mozilla Add-Ons site.

In an e-mail today, Mozilla's director of ecosystem development, Mike Shaver, admitted the danger that insecurely hosted and updated add-ons pose, and urged extension developers to fix the problem.

"We strongly encourage the providers of such add-ons to remedy their hosting situation promptly, to minimize the exposure to the users of their software," Shaver said. "Users of add-ons hosted on AMO, including all of the ones we've been working on, are not at risk here."

[Rasputin]

Best Downloads for Hacking Firefox

In the battle of the browsers, Firefox clearly beats Internet Explorer in one area--the number of adds-ons (called "extensions") available for strengthening, focusing, and directing the software's power.

You can download hundreds of free extensions to make Firefox do just about anything you can imagine. But I think that the following four stand out from the rest. Give my favorites a try; they may well become yours, too.

Cooliris Previews
Surfing the Web is like walking past a series of dark alleys--before you click on a link, you can't be sure of what lies ahead. But Cooliris Previews shines a light into the dark.

Hover your mouse over a link on a Web page, and a small blue icon appears. Click the icon, and a popup window displays a thumbnail preview of the page, so you can decide whether to go there.

The popup window includes a number of useful tools, including one that lets you lock the preview window so that it stays open, another that lets you open the preview in a new tab, and another that lets you e-mail the link to a friend.

Cooliris Previews is particularly useful during searches: It helps you narrow your search results down to the most useful ones. And it really shines at video sites such as YouTube, because the video plays right inside the popup window when you click the blue icon.

The software has several other nifty features. Select any text on a Web page, right-click, and your selection becomes the basis for a keyword search of various sources, including Google and Wikipedia.

Firefox Showcase
When it comes to tabbed browsing, Firefox falls short of Internet Explorer in one area: the ability to display all open tabs in thumbnail view. Firefox Showcase fixes this shortcoming--and outdoes Internet Explorer's Quick Tabs thumbnail feature.

After installing the extension, you'll find an entirely new Showcase submenu beneath the View menu, with various options for displaying your open tabs in thumbnails, such as by arranging them in a large window that appears on top of Firefox, or by displaying them in a new tab. Or you can forgo the menu in favor of keyboard shortcuts such as <Shift>-<F12> to open the thumbnails in a large window and <Ctrl>-<Alt>-Y to display them in a tab.

The thumbnails are pretty to look at, and they're functional. Hold your mouse over one, and you can move forward or back through that tab's browsing history, reload the page, or stop loading the page.

There are dozens of options for changing how Firefox Showcase works, including ways to alter the size of the thumbnails, the thumbnails' borders, and the behavior of the mouse with regard to thumbnails. The defaults are perfectly fine for most users, however.

NoScript
The Web is a dangerous place. As you surf, malicious sites may use JavaScript and Java to exploit security holes in your browser and perform a drive-by download of malware, for example. You may not even know what hit you.

NoScript solves the problem neatly. It disables JavaScript, Java, and scripting on any Web site you visit, but lets you enable it on sites that you know are safe--such as Gmail and your online bank.

When you visit a site that has scripting on it, NoScript will post an alert at the bottom of Firefox, informing you that it has disabled scripts on the page and identifying them. If you want to overrule the program in this instance, click the Options button that appears on the lower right-hand portion of Firefox, and in one additional click you can order NoScript to let the scripts run on the site a single time or permanently.

You can also add pages to the NoScript whitelist--a list of sites that you allow to run scripts--without having to visit each site individually. Choose Tools, Add Ons, and click Options in the 'NoScript' entry; then click the Whitelist tab, and type in URLs of any sites that you want to add to the list.

NoScript comes with a starter whitelist containing Google.com, Gmail.com, and several others. Interestingly, Microsoft.com isn't on the list, though a number of Microsoft-owned sites (including Live.com and MSN.com) are.

CustomizeGoogle
Google has become many people's de facto entry point to the Internet. If you want to tweak how the search site works, you'll love CustomizeGoogle, possibly the most useful Firefox extension you'll ever see.

For example, if you don't like the ads that appear on the right-hand side or at the top of the page, you can use CustomizeGoogle to make them disappear; do a search, and they're gone. The extension can also add links to other search sites, so you can use other search engines directly from Google. And if you add a History link to each search result, it can find old versions of a Web pages. Click the link, and you'll be sent to the WayBack Machine site, which caches old versions of Web pages.

Worried that Google may invade your privacy? The extension can block cookies from being sent to the Google Analytics service, which web site proprietors use to track visitor behavior on their pages.

There's plenty more here as well, such as the ability to customize Gmail by removing ads. You'll find dozens of ways to change how Google and all its services work.

[Rasputin]

Iraqi hacker and Iranian web site :

[Rasputin]

Hack Attack Hits 10,000 Web Sites

A large-scale hack of legitimate Web sites to infect visitors' PCs is much more massive than first thought, researchers said Friday. At least 10,000 sites have been compromised, and have hijacked unpatched systems that steered to their URLs.

On Monday, Mary Landesman, a senior security researcher at ScanSafe Inc., said that she had uncovered hundreds of sites which had been hacked and were feeding exploits to visitors. Friday, Don Jackson, a senior researcher with Atlanta-based SecureWorks Inc., said the number was considerably larger.

According to ScanSafe's data, approximately 10,000 sites hosted on Linux servers running Apache, the popular open-source Web server software, have been hacked, most likely with purloined log-in credentials. Those servers have been infected with a pair of files that generate constantly-changing malicious JavaScript. When visitors reach the hacked site, the script calls up an exploit cocktail that includes attack code targeting recent QuickTime vulnerabilities, the long-running Windows MDAC bug, and even a fixed flaw in Yahoo Messenger.

If the visitor's PC is unpatched against any of the nine exploits Jackson listed, it's infected with new variant of Rbot, the notorious backdoor Trojan he called "a very nasty piece of software." The end result: The PC is added to a botnet.

Jackson's can't prove how the sites were originally hacked, but all the evidence points to the theft of log-on credentials; one reason why he came to that conclusion is that hosts that have been cleaned of the infection -- or in some cases even had Linux reinstalled -- are quickly reinfected.

"There was no sign of brute forcing [of passwords] just prior to the infection," said Jackson, "but attackers hosting companies are hit all the time with password attacks. It's part of doing business."

Earlier in the week, Landesman of ScanSafe drew a link between the security breach at U.K.-based Fasthosts Ltd., that country's largest Web hosting vendor, and the site hacks, saying then that the domains ScanSafe had found infected had, or had recently had, a relationship with Fasthosts.

Fasthosts denied such a cause-and-effect, and cited what it called "technical discrepancies" with Landesman's claims, but said it was investigating nonetheless.

Friday, Landesman said more data during the week had made her change her mind about the link to Fasthosts. "There are a great deal more of these [compromised] sites than earlier," she said Friday. "There are a number of them that can be traced to Fasthosts, but not all of them do."

Like Jackson, Landesman remained convinced that the hacks were possible because of stolen log-on usernames and passwords. "From everything we have it does point to some kind of compromise of usernames and passwords," she said. "My theory remains that the eventual source of the compromise is going to be a fairly finite number [of hosting companies]."

Jackson stressed that while the site hacks were done sans a true vulnerability, the Apache feature used by the hackers -- "dynamic module loading" -- is little known by most site administrators, making it extra difficult for all infected sites to cleanse themselves.

More to the point, said Jackson, administrators must change every password on the infected server; failing to do so has led to quick reinfections on some hosts. "All passwords must be changed," he said, "not just FTP and Cpanel passwords." There's some evidence, he said, that other passwords besides those for FTP and Cpanel -- a popular server control panel program -- have been used to access the hacked sites.

Other clues led Jackson to speculate that the attackers are not the usual cyber criminals based in Russia or China, but are likely from North America or western Europe. The code for the hacking and file upload tools lack any comments written in Russian or Chinese, which is normally the case when an attack originates in Russia or China. Instead, the comments and code snippets are in English only. "Almost all the hacking business in western Europe is done in English," Jackson said, mentioning Germany specifically.

Users can protect themselves from attack by making sure all software on their systems is patched and that their security software signatures are up-to-date. Web site administrators, on the other hand, should disable dynamic loading in their Apache module configurations.

[Rasputin]

If last November you googled one of thousands of innocuous and common search terms, such as "Microsoft excel to access" or "how to teach your dogs to fetch," you were in line for an Internet attack that infects PCs with spam senders, password stealers, and other kinds of nasty malware.

Beginning on November 24 and continuing for less than a week, bad guys loaded up more than 40,000 Web pages with malicious software and thousands of common search terms. They then employed an automated network of malware-infected computers--known as a botnet--to link to those sites in blog-comment spam and other places. The mentions elevated the position of the poisoned sites in search results, often to the first page.

Click Here for Free Attack
The malicious sites had no useful information. Instead, a simple click on a link to such a site in the search results was enough to launch attacks against your PC. If the attack found any of a number of vulnerabilities in a range of programs, it would load.

"This was a massive wave," says Alex Eckelberry, president and CEO of security firm Sunbelt Software.

The attack marks a new level of sophistication, using multiple techniques to raise site visibility in search results and deliver malware to a mass audience.

Sunbelt researcher Adam Thomas happened upon the attack when he ran a search of "netgear ProSafe DD-WRT" for router firmware. His trained eye saw a suspicious-looking result on the first page. More research and digging on other phrases turned up the vast array of attack sites.

None of the sites from this wave, or a smaller follow-up group, appear now on Google, and Eckelberry and other experts believe the search giant has blocked those specific domains. But Google isn't saying what it did to stop this attack, or whether measures are in place to halt a recurrence.

[Rasputin]

کلمه "هکر" از اواسط سال 1960 به گوش رسيد. هکر به برنامه**نويسی گفته شد که مي*توانست کدهای رايانه*ها را کشف و استفاده کند.
هکرها افرادی بودند که مي*توانستند راه*های جديد برای استفاده از رايانه*ها پيدا کنند و برنامه*هايی درست کنند که هيچ*کس ديگری قادر به انجام آن*ها نبود. آن*ها مههترين افراد کليدی در شرکت*های بزرگ ساخت رايانه*ها بودند و از کوچکترين برنامه*ها تا سيستم*های عامل را طراحی و اجرا مي*کردند.
از اين حيث افرادی همچون "بيل گيتس" و "استيو جابز" هم هکر بودند زيرا مي*دانستند که رايانه*ها چه قابليت*هايی دارند و راه*های استفاده از اين قابليت*ها چگونه است.
اما در ميان هکرها، افرادی که حس کنجکاوی بيشتری داشتند علاوه ساخت برنامه*های جديدی برای رايانه*ها، گذری هم بر ديگر برنامه*های رايانه مي*کردند و از چند و چون آن*ها مطلع مي*شدند.
هکرها در واقع همان افرادی بودند که زمانی که يک "باگ" که مشكلى برای رايانه*هاست به رايانه*ای وارد مي*شد با کدگذاري*های صحيح مي*توانستند آن را از بين ببرند و در قبال اين کار هم پول دريافت مي*کردند.
با گذشت زمان و پيشرفت رايانه*ها و بيشتر شدن تعداد برنامه*نويسان رايانه*ها که همگی مهندسين خبره بودند نام "هکر " وجهه مثبت خود را از دست داد. هکرها به افرادی اطلاق شدند که به شبکه*هايی وارد مي*شدند که ارتباطی به آنان نداشت.
اين در حالی بود که بيشتر اوقات هکرها قصد فضولی يا اختلال در کارها را نداشتند و تنها اين*کار را برای آن انجام مي*دادند که بدانند شبکه*ها چطور کار مي*کنند و موانع را از ميان بردارند تا به دانش خود بيفزايند.
حقيقت آن است که امروزه هم ماجرا از همين قرار است. در حالی که بسياری از افراد هکرها را افرادی مي*دانند که ويروس به رايانه*ها منتقل مي*کنند و در شبکه*ها و سيستم*های رايانه*ها اختلال ايجاد مي*کنند، هکرها تنها به خاطر حس کنجکاوی و در آوردن رمز و راز رايانه*ها دست به رمز گشايی مي*زنند. بسياری از آنها مي*توانند دانش خود را برای کمک به دولت*ها به کار گيرند و راه*های حفاطتی و امنيتی را نشان داده و سودمند باشند.
بسياری از برنامه نويسان رايانه*ها اصرار دارند که کلمه "هکر" به افرادی تلقی شود که از علم خود در راه سودمند استفاده مي*کنند و برای شبکه*های مختلف رايانه*ای مفيد هستند.
آن دسته از افرادی که دست به خرابکاری مي*زدند و رمز گشايي*های نابه*جا مي*کنند را بايد "کراکر" خواند که با هکرها بسياری متفاوتند. مردم عادی تفادت بين هکرها و کراکرها را نمي*دانند و به همين علت است که هکرها هميشه اسامی هستند که چهره منفی دارند و به اختلال دست می زنند.
ابزار هکرها
هکرها برای انجام کارهای خود علاوه بر نبوغ به وسيله ديگری نيز احتياج دارند که کد رايانه است. در حالی که انجمن*های بسياری از هکرها در اينترنت وجود دارد، تنها تعداد کمی از هکرها کدگذاری مي*کنند. بسياری از هکرها کدهايی را دانلود مي*کنند که ديگران آنها را نوشته و برنامه*ريزی کرده*اند.
ده*ها هزار برنامه وجود دارد که هکرها برای کشف ديگر رايانه*ها و شبکه*ها از آنها استفاده مي*کنند که به آنها قدرت مي*دهد تا بتوانند وارد سيستم شوند. تعجبی ندارد که وقتی هکرها با هوش بالای خود مي*توانند برنامه نويسی کنند، هم زمان مي*توانند برنامه*های رايانه*های ديگر را هم بازبينی و رمز گشايی کنند.
هکرهای بدخواه (کراکرها) از برنامه*ها استفاده مي*کنند تا:
-کلمه*های عبور (پس*ورد) را در آوردند: راه*های بسياری وجود دارد که هکرها مي*توانند رمزهای شخصی افراد را بازگشايی کنند. از حدسيات گرفته تا الگوريتم*هايی که ترکيبات حروف و اعداد و سمبل*هاست.
- رايانه مورد هدف را ويروسی کنند: ويروسی کردن رايانه*ها مشکلات زيادی را برای فرد پديد ميآورد. از بهم ريختن تمامی برنامه*های روی سيستم تا در آمدن انواع رمزهای داخلی از جمله آنهاست.
- کنترل رد پاهای استفاده کننده: برنامه*هايی وجود دارد که اين امکان را مي*دهد که فرد مهاجم تمامی نقاطی را که صاحب رايانه طی کرده است دقيقا پشت سر او طی کند و به تمامی اطلاعت لازم دسترسی پيدا کند. پيشروی در اين راه مي*تواند حتی منجر به دزديدن تمامی اطلاعات شخصی فرد شود. دسترسی به شبکه*ها: برنامه*هايی هم توسط هکرها يا بهتر بگوئيم کراکرها نوشته مي*شود که مي*تواند راههايی را شناسايی کند که در سيستم*ها محافظت نمي*شوند و مي*تواند به راحتی رايانه*ای را به طور کامل تحت کنترل قرار دهد. معمولا رايانه*هايی که در روزهای اوليه خريداری شدن وارد اينترنت مي*شوند به راحتی مورد حمله اين نوع برنامه*ها قرار مي*گيرند.
استفاده از رايانه*هايی که مي*تواند با دارا بودن شرايط ويژه وارد ديگر رايانه*ها شده و کدها را شناسايی کند هم بسيار متداول است در اين حال فرد مهاجم مي*تواند از رايانه شخص مورد نظرش حتی پست*های الکترونيکي*های مورد نظر خود را به افراد مختلف ارسال کند بدون اينکه صاحب رايانه حتی منوجه شود.
جستجو در پست*های الکترونيکی: هکرها مي*توانند کدهايی را بسازند که مي*تواند وارد ايميلهای افراد شود و اهداف خودر ا به راحتی عملی سازد.
آنها هميشه مخرب نيستند
هکرها معمولا زمانی که از طرف دولت و يا حتی دوستانشان مورد صحبت قرار مي*گيرند خود نيز اعتراف مي*کنند که با دانايی بالايی که دارند مي*توانند دست به کارهای فوق العاده*ای بزنند که مي*تواند خرابي*هايی هم به بار بياورد. اما بسياری از آنها ادعا مي*کنند که استفاده از اين کار حرفه*ای را نه برای آسيب زدن، بلکه برای دانايی بيشتر از رايانه و اينترنت دنبال می کنند.
از سويی هم به نظر مي*رسد که اينترنت و ارتباطات جهانی خود سبب شده است تا اختلافاتی ميان هکرهای مختلف در سراسر دنيا بوحود آيد.
هکرهای "کلاه سياه" که شغلشان انتقال ويروس*ها و به بار آوردن خرابي*هاست و "هکرهای کلاه سفيد" که کارشان خرابکاری نيست و تنها سيستم*های امنينی را مورد ارزيابی قرار مي*دهند، معمولا با هم در تضاد بسياری هستند.
علی رغم درگيري*هايی که بسياری از اوقات ميان هکرهای کلاه سفيد با هکرهای کلاه سياه بوجود مي*آيد سالانه در سراسر دنيا انجمن*هايی از هکرها تشکيل مي*شود که معمولا تبليغی برای رفتارهای صحيح در حيطه رايانه است و در عين حال ده*ها هزار برنامه مختلفی که به تازگی وارد بازار شده معرفی مي*شوند و مسابقه*هايی هم در اين زمينه برگزار مي*شود.
هکرهای معروف دنيا:
استيو جابز و استيو وزنياک بنيان*گذاران رايانه*های اپل هر دو از بزرگترين هکرها هستند که در عين حال روی نرم افزارها و سخت افزارها کاملا مسلط هستند. اين دو مهندس بزرگ از افرادی هستند که باعث شدند رايانه*ها برای افراد هم به کار گرفته شوند و از انحصار برای شرکتهای بزرگ در آيند.
"لينوس توروالدز" سازنده "لينوکس" که يک سيستم عامل است از ديگر هکرهای بسيار قوی به حساب مي*آيد. او کسی است که با اصرار بر اشتراک اطلاعات عنوان مي*کند که اين کار مي*تواند هر فردی را به جمع آوری اطلاعات بي*نظير برساند.
"کوين ميتنيک" نيز هکر ديگری است که در سال 1980 در 17 سالگی به خاطر هک کردن سازمان دفاع هوايی شمال امريکا دستگير شد. او از آن سال نيز چندين بار ديگر به خاطر هک کردن سيستم*های امنيتی دولتی چندين بار ديگر دستگير شده است.

[Rasputin]

Hackers Rig Google to Deliver Malware

If last November you googled one of thousands of innocuous and common search terms, such as "Microsoft excel to access" or "how to teach your dogs to fetch," you were in line for an Internet attack that infects PCs with spam senders, password stealers, and other kinds of nasty malware.

Beginning on November 24 and continuing for less than a week, bad guys loaded up more than 40,000 Web pages with malicious software and thousands of common search terms. They then employed an automated network of malware-infected computers--known as a botnet--to link to those sites in blog-comment spam and other places. The mentions elevated the position of the poisoned sites in search results, often to the first page.

Click Here for Free Attack
The malicious sites had no useful information. Instead, a simple click on a link to such a site in the search results was enough to launch attacks against your PC. If the attack found any of a number of vulnerabilities in a range of programs, it would load.

"This was a massive wave," says Alex Eckelberry, president and CEO of security firm Sunbelt Software.

The attack marks a new level of sophistication, using multiple techniques to raise site visibility in search results and deliver malware to a mass audience.

Sunbelt researcher Adam Thomas happened upon the attack when he ran a search of "netgear ProSafe DD-WRT" for router firmware. His trained eye saw a suspicious-looking result on the first page. More research and digging on other phrases turned up the vast array of attack sites.

None of the sites from this wave, or a smaller follow-up group, appear now on Google, and Eckelberry and other experts believe the search giant has blocked those specific domains. But Google isn't saying what it did to stop this attack, or whether measures are in place to halt a recurrence.

[Rasputin]

Critical QuickTime Bug Fixed

Apple has released a security fix for its QuickTime media player software, fixing a critical bug that had been worrying security experts for nearly a month.

The update, released Wednesday, fixes a vulnerability in the Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) used by QuickTime to handle streaming media. It also fixes a previously reported incompatibility between QuickTime 7.4 and Adobe Premiere and After Effects, according to an Apple spokesman.

On Jan. 10, researcher Luigi Auriemma disclosed the flaw by posting proof-of-concept attack code that could be used to run unauthorized software on a victim's computer. For the attack to work, the criminal would have to first trick the user into viewing a maliciously encoded QuickTime media file.

With the attack code available, security researchers had been hoping that Apple would address the flaw. Wednesday's QuickTime 7.4.1 update is for both the Mac OS X and Windows operating systems.

It is Apple's fifth QuickTime update since October. The company has been forced to issue the flurry of patches as security researchers have taken a closer look at media player flaws during the past year. In December, Apple patched a separate RTSP vulnerability, which online criminals had already started to use in their attacks.

"In the past few months, QuickTime has been a prevalent target for security researchers," said Andrew Storms, director of security operations with nCircle Network Security, via instant message. "Internet media applications on the desktop have been a rich target for attackers and this trend is sure to continue as most users aren't yet accustomed to attacks arriving in the form of a viral video."

[Rasputin]

Windows Hacked in Seconds via Firewire

A New Zealand security researcher has published a software tool allowing attackers to quickly gain access to Windows systems via a Firewire port.

The tool, which can only be used by attackers with physical access to a system, comes shortly after the publication of research on gaining access to encrypted hard drives via physical access to memory.

Researcher Adam Boileau, a consultant with Immunity, originally demonstrated the access tool at a security conference in 2006, but decided not to release the code any further at the time. Two years later, however, nothing has been done toward fixing the problem, so he decided to go public.

"Yes, this means you can completely own any box whose Firewire port you can plug into in seconds," said Boileau in a recent blog entry.

An attacker must connect to the machine with a Linux system and a Firewire cable to run the tool.

The tool, called Winlockpwn, allows users to bypass Windows authorization, was originally demonstrated at Ruxcon in 2006 at a talk called "Hit By A Bus: Physical Access Attacks With Firewire".

At the time, Boileau also demonstrated some of the malicious uses of the tool, but said he wouldn't be releasing the code for those attacks.

The attack takes advantage of the fact that Firewire can directly read and write to a system's memory, adding extra speed to data transfer. According to Boileau, because this capability is built into Firewire, Microsoft doesn't consider the problem a standard bug.

On the other hand, Boileau said he feels PC users need to be more aware of the fact that their systems can be unlocked via Firewire.

"Yes, it's a feature, not a bug," Boileau stated. "Microsoft knows this. The OHCI-1394 spec knows this. People with Firewire ports generally don't."

Microsoft was not immediately available for comment. In the past the company has downplayed security problems that require physical access.

Firewire has become common on Windows systems in the past few years, and is especially prevalent on laptops.

Researcher Maximillian Dornseif demonstrated a similar exploit on Linux and Mac OS X systems at the CanSec conference in 2005, connecting to those systems via a malicious iPod and Firewire.

According to security researchers, the problem can be remedied by disabling Firewire when not in use.

[Rasputin]

UK told to delay sending hacker to U.S.

A European court has asked Britain to delay sending a computer expert to face trial in the United States until it can review his request to block his extradition.

The European Court of Human Rights said on Wednesday it needed to examine Gary McKinnon's complaint that he could face inhumane prison conditions if convicted in the United States.

"The applicant should not be extradited to the United States before midnight on 29 August," so the court can examine his request at its next meeting on August 28, it said in a statement.

McKinnon lost his appeal last month in the High Court to block extradition to face charges over what U.S. prosecutors call "the biggest military hack of all time".

He could face up to 70 years in prison if convicted of illegally accessing computers, including the Pentagon, U.S. army, navy and NASA systems, and causing $700,000 (375,000 pounds) worth of damage.

McKinnon told Reuters in 2006 he was just a computer nerd who wanted to find out whether aliens really existed and became obsessed with trawling large military networks for proof.

His lawyers have also argued that sending him to the United States would breach his human rights because he could be prosecuted on account of his nationality or political opinions.