SSCC 100 - John McAfee, OS X malware, Swiss intel, NASA laptops and Romanian carders

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Filed Under: Featured, Podcast

Chester finally brings up his century with Chet Chat Episode 100 - the Benjamin Franklin edition!

(For readers not familiar with US history and culture, Benjamin Franklin was not only one of America's Founding Fathers, but also also a tireless scientist, engineer and inventor. His likeness appears on the US $100 banknote, which is where the "century" connection comes in.)

Chet's guest in the 100th Chet Chat is Paul Ducklin.

The pair discuss a range of recent security issues:

• John McAfee and geolocation data - advice for non-fugitives.

• Website with Dalai Lama connection hit with Mac malware - making sense of the risk to OS X.

• Swiss intelligence agency in huge data theft - terabytes worth!

• NASA loses yet another laptop - find out what they're doing to prevent (yet another) repeat.

• Romanian carders hack 500,000 Australian credit cards - but law enforcement strikes back.

(07 December 2012, duration 15:37 minutes, size 11.3 MBytes)

You can also download this podcast directly in MP3 format: Sophos Security Chet Chat 100. And why not take a look at the back-catalogue of Sophos Podcasts in our archive? We have loads of interesting stuff for your listening pleasure.

http://twitter.com/duckblog

Tags: carding, chet chat, Dalai Lama, John McAfee, macfee, NASA, ncb, OS X, Podcast, Romania, sscc

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SophosLabs wins coveted Swiss prize

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Unfortunately we were passed over by the Nobel Assembly for a prize from their esteemed foundation again this year, but the Swiss weren't so shortsighted.

Adrian Leuenberger from SWITCH-CERT in Switzerland presented a last minute talk titled "Cleaning up the net 2.0 - a success story of cleaning 3,000+ websites" at this year's Virus Bulletin conference in Dallas, Texas.

SWITCH-CERT is the domain registrar for the .ch (Switzerland) and .li (Liechtenstein) top-level domains (TLDs) and recently gained the authority to try to notify and help clean websites within these TLDs.

Adrian shared his processes and procedures for detecting, notifying and remediating affected web sites and talked about how they were able to clean more than 1,000 malicious sites between January and July of 2012.

SWITCH worked together with OFCOM, the Swiss Federal Office of Communications, to implement a process where they are allowed to take domains offline for sites spreading malicious content or hosting phishing sites until they are clean.

Adrian made a plea to the Virus Bulletin audience with a promise... He would send a 4.5 kg (9.92 lb), 80 cm (2.5 ft) long Toblerone chocolate bar to the research lab that could submit the largest list of infected .ch and .li domains.

One of our Vancouver researchers, Onur Komili, heard about the contest from a colleague and being a sucker for chocolate mined our databases for information to provide to SWITCH-CERT.

In the end, we won! To quote Adrian "I can happily announce that Sophos delivered by far the largest list of potentially malicious URLs."

The picture at the top of this post is Tareq Alkhatib enjoying the spoils, while below you can see Onur pondering the how to go about opening a 4.5 kg chocolate bar.

I would like to say congratulations to SophosLabs!

We are proud to help the Swiss make their domain space a little bit safer and hope their experiment can be a model for cleaning up the web in other countries.

Thank you to Andrew Ludgate in SophosLabs Vancouver for sharing the photos.

Follow @chetwisniewski

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