Provided by CommunityDNS, the information in this post consists of news items in the security-based Internet community.

Cable fault cuts off West Africa

The one undersea cable that stretches from Portugal and Spain to South Africa, via West Africa, was damaged, causing Internet problems for users in Benin, Togo, Niger and Nigeria. The problem caused a 70% decrease in Nigeria’s bandwidth causing major problems for its banking sector, government and mobile phone networks. Once all paperwork is in place it will probably be two weeks before a ship can be onsite to begin working on a fix.

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Researcher Uncovers Massive, Sophisticated Trojan Targeting Top Business

Extracting only useful credentials and account data, the Clampi Trojan, new to the Internet, has already targeted 4,600 websites around the globe, with currently 1,400 sites identified in 70 countries. Spreading across Microsoft networks in a worm-like fashion, hundreds of thousands of computers (corporate and home computers) may have already been compromised. This attack is targeting sites with the most users and the most money such as banks, credit card companies, stock brokerages, insurance, retail, advertising networks and utilities.

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Wildcard certificate spoofs web authentication

SSL has long been a way for people to trust their session is secure, especially when conducting financial transactions. One researcher has devised a simple way to spoof SSL certificates used to secure websites, e-mail servers and VPNs.

Exploiting a weakness in how SSL certificates are generated, adding a null string character to several certificate fields trick browsers and other SSL-enabled programs into misinterpreting the domain name that is being authenticated.

By adding “*” to a URL, such as *.domainname.TLD will yield a certificate that tricks many programs into authenticating almost every address on the Internet.

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Translation services used to pump out polyglot spam

In the recent spam explosion spammers are taking advantage of online translation programs to produce spam in the local language. While Germany recently gained the distinction of being the world’s most dumped on country when it comes to spam with such mails reaching 97.5% of all e-mail in Germany, 46% of which is in German. 53% of France’s spam is in French and 25% is in Dutch for those in the Netherlands. 62.3% of the spam in Japan is in Japanese and in China the percentage of e-mails received in Chinese is 54.7. Non-English spam accounts for 1 in 20 messages sent.

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