Tech Bones

If you think battling all the viruses, trojans, malware, and other perpetrators in the internet world is tough enough, imagine trying to defend against someone with a passkey to your backdoor. Virtually everything used on a daily basis is computerized and networked. The latest gadgets, alarm clocks, appliances, houses, cars, and virtually everything else we use for entertainment or work, are computerized and inter-connected. Imagine a nefarious entity, such as Austin Powers' Dr. Evil, who intends to control the world and force his way of life on the rest of us. What if Dr. Evil covertly, over time, gained control of the manufacture of technology by replicating creations throughout the world and selling them at a fraction of the price, thanks to lower labor costs and a willingness to take a short term loss to gain long term control of the market? What if Dr. Evil succeeded in not only becoming the manufacturer of a majority of all electronics produced in the world including mili...

If you are a network manager, a computer systems administrator or a computer security specialist, you have undoubtedly heard about the Flame trojan, a malware program that redefines ones concept of espionage and warfare on the cyber front. In a recent post on The Weekly Standard magazine's Web site, Jonathan V. Last provides an interesting perspective of the Flame pertaining to what Flame means in terms of the evolution of malware. Bride of Stuxnet Webcraft as spycraft. http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/bride-stuxnet_646424.html While accurately describing Flame as " the most spectacular computer worm ever made ", Jonathan Last minimizes the true threat it presents by categorizing it as " the perfect spy ." Aside from the obvious espionage threat this malware poses, its potential evolution as a disruptive and destructive threat is far more ominous. The current Flame trojan could be merely a first release in the wild, a recon version on a spy missi...