A (bored) Russian physicist has successfully hacked an emergency patch designed to fix a recently discovered DNS vulnerability.

Evgeniy Polyakov reportedly used two desktop computers and a high-speed network link to fool the patch into returning a spoofed address in just 10 hours.

According to Polyakov, a typical attack server generates approximately 40,000-50,000 fake replies before hitting on the right one. Polyakov also noted that if the port is matched “the probability of successful poisoning is more than 60 per cent”.

Alarmed insecurity experts warned the patch could be exploited to redirect Internet traffic and collect user passwords.

The hacker appears to state on a Russian Blog, “DJBDNS does not suffer from this attack. It does. Everyone does. With some tweaks it can take longer than BIND, but overall problem is there.”

Read the full story at New York Times.

George Ledin teaches students how to write viruses in order to make them understand how to protect.

Watch the video on Newsweek here.

In a windowless underground computer lab in California, young men are busy cooking up viruses, spam and other plagues of the computer age. Grant Joy runs a program that surreptitiously records every keystroke on his machine, including user names, passwords, and credit-card numbers. And Thomas Fynan floods a bulletin board with huge messages from fake users. Yet Joy and Fynan aren’t hack - they’re students in a computer-security class at Sonoma State University. And their professor, George Ledin, has showed them how to penetrate even the best antivirus software.

Continue reading the rest of the article here.

In this amazing video, a slow-motion camera captures the strange and beautiful electricity dance that is a lightning strike.

In less than one hour the Olympics will be officially opened at the Olympic stadium in Bejing. The Chinese are going to fire 35000 (yes 35 thousand) rockets (firework, not missiles) into the air during the show. Below is an image of how it looked like during the “rehearsal”;

I do indeed hope everything goes well and best of luck to all you Norwegian athletes!

Rumours has it that Jonathan Zdziarski, a well-known iPhone developer, has discovered a page on the Apple site that could possibly be used to “kill” applications downloaded from App Store.

Deep down in the configuration files in the latest iPhoneOS (version 2.x.) there’s a link to this “suspicious” Apple page that could possibly be used to block unauthorized applications.

The list is currently more or less empty but in case of an emergency (trojan, virus) there’s reasons to believe that your iPhone (if you have one) will connect automatically and deactivate any application that is found listed on this page.

This might also prove to be a way for Apple to block or alter additional hacks and workarounds that you have installed (at least with later versions of the OS).

Zdziarski has just written a brief note on his personal website to “clarify” all these conspiracy theories, but who knows for sure?

Noticed anything funny with your iPhone lately…?