Lost+Found: Cosmic rays, TED and 15 men-in-the-middle

Too short for news, too good to lose; Lost+Found is a roundup of useful and interesting security news. In this edition: rays from space, an online classroom for pen testers, TED talks on computers and fish, the Stuxnet family, a VM trick, men-in-the-middle, and another alternative to Adobe Reader.

• It may sound esoteric, but cosmic rays are actually one of the reasons that now and again a bit in memory switches state; another is overheating. If this occurs at a memory address containing a domain name such as microsoft.com, this could become microsnft.com and the computer will find itself communicating with the wrong server. Security expert Artem Dinaburg calls this phenomenon Bitsquatting.

• Security expert Dan Guido has put together free online courses for would-be pen testers. Click on "Topics" to get started.

• If you're given a platform at a TED conference, it's usually because you have something to say. Mikko Hypponen, Chief Research Officer at F-Secure and a TED speaker, has put together eight interesting presentations on technology, security and data protection. And one on fish.

• Hungarian virus researchers at CrySyS Lab have published a study dealing with super-spy Stuxnet's relatives Duqu, Flame and Gauss.

• When you forget the password to your virtual machine, VMInjector can help.

• The enemy is everywhere – at least it is if you believe security firm ScanToSecure. They have posted a blog entry describing 15 man-in-the-middle attack scenarios, not all of them involving a computer.

• Had it with Adobe Reader? Under Windows, Google's Chrome web browser can also be set as the default program for viewing PDFs. To do so, right click on a PDF file, select "Open With", "Choose program" and then select Chrome.exe (which, in Windows 7, can be found under C:\Users\{user name}\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application).
  

(crve)