The U.S. Army is flagging the popular blogging service Twitter as a potential terrorist tool, the Agence France-Presse news agency reported Sunday.

A recently released report by the 304th Military Intelligence Battalion contains a chapter entitled "Potential for Terrorist Use of Twitter," which expresses concern over the increasing use of Twitter by political and religious groups, the AFP reported.

"Twitter has also become a social activism tool for socialists, human rights groups, communists, vegetarians, anarchists, religious communities, atheists, political enthusiasts, hacktivists and others to communicate with each other and to send messages to broader audiences," according to the report.

Posted by Justin Payton in Adware, Spyware and Trojans at 17:12

If you want to make sure your computer or server is not tricked into undertaking malicious or undesirable behavior, it’s not enough to keep bad code out of the system.

Two graduate students from UC San Diego’s computer science department—Erik Buchanan and Ryan Roemer—have just published work showing that the process of building bad programs from good code using “return-oriented programming” can be automated and that this vulnerability applies to RISC computer architectures and not just the x86 architecture (which includes the vast majority of personal computers).

Last year, UC San Diego computer science professor Hovav Shacham formally described how return-oriented programming could be used to force computers with the x86 architecture to behave maliciously without introducing any bad code into the system. However, the attack required painstaking construction by hand and appeared to rely a unique quirk of the x86 design.

This new automation and generalization work from graduate students and professors from UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering will be presented on October 28 at ACM’s Conference on Communications and Computer Security (CCS) 2008, one of the premier academic computer security conferences.

“Most computer security defenses are based on the notion that preventing the introduction of malicious code is sufficient to protect a computer. This assumption is at the core of trusted computing, anti-virus software, and various defenses like Intel and AMD’s no execute protections. There is a subtle fallacy in the logic, however: simply keeping out bad code is not sufficient to keep out bad computation,” said UC San Diego computer science professor Stefan Savage, an author on the CCS 2008 paper.

Posted by Justin Payton in Adware, Spyware and Trojans at 10:22