German Goverment Urges Everyone to Stop Using Internet Explorer

Following the recent bug  that was discovered in Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8 and Internet Explorer 9 which makes PC's vulnerable to attack by hackers, the German government advised the public on Tuesday to stop using the browser temporarily.

The security flaw, which affects hundreds of millions of Internet Explorer browser users around the globe, publicly surfaced over the weekend.

Microsoft had said on Monday that attackers can exploit the bug to infect the PC of somebody who visits a malicious website and then take control of the victim's computer.

The German government's Federal Office for Information Security, or BSI, said that it was aware was aware of targeted attacks and that all that was needed was to lure web surfers to a website where hackers had planted malicious software that exploited the bug in Internet Explorer to infect their PCs.

"A fast spreading of the code has to be feared," the German government said in its statement.

BSI advised all users of Internet Explorer to use an alternative browser until the manufacturer has released a security update.

Officials with Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment on the move by the German government.

The company late on Monday urged customers to install a piece of security software as an interim measure, buying it time to fix the bug and release a new, more secure version of Internet Explorer.

Microsoft did not say how long that will take, but several security researchers said they expect the update within a week.

The free security tool, which is known as the Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit, or EMET, is available through an advisory on Microsoft's website: blogs.technet.com/b/msrc/

The EMET software must be downloaded, installed and then manually configured to protect computers from the newly discovered threat, according to the posting from Microsoft. The company also advised customers to adjust several Windows security settings to thwart potential attackers, but cautioned that doing so might impact the PC's usability.

Some security experts had said it would be too cumbersome for many PC users to implement the measures suggested by Microsoft. Instead they advised Windows users to temporarily switch from Internet Explorer to rival browsers such as Google Inc's Chrome, Mozilla's Firefox or Opera Software ASA's Opera.

Internet Explorer was the world's second-most widely used browser last month, with about 33 percent market share, according to StatCounter. It was close behind Chrome, which had 34 percent of the market.

Hackers stole and leaked Over 1 Million Apple IOS Device ID From FBI

Hackers have dumped online the unique identification codes for one million Apple iPhones and iPads allegedly lifted from an FBI agent's laptop. The leak, if genuine, proves Feds are walking around with data on at least 12 million iOS devices.

The 20-byte ID codes were, we're told, copied from a file extracted from the Dell notebook of a senior federal agent, who was tracking the activities of hacktivists in LulzSec, Anonymous and related groups. Supervisor Special Agent Christopher Stangl's machine was compromised via a AtomicReferenceArray vulnerability in Java in March, the black hats claim.

Once his computer was infiltrated by the hackers, a file was allegedly seized containing 12 million device records that included Unique Device Identifiers (UDIDs), usernames and push notification tokens as well as a smaller number of names, mobile phone numbers, addresses and zip codes. Members of the AntiSec crew leaked edited extracts of this data, having mostly stripped it of fanbois' personal information, on Monday.

The listed UDIDs, which include gadget serial numbers and other data so apps can distinguish between individual devices, appear to be genuine. However, by themselves they may pose only a minimal privacy risk once leaked online, so the effect of the dump is largely confined to embarrassing the Feds - and raising questions as to why agents have the information in the first place.

The most likely source of the data was either an iOS app developer or multiple developers, Mac Rumours speculates.

The Java exploit used in the attack is unrelated to the mega-bugs finally patched by Oracle last week.

It's a matter of record that Stangl was among the agents invited to an FBI-Scotland Yard conference call about the progress of investigations into members of Anonymous back in January. Members of LulzSec infamously eavesdropped on this call and leaked a recording after intercepting an email arranging the chat.

Email addresses exposed by this breach may have been used in a follow-up targeted attack that tricked investigators into visiting a booby-trapped website exploiting an at-the-time Java 0-day vulnerability. Rob Graham of Errata Security expands this plausible theory in this How the FBI might've been owned blog post.

The AntiSec activists behind this week's leak suggest the device info data was used as part of some FBI tracking project involving iOS devices, such as iPhones. Even they are a bit vague on what that might be. However the group goes into some detail in explaining how it apparently swiped the data:

During the second week of March 2012, a Dell Vostro notebook, used by Supervisor Special Agent Christopher K. Stangl from FBI Regional Cyber Action Team and New York FBI Office Evidence Response Team was breached using the AtomicReferenceArray vulnerability on Java, during the shell session some files were downloaded from his Desktop folder one of them with the name of "NCFTA_iOS_devices_intel.csv" turned to be a list of 12,367,232 Apple iOS devices including Unique Device Identifiers (UDID), user names, name of device, type of device, Apple Push Notification Service tokens, zipcodes, cellphone numbers, addresses, etc. the personal details fields referring to people appears many times empty leaving the whole list incompleted on many parts. no other file on the same folder makes mention about this list or its purpose.

The AntiSec group says it decide to published a portion of the leaked data in response to a keynote speech by the NSA's General Keith Alexander at the DefCon hacker convention in July. In part, Alexander sought to persuade hackers at the convention to consider a career at the NSA, a suggestion that predictably galled the black hats.