USAID gets detention after failing FISMA test

The US Agency for International Development (USAID) is working to improve its network security monitoring in response to a failing grade on the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) scorecard, according to Jerry Horton, the agency’s chief…

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PDFs wrapped in XDP evade anti-virus scans

“Security researcher Brandon Dixon has discovered a way to bypass the Antivirus detection for malicious PDFs,” writes eHackingNews, “using the XML Data Package(XDP) format.” It goes on to add that “opening the malicious XDP file can result in Adobe Rea…

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Microsoft increases hackers’ exploit development costs

Jonathan Ness, security development manager of Security Science – part of the Trustworthy Computing group – claimed that Microsoft are looking to reduce or eliminate exploit based attacks by increasing the cost required to develop attacks – specificall…

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