Informationweek Influencer

Gunter Ollmann (@gollmann)

Twitter Bio:: Security researcher, consultant, tinkerer, skeptic and cynic of many things. Apparently I can exude a subtle sarcasm that baffles Americans.
Website:: http://www.technicalinfo.net

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Hackers Exploit Software Bugs For 10 Months On Average Before They're Exposed ...

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Symantec's chart shows a distribution of zero-day exploits based on how long they persist before being discovered. The average is close to 10 months. (Click to enlarge.)Software vendors are constantly on the watch for so-called “zero day” vulnerabilities–flaws in their code that hackers find and exploit before the first day companies become aware of them. But the term “zero-day” doesn’t capture just how early hackers’ head-starts often are: Day zero, it seems, often lasts more than 300 days.That’s one of the findings of a broad study of hackers’ zero-day exploits by two researchers at the antivirus firm Symantec that they plan to present at the

How a Google Headhunter's E-Mail Unraveled a Massive Net Security Hole | ...

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Mathematician Zach Harris, 35, of Jupiter, Fl., poses for a portrait on Tuesday. Photo: Brynn Anderson/WiredIt was a strange e-mail, coming from a job recruiter at Google, asking Zachary Harris if he was interested in a position as a site-reliability engineer.“You obviously have a passion for Linux and programming,” the e-mail from the Google recruiter read. “I wanted to see if you are open to confidentially exploring opportunities with Google?”Harris was intrigued, but skeptical. The e-mail had come to him last December completely out of the blue, and as a mathematician, he didn’t seem the likeliest candidate for the job Google was pitching.

Why passwords have never been weaker and crackers have never been stronger

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In late 2010, Sean Brooks received three e-mails over a span of 30 hours warning that his accounts on LinkedIn, Battle.net, and other popular websites were at risk. He was tempted to dismiss them as hoaxesâuntil he noticed they included specifics that weren't typical of mass-produced phishing scams. The e-mails said that his login credentials for various Gawker websites had been exposed by hackers who rooted the sites' servers, then bragged about it online; if Brooks used the same e-mail and password for other accounts, they would be compromised too.

The warnings Brooks and millions of other people received that December weren't fabrications.

Tech Confessional: The Googler Who Looks At The Worst Of The Internet

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After a year spent looking at the dark underside of the Internet — including bestiality, necrophilia and child pornography — this Google contractor wasn't even hired full-time.

Sitting in the sun at a tech company cafeteria, this former Google worker described a year spent immersed in some of the darkest content available on the Internet. His role at the tech company mainly consisted of reviewing things like

'Biggest ever attack' slows internet

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The internet around the world has been slowed down in what security experts are describing as the biggest cyber-attack in history.A row between a spam-fighting group and hosting firm has sparked retaliation attacks flooding core infrastructure.It is having an impact on widely used services like Netflix - and experts worry it could escalate to affect banking and email services.Spamhaus, a group based in both London and Geneva, is a non-profit organisation which aims to help email providers filter out spam and other unwanted content.To do this, the group maintains a number of blocklists - a database of servers known to be being used for malicious