Category: Web and Global News

Source: Free Press Newspaper, India

Hackers turned computer security specialists accuse Google of setting users up for online disasters by letting them personalise home pages with applications that could be tainted.

Software that hackers can trick people into installing on “iGoogle” home pages can track users’ activities and control their machines, SecTheory chief executive Robert Hansen showed this yesterday.

“I could force you to download child porn or send subversive material to China,” Hansen said. “The exploitation is almost limitless. Google has to fix it.”

Google lets people customise iGoogle home pages with mini-software programs called “gadgets” such as to-do lists, news feeds, currency converters, and calendars.

Hackers can program malicious code into proffered gadgets or break into systems hosted by engineers providing legitimate mini-programs.

“It turns out a lot of people who develop these things aren’t good at security,” Hansen said, citing research he and Cenzic security analyst Tom Stracener shared at a notorious annual DefCon hacker gathering in Las Vegas.

“We pretty much break into anything we try.” Hackers can resort to a tactic of luring people to websites that trick people into installing applications in iGoogle home pages. A hacker can remotely control a victim’s computer as long as the iGoogle page is open.

Gmail users face danger from the same “hole” in security, according to Hansen, whose hacker name is “RSnake.”

“We’ve been telling Google about these vulnerabilities for years and they have not made corrective actions,” Hansen said.

“They chose to open the doors and insomuch put a lot of consumers at risk.”

Google says it checks gadgets for malicious code, rarely finding any, and that it removes tainted programs.

Here arises a question that We The bloggers,Should we stop using those google gadgets?

By the way i never thought of using it but when it comes to hacking i might try it because I Like Hacking and Hacking Is Not A Crime It’s My Passion

Comment Guys

Blogger has restored all accounts which were mistakenly locked down yesterday under suspicion of spam!

Here’s an official statement from the Blogger Buzz blog:

We want to offer our sincerest apologies to affected bloggers and their readers. We’ve tracked down the problem to a bug in our data processing code that locked blogs even when our algorithms concluded they were not spam. We are adding additional monitoring and process checks to ensure that bugs of this magnitude are caught before they can affect your data.

At Blogger, we strongly believe that you own and should control your posts and other data. We understand that you trust us to store and serve your blog, and incidents like this one are a betrayal of that trust. In the spirit of ensuring that you always have access to your data, we have been working on importing and exporting tools to make it easier to back up your posts. If you’d like a sneak peek at the Import / Export tool, you can try it out on Blogger in Draft.

Our restoration today was of all blogs that were mistakenly marked as spam due to Friday’s bug. Because spam fighting inherently runs the risk of false positives, your blog may have been mis-classified as spam for other reasons. If you are still unable to post to your blog today you can request a review by clicking Request Unlock Review on your Dashboard.

Many bloggers who were affected by this issue were justifiably inflamed by yesterday’s incident, and I sincerely hope this apology will go some way to quell dissent against this otherwise great blogging platform.