Security Smorgasbord

Three short security stories tonight:

1. Twitter taken off-line today with a Distributed Denial-Of-Service (DDoS) attack:

Twitter confirmed the outage was linked to malicious attackers in a brief status message posted around 11:00 a.m EST.

We are defending against a denial-of-service attack, and will update status again shortly.

A DDoS attack is where a bunch of computers simultaneously connect to a site, to exhaust all available resources and prevent legitimate users from getting access. Sort of a cyber version of a crowd shouting down a speaker. Of course, with the recent attacks on Twitter, this may have kept people from getting infected via Twitter-delivered malware.

In keeping with Twitter's brevity-is-the-soul-of-the-web philosophy, I'll just say For a short period of time today, Twitter entered "secure mode".

2. House of Representatives web sites pwned:

Hackers broke into more than a dozen Web sites for members of the U.S. House of Representatives in the past week, replacing portions of their home pages with digital graffiti, according House officials.

It seems that some of the web site passwords were weak, and easily guessable. That's what they get for using Obamaisdreamy and zomgpelosisux as passwords. Think security, people.

3. Most Windows 7 antivirus is lousy:

Security vendors including CA and Symantec failed to secure Windows systems without fault in recent independent tests.

Twelve of the 35 anti-virus products put through their paces by independent security certification body Virus Bulletin failed to make the grade for one reason or another and therefore failed to achieve the VB100 certification standard.

Top performers include Kaspersky and ESET, as well as free scanners from Microsoft (Forefront - well, it will be free in a couple months) and AVG.