Three U.S. online civil rights groups have filed a complaint asking the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to block Google Inc.'s planned $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick Inc. unless the company agrees to stop tracking its users.
The complaint, filed today by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (US PIRG), calls upon the FTC to block the merger unless it obtains guarantees from Google and DoubleClick that they will protect Internet users' privacy.
Those guarantees include a promise to destroy all cookies and other persistent identifiers resulting from Internet searches that are or could be personally identifiable once a user terminates a session with Google.
Such a move would seriously affect many of the services Google offers, which are built on storing the entire search or transaction history of its users.
Google amasses data about the search and surfing habits of millions of Internet users, tracking what they look at, what they write and even what they buy in order to serve relevant advertising. DoubleClick follows Web surfers' activities through cookies attached to the banner ads it serves up, exchanging information with advertisers to help them better target their messages.
The collection of such personal information poses far-reaching privacy concerns that the FTC should address, the three advocacy groups said.
"Neither Google nor DoubleClick have taken adequate steps to safeguard the personal data that is collected. Moreover, the proposed acquisition will create unique risks to privacy and will violate previously agreed standards for the conduct of online advertising," the groups wrote in the complaint filed today.
Those standards include the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Privacy Guidelines.
The three groups called on the FTC to investigate what effect a Google-DoubleClick merger will have on Google's ability to track and profile Internet users' activities.
They also want the FTC to order DoubleClick to remove cookies and other identifiers of individual users from any records it transfers to Google, unless the company has previously obtained explicit consent from those the data relates to, including giving users the right to first inspect, delete and modify the data.
Other demands include ordering Google to explain publicly how it plans to comply with privacy standards such as the OECD Privacy Guidelines, ordering the company to provide reasonable access to personally identifiable data it holds to the subject of that data and establishing a meaningful data destruction policy.
EPIC campaigns for Internet users' right to privacy, the CDD for a more open and diverse Internet and the US PIRG for fair marketplace practices.
Sunday, April 22, 2007
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Soaring Port 1025 scans could foreshadow Windows DNS Server bug exploit
A major spike in activity targeting TCP Port 1025 on Windows systems may be a sign that attackers are gathering intelligence for an upcoming attack against unpatched servers, Symantec Corp. warned today.
Symantec's DeepSight threat network has seen a "pretty sizable" increase in the number of sensors that have registered events on TCP Port 1025, said Mimi Hoang, group product manager with the company's security response team. "A normal level of activity would be 30 or so [source] IP addresses, give or take, with the number of events below 100," said Hoang. "But here we're seeing 1,400 to 1,500 IP addresses and more than 8,000 events.
"A spike like this doesn't happen without a reason," she said.
Hoang wouldn't definitively connect it with the Windows DNS Server Service vulnerability that Microsoft acknowledged last Thursday, but she did say, "We suspect it's because any high port above 1024 is associated with Microsoft's RPC [Remote Procedure Call protocol]. And 1025 is the first open port used by RPC."
The bug in Windows 2000 Server and Windows Server 2003 can be exploited by sending a malicious RPC packet via Port 105 or higher. Microsoft, in fact, has recommended that businesses block all inbound unsolicited traffic on ports 1024 and greater.
"Considering the recent Microsoft Windows DNS Remote Procedure Call Interface Vulnerability, this traffic spike may be associated with scanning and intelligence gathering aimed at assessing available Windows RPC endpoints," Symantec's warning said. "The traffic may also be indicating an increase in exploit attempts over TCP 1025, although this has not been verified at the time of this writing."
By midday today, Hoang had reiterated that Symantec had not confirmed any link between the port activity and actual exploits.
Exploits, however, continue to proliferate, Symantec and other security organizations said. Immunity Inc. in Miami Beach, Fla., released an exploit for the DNS server bug today for its Canvas penetration-testing framework, putting the total of publicly posted exploits at five. One recent exploit reportedly uses TCP and UDP Port 445, which Microsoft recommended blocking only yesterday.
Researchers are also positing additional attack strategies, in part because the normal routes through client PCs running Windows 2000, Windows XP or Windows Vista aren't available.
Today, Maarten Van Horenbeeck, one of the analysts in SANS Institute's Internet Storm Center, noted that hosting service servers running Windows 2003 Server may be at risk because although they run DNS services as well as others -- HTPP and FTP, for example -- they're usually not shielded by a separate firewall. Active Directory servers may be in danger, too, said Van Horenbeeck.
"Active directory servers hosted on the internal network are often combined with DNS functionality," Horenbeeck said in an ISC research note. "These machines are usually less protected than DMZ DNS servers, and other functionality provisioned may require the RPC ports to be available. If your active directory server is compromised, the game is essentially over."
Microsoft has said several times that it is working on a patch, but it has not yet committed to a release date. The company's next scheduled patch day is three weeks away, on May 8.
Symantec's DeepSight threat network has seen a "pretty sizable" increase in the number of sensors that have registered events on TCP Port 1025, said Mimi Hoang, group product manager with the company's security response team. "A normal level of activity would be 30 or so [source] IP addresses, give or take, with the number of events below 100," said Hoang. "But here we're seeing 1,400 to 1,500 IP addresses and more than 8,000 events.
"A spike like this doesn't happen without a reason," she said.
Hoang wouldn't definitively connect it with the Windows DNS Server Service vulnerability that Microsoft acknowledged last Thursday, but she did say, "We suspect it's because any high port above 1024 is associated with Microsoft's RPC [Remote Procedure Call protocol]. And 1025 is the first open port used by RPC."
The bug in Windows 2000 Server and Windows Server 2003 can be exploited by sending a malicious RPC packet via Port 105 or higher. Microsoft, in fact, has recommended that businesses block all inbound unsolicited traffic on ports 1024 and greater.
"Considering the recent Microsoft Windows DNS Remote Procedure Call Interface Vulnerability, this traffic spike may be associated with scanning and intelligence gathering aimed at assessing available Windows RPC endpoints," Symantec's warning said. "The traffic may also be indicating an increase in exploit attempts over TCP 1025, although this has not been verified at the time of this writing."
By midday today, Hoang had reiterated that Symantec had not confirmed any link between the port activity and actual exploits.
Exploits, however, continue to proliferate, Symantec and other security organizations said. Immunity Inc. in Miami Beach, Fla., released an exploit for the DNS server bug today for its Canvas penetration-testing framework, putting the total of publicly posted exploits at five. One recent exploit reportedly uses TCP and UDP Port 445, which Microsoft recommended blocking only yesterday.
Researchers are also positing additional attack strategies, in part because the normal routes through client PCs running Windows 2000, Windows XP or Windows Vista aren't available.
Today, Maarten Van Horenbeeck, one of the analysts in SANS Institute's Internet Storm Center, noted that hosting service servers running Windows 2003 Server may be at risk because although they run DNS services as well as others -- HTPP and FTP, for example -- they're usually not shielded by a separate firewall. Active Directory servers may be in danger, too, said Van Horenbeeck.
"Active directory servers hosted on the internal network are often combined with DNS functionality," Horenbeeck said in an ISC research note. "These machines are usually less protected than DMZ DNS servers, and other functionality provisioned may require the RPC ports to be available. If your active directory server is compromised, the game is essentially over."
Microsoft has said several times that it is working on a patch, but it has not yet committed to a release date. The company's next scheduled patch day is three weeks away, on May 8.
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