Dennis Fisher

Injecting malicious code into the HTML used on legitimate Web sites is a key part of the infection lifecycle for many attack crews, and they often disguise and obfuscate their code to make it more difficult to analyze or so it appears to be legitimate code. The latest instance of this technique has seen attackers employing code that is meant to look like Google Analytics snippets, but instead sends victims off to a remote site that's hosting the Black Hole Exploit Kit. Not the desired result. Read more »

Google has released an initial beta of Chrome for Android devices, and the new mobile browser includes a full set of security and privacy functions. The new mobile version of Chrome has the sandbox functionality that has been so important in the desktop browser, as well as a strict permission model for mobile apps. Read more »

In the face of mounting evidence that the CA system is inherently flawed, Google officials are in the process of making changes to the way Chrome handles certificate revocations, and no longer will be using online revocation checks. Instead, Chrome will use the existing update system in the browser to accomplish this task. Read more »

DDoS attacks come in all shapes and sizes, and in a lot of cases, the victims of the attacks don't much care who is executing the attack or why. They just know that their network is being overwhelmed with junk traffic. But the last year has seen a major volume of politically motivated attacks, and new research shows that as much as 35 percent of DDoS are the result of some political or ideological motivation.  Read more »

Adobe, which has spent the last few years trying to dig out of a deep hole of vulnerabilities and buggy code, is making a major change to Flash, adding a sandbox to the version of the player that runs in Firefox. The sandbox is designed to prevent many common exploit techniques against Flash. Read more »

Apple has issued a new patch for Mac OS X Snow Leopard to fix a problem that users were reporting with application-compaitibility with the original fix issued last week. The new patch is designed to alleviate problems with the Rosetta technology in Snow Leopard. Read more »

CANCUN--For people who follow the developments in the security and research communities, it's easy to get discouraged by the current state of affairs, given the rash of serious hacks on certificate authorities, military networks and companies such as RSA and VeriSign. But, if you think things are bad there, you may not want to look at what's happening in the ICS and SCADA communities. It's getting ugly early. Read more »

After a couple of years of seeing headlines announcing a steady stream of pieces of malware and trojaned apps appearing the Android Market, Google finally has taken steps to find and remove malicious apps from the market automatically. The company has unveiled a service called Bouncer that scans apps and looks for known malware as well as potentially malicious behavior. Read more »

CANCUN--Facebook is a lot of things, and one of the things that it's become of late is a fertile green field for attackers and scammers of all stripes. The Koobface worm is perhaps the most famous threat to hit the network, but the more mundane ones, such as scammers generating fake profiles automatically to spread spam and malicious URLs are becoming more and more prevalent, researchers say. Read more »

CANCUN--The skill of attackers, combined with the difficulty and cost of finding and fixing vulnerabilities in software--especially after deployment--has reached the point that it's now more effective and efficient for vendors to concentrate on making life more difficult for those attackers looking to exploit bugs.  Read more »