Chris Brook

As predicted by researcher Dino Dai Zovi in these pages in January, 2010 turned out to be the year of the sandbox. Attackers for years have been focusing their attention on browsers and other Web apps and using them as jumping off points for further attacks on compromised PCs. Vendors finally began to take notice and implement sandboxes in their products.

There were a lot of excellent talks at conferences this year, but perhaps the most interesting and far-reaching presentation was one given by researchers Thai Duong and Juliano Rizzo at Ekoparty on a crypto attack against ASP.NET applications.

Before WikiLeaks emerged to dominate the news cycle in November, Stuxnet was the leader in the clubhouse for most overhyped, misconstrued and misunderstood story of the year. The worm burst onto the scene in July when researchers discovered it using four previously unknown Windows bugs and compromising computers running esoteric Siemens industrial control software.

Many people in the security and privacy communities have been aware of the activities of WikiLeaks for several years now, but in 2010 the group hit the mainstream like a hurricane. First came document dumps that revealed embarrassing details about the way the U.S. has conducted the war in Iraq.

The hack of blog news network Gawker dominated the headlines this week, leaving behind a trail of spammy Tweets and stolen passwords across the Internet. But Gawker was just one of a handful of data breaches in a week that saw the continuation of the Wikileaks saga and a massive patch release from Microsoft. To get the full rundown, read on for the week in security.

Threatpost editor Paul Roberts discusses issues that matter to small businesses including the impact of the recent Wikileaks debacle and the need for improved endpoint security, patch management and data protection on Pulse Network’s ITEC This Week with hosts Tyler Pyburn and Bill Sell.

The words “cyber war” were in the headlines this week, as controversy and debate about the leak of confidential diplomatic cables by Wikileaks reached a fever pitch. As speculation turned to the fallout from the ongoing publication of documents, the U.S. government laid the groundwork to prevent similar breaches while two browsers announced changes for upcoming builds. Read on for the full week in review.