About
Dennis Fisher is a journalist with more than 13 years of experience covering information security.
Google has fixed two bugs in its Chrome browser, including a high-severity vulnerability in its media handler that a researcher named Pinkie Pie discovered. The bug, which is different from another use-after-free vulnerability the researcher used in the Pwnium contest at Hack in the Box in October, was serious enough to earn him a bug bounty of more than $7,000.
UPDATE — DNS hijacking attacks carried out today against the home pages of Google, Yahoo and other high-profile sites in Romania have been traced to an attack on the Romanian Top Level Domain Register, researchers at Kaspersky Lab said.”The altered DNS records propagated from there to different Internet Service Providers’ DNS services, including Google’s,” Kaspersky said in a statement.
Fake and malicious Android apps have become an industry unto themselves in the last couple of years, as attackers have sought to capitalize on the massive market share that the mobile OS enjoys worldwide. It’s a safe bet that any popular new app will attract a malicious copycat version, and researchers have found that the latest app on this list is Angry Birds Star Wars.
Google has fixed a couple of security vulnerabilities in its Chrome browser, including a high-risk use-after-free bug and a problem in the way that the Apple OS X driver for some Intel GPUs handles rendering.
It is open season on SCADA software right now. Last week, researchers at ReVuln, an Italian security firm, released a video showing off a number of zero-day vulnerabilities in SCADA applications from manufacturers such as Siemens, GE and Schneider Electric. And now a researcher at Exodus Intelligence says he has discovered more than 20 flaws in SCADA packages from some of the same vendors and other manufacturers, all after just a few hours’ work.
A new Linux rootkit has emerged and researchers who have analyzed its code and operation say that the malware appears to be a custom-written tool designed to inject iframes into Web sites and drive traffic to malicious sites for drive-by download attacks. The rootkit is designed specifically for 64-bit Linux systems, and while it has some interesting features, it does not appear to be the work of high-level programmer or be meant for use in targeted attacks.
Facebook this week will begin turning on secure browsing be default for its millions of users in North America. The change will make HTTPS the default connection option for all Facebook sessions for those users, a shift that gives them a good baseline level of security and will help prevent some common attacks.
BROOKLYN, NY–After years of research and investigation into the cyber-espionage attacks that began with the discovery of Stuxnet and continued with Flame, Duqu and Gauss, there still are many details that are unknown. While researchers have a pretty good handle on many of the tools’ capabilities, experts say that there may be other modules from these weapons still in circulation that have yet to be discovered.
Adobe is looking into an apparent compromise of one of its sites, the ConnectUsers forum. The company says that it is investigating reports of an attack on the site, which is a community site for users of Adobe’s Connect conferencing software.The reports of the compromise began to surface on Tuesday and Adobe security officials began looking into them, trying to determine whether there actually was an infiltration. It now appears that someone was able to compromise the database associated with the ConnectUsers site. The company has taken the site offline and is resetting passwords for users associated with the site.
With an update pushed out recently, Google has now added a new security feature to Chrome on OS X by placing the Adobe Flash Player inside a sandbox to prevent exploits against Flash from affecting the browser or the rest of the applications on the machine.
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