Dennis Fisher

About

Dennis Fisher is a journalist with more than 13 years of experience covering information security.

Nitol Infections Fall, But Malware Still Popping Up

When Microsoft went after the Nitol botnet in September, one of the key details in the investigation was the fact that much of the botnet was built by pre-loading malware onto laptops during the manufacturing process in China. This was the clearest case yet of the phenomenon of certified pre-owned devices making their way through the supply chain and into the market. As it turns out, nearly half a million of those infected machines showed up here in the U.S.

Attackers Turn to Open DNS Resolvers to Amplify DDoS Attacks

Although DDoS attacks have been a serious problem for more than a decade now and security staffs have a good handle on how they’re executed and how to handle them, attackers constantly adjust their tactics in order to defeat the best defenses available. One of the more recent tactics adopted by attackers is the use of open DNS resolvers to amplify their attacks, and this technique, while not novel, is beginning to cause serious problems for the organizations that come under these attacks.

After Five Years, SAFECode Sees Software Security Progress, But Challenges Remain

Software security, code quality and the iea of building security into applications from the design phase forward have become touchstones for any conversation about how to improve the security of the Web and the general IT infrastructure. But it wasn’t always thus. In fact, it wasn’t too many years ago that the idea of software security took a back seat to the more traditional security disciplines. That’s changed of late, and one of the groups that’s been in the middle of the transformation is SAFECode, the industry organization comprising Microsoft, Adobe, SAP, EMC and others, that’s designed to advance software security methods and practices.

HackRF Jawbreaker Could Bring Low-Cost Wireless Hacking to the Masses

by Dennis Fisher
13

Generations of hobbyists hardware hackers have spent countless hours messing with piles of radio gear, happily tinkering away in garages and basements looking for new ways to connect to people around the world. Now, a researcher has put together a new radio called HackRF that is a kind of all-in-one hacker’s dream with functionality to intercept and reverse-engineer traffic from a wide range of frequencies and sources.

Microsoft Settles With Kelihos Botnet Defendant, Says He Didn’t Run the Network

by Dennis Fisher

Microsoft on Friday said it has reached a settlement with a Russian programmer it named as a defendant in a lawsuit related to the operation of the notorious Kelihos botnet. The company said that it no longer believes Andrey N. Sabelnikov was the operator of the botnet, but was instead responsible for writing some code that was later used by the botnet.

Research Shows Serious Problems With Android App SSL Implementations

by Dennis Fisher
1

There are thousands of apps in the Google Play mobile market that contain serious mistakes in the way that SSL/TLS is implemented, leaving them vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks that could compromise sensitive user data such as banking credentials, credit card numbers and other information. Researchers from a pair of German universities conducted a detailed analysis of thousands of Android apps and found that better than 15 percent of those apps had weak or bad SSL implementations.

Apple Patches Java Flaws

by Dennis Fisher

Apple has released a patch that fixes a laundry list of vulnerabilities in Java after Oracle pushed out a fix for the technology for users of Windows and other platforms. The patch from Apple also completely disables the Java plugin in users’ browsers in order to prevent users from falling victim to new attacks on the oft-vulnerable application.

Medical Device Security in Need of Major Upgrade

by Dennis Fisher

Security researchers and hackers have spent the last 20 years or so tearing apart all manner of software and hardware, looking for vulnerabilities, attack vectors and bugs, and the advent of embedded and implantable devices has now drawn their attention to this new class of targets. Medical devices, both implantable and external, have become the subjects of quite a lot of research lately, and the results are not encouraging. 

Gathering Threat Intelligence With Open Tools

by Dennis Fisher

Threat intelligence is one of the go-to buzz phrases for many people in the security industry right now, and it’s thrown in so many contexts and situations, it’s quickly becoming almost meaningless. Most people understand that they need to get better information about what’s happening both on their own networks and in the broader landscape, but few people are talking about how exactly to go about gathering that data, outside of trying to sell you a SIEM installation.

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