Dennis Fisher

About

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

Eugene Kaspersky Unveils Plans for New Secure SCADA OS

Attacks against SCADA and industrial-control systems have become a major concern for private companies as well as government agencies, with executives and officials worried about the potential effects of a major compromise. Security experts in some circles have been warning about the possible ramifications of such an attack for some time now, and researchers have found scores of vulnerabilities in SCADA and ICS systems in the last couple of years. Now, engineers at Kaspersky Lab have begun work on new operating system designed to be a secure-by-design environment for the operation of SCADA and ICS systems. 

ReVuln Emerges as New Player in Vulnerability Sales Market

It’s getting difficult these days to keep track of all of the companies, public and otherwise, that are buying and selling vulnerabilities or information on bugs, and now there’s another group on the scene: ReVuln. But, unlike other companies in the industry, ReVuln is mostly focusing its efforts on vulnerabilities in SCADA and ICS software, the applications that run utilities, industrial systems and other sophisticated systems.

Mozilla Adds Click-to-Play Plugin Security Feature to Firefox Beta

Attackers have been going after vulnerabilities in browser plugins and extensions for years now, as they know that users are slow about updating these components. Even if users have the browser set to update automatically, the third-party components are a separate issue and need to be patched on their own. With that in mind, Mozilla has added a new feature to Firefox that will, by default, block known vulnerable versions of plugins from running.

Critical Flaw Reported in CloudStack

by Dennis Fisher

The Apache Software Foundation is warning users about a configuration problem in the open-source CloudStack platform that could allow an attacker to take a number of unwanted actions, including deleting all of the virtual machines on a system.

HTTPS Everywhere 3.0 Released

by Dennis Fisher
2

The EFF has released an updated version of its popular HTTPS Everywhere browser plugin, which enables users to automatically connect over HTTPS to many sites. The newest version of the extension now supports more than 1,500 sites.

SHA-1 Hash Collision Could Be Within Reach of Attackers By 2018

by Dennis Fisher
1

It’s been just a few days since NIST approved Keccak as the winner of the SHA-3 competition, and it likely will be some time before we begin seeing the new hash algorithm popping up in common products and services. However, some in the cryptography community say it may not be a bad idea to start making plans to move away from the older SHA-1 algorithm fairly soon, given the quickly dropping cost of compute power.

Malware Signed by Adobe Certificate Only Used in Limited Targeted Attacks

by Dennis Fisher
1

Adobe’s revocation of a code-signing certificate that had been used by attackers to sign several malicious utilities sparked concerns in the security community about widespread malware attacks using those utilities. The key concern was that most antimalware systems will implicitly trust files that are digitally signed and so would pass them by without flagging them as malicious. However, security researchers say that the utilities, while still circulating, aren’t being used in large-scale attacks.

Google Warning About More State-Sponsored Attacks

by Dennis Fisher

When Google told users in June that it was going to start warning them about attacks on Gmail accounts that the company believed were coming from state-sponsored groups, it looked like an announcement that only would affect a tiny percentage of the company’s users. Journalists, activists and dissidents seemed like the target base. Now, Google officials say that they have seen a new wave of attacks and has issued warnings to more users as a result.

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