Dennis Fisher

Security researchers Juliano Rizzo and Thai Duong have developed a new attack called CRIME on the TLS protocol that uses the compression ratio in TLS requests as a side channel to gather information that enables them to decrypt the requests and extract users’ cookies.

The developer behind the notorious Black Hole exploit kit has released a new version of the software, adding in several new features designed to prevent security researchers from getting access to new exploits or reverse-engineering the kit’s inner workings. Conveniently, the pricing for Black Hole has stayed the same, so hackers get more value for the same amount of money.

By Andrew Storms

Let’s be clear, SAS70 should be sentenced to a quick and painful death in the bottom of a giant pit protected by 20-foot thick concrete walls where it should be buried forever, along-side other IT criminals such as Windows ME and IE6.

Saudi Aramco says that the virus attack that compromised tens of thousands of the company’s workstations last month never endangered the company’s oil production capabilities and that all of the affected systems have been brought back online and restored. The attack on Aramco has been linked by researchers to the Shamoon malware, but company officials did not comment on the nature or provenance of the malware.

UPDATE–The same team that attacked Google in the Aurora campaign in 2009 is still active and has been conducting a long-term campaign targeting defense contractors, financial services companies, energy companies, human rights organizations and government agencies using a seemingly inexhaustible supply of zero day vulnerabilities. The crew is using a variety of techniques to go after its targets, most notably compromising legitimate Web sites frequented by employees of the targeted organizations and then delivering exploits for one or more of their stockpiled zero-day bugs, researchers say.

Dennis Fisher talks with Al Huger of Sourcefire about the difficulty of tracking down the source of a malware infection, whether organizations should care about attribution after discovering an attack and why playing defense is so difficult.

Huawei, the massive Chinese technology company that has come under criticism for its close ties to China’s government, is defending itself, saying that it has never stolen national intelligence or intellectual property and does not support any groups that do so. The company has been a frequent target of critics who allege that it trades information and secrets with the Chinese government, allegations its officials have consistently denied.