About
Dennis Fisher is a journalist with more than 13 years of experience covering information security.
There is a newly discovered zero day vulnerability in Java 7 that is being used in some targeted attacks right now. The vulnerability works against Internet Explorer and Firefox and researchers say that attackers are exploiting in the wild and installing a version of the Poison Ivy RAT on compromised systems.
As security defenses have advanced and become more adaptive in the last decade, malware authors and attackers have had to respond, looking for new ways to get their malicious software onto PCs or exploit previously unknown vulnerabilities. One target is the system BIOS, the low-level instruction set that loads when the computer boots, and now the U.S. government has released some draft specifications for helping to secure BIOS implementations.
For most of the recorded history of malware, viruses, Trojans and other malicious software have been specialists. Each piece of malware typically targeted one platform, be it Windows, OS X or now, one of the mobile platforms. But the last few months have seen the rise of cross-platform malware that have the ability to infect several different kinds of machines with small variations to their code.
Dennis Fisher talks with Cesar Cerrudo of IOActive Labs about his research project that used Fortune 500 executives’ corporate email addresses as the starting point to gather data about their online activities. Cerrudo found that he was able to map executives’ activities across a wide range of e-commerce, social networking and other sites with just an email address.
Attackers are threatening to launch a second assault on Saudi Aramco on Saturday in order to prove its abilities and the fact that it’s not relying on help from an Aramco insider. The first attack on the oil company occurred last week and resulted in the company taking its Web sites offline, saying that it had been hit by a malware infection on some of its workstations.
Google, which has come under fire for years for its privacy practices and recently settled a privacy related case with the Federal Trade Commission that resulted in a $22.5 million fine, is building out a privacy “red team”, a group of people charged with finding and resolving privacy risks in the company’s products.
While researchers continue to dig into the Shamoon malware, looking for its origins and a complete understanding of its capabilities, a group calling itself the Cutting Sword of Justice is claiming responsibility for an attack on the massive Saudi oil company Aramco, which some experts believe employed Shamoon to destroy data on thousands of machines.
The Apache Software Foundation has fixed two vulnerabilities in its ubiquitous Web server, including a cross-site scripting bug that could enable an attacker to upload files to a remote server. The new version of the Apache HTTP Server also includes updates that resolve dozens of other, non-security related bugs.
Apple has released a fix for a vulnerability in its Remote Desktop product that could result in sensitive data not being encrypted, even when users have the product configured to send all data in encrypted form. The vulnerability can lead to information leakage and Apple says the issue affects versions 3.0 and later.
Microsoft is warning customers about the availability of the ChapCrack tool that Moxie Marlinspike built to crack the VPN credentials for systems built on MS-CHAPv2 protocol. The company said that while it’s not aware of any active attacks using the tool, customers can protect themselves by implementing PEAP or changing to a more secure VPN tunnel.
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