Dennis Fisher

One of the more pernicious and as-yet incurable diseases in security is the resistance to sharing data. Organizations large and small collect all sorts of information on attacks, vulnerabilities and threats and, for the most part, it simply sits in databases and is never of any use to anyone outside of the organization. But there’s an effort underway at the Georgia Tech Research Institute to change that through the use of a new information-gathering and analysis system called Titan.

One of the men authorities allege to have been behind the massive–and now dead–Mariposa botnet, has gone on trial in Slovenia, more than two years after the initial arrests and takedown of the network. 

Researchers have found several samples of a new version of the mobile version of the Zeus malware, with these newest ones targeting the BlackBerry platform. BlackBerry has not been a common target for attackers, despite the high-value user base of corporate executives and government officials, but that may be changing now with this new version of Zitmo targeting RIM’s devices.

Microsoft has released a public version of its internal Attack Surface Analyzer tool, which helps organizations identify changes to a system’s attack surface as new applications are added. The tool has been in beta for a few months, but this is the first official release.

There are a lot of things that the United States is no longer so good at doing: eating vegetables or winning major marathons, for example. But one thing that the U.S. still does really well is provide comfortable hosting platforms for phishing sites. In fact, about 60 percent of all phishing sites are hosted in the U.S., and no other country had more than seven percent, according to a new report.

The Java CVE-2012-1723 vulnerability is suddenly the golden child of bugs. The flaw, which Oracle patched in June, has been the target of several pieces of malware and Web-based attacks of late, and now researchers say there is a phishing scam targeting payroll and HR employees that involves and exploit for the Java bug, as well.

SQL injection attacks have been going on for years, and the vulnerabilities and exploitation techniques are well-understood and widely discussed. However, they’re still quite prevalent and are used in a variety of scenarios. One recent example is the attack on a Yahoo site that resulted in a breach of 450,000 usernames and passwords. In this video, Ryan O’Boyle of Veracode discusses the nature of SQL injection attacks and how to defend against them.