About
Dennis Fisher is a journalist with more than 13 years of experience covering information security.
The author of DarkComet, one of the more notorious remote administration tools in use today, has said that he is ending development and sales of the tool after finding out that DarkComet was used by the Syrian government in attacks against anti-government activists.
Privacy advocates and security experts often warn users about the consequences of handing over so much of their personal data to Web sites or social networks, saying that they never know how it’s going to be used or sold. But it’s rare that users ever see examples of that in action. Twitter is giving people that chance with its decision to begin releasing reports on law enforcement requests for user data and content takedowns.
Attackers really like exploit kits because they offer users the ease of point-and-click exploitation, lots of potential targets and don’t require a huge amount of technical knowledge to use. Attackers also enjoy Microsoft vulnerabilities, especially unpatched ones, because of the massive installed base, and at least some of the users of the Black Hole exploit kit have begun using the exploit for the critical MSXML vulnerability in their attacks.
Three months after initially disrupting the Zeus botnet, Microsoft officials have named two of the people who they think are behind the malware network, a pair of Ukrainians who already are sitting in jail in the UK.
It turns out that malware authors–at least some of them–may have an interest in economics. Perhaps worried about market saturation or commoditization, the distributors of the Citadel malware, which has been used to deliver ransomware in the past, are apparently about to take their creation off the market.
Nothing is more frustrating than spending days or weeks compromising dozens of Web sites and setting up your network of malicious redirects and then finding out that someone has screwed it all up by taking down one of your infected sites. Luckily, the crew behind the BlackHole exploit kit has solved that problem for its customers by including a new domain-generation algorithm that will help create new malicious sites as quickly as possible.
It’s nearly impossible to remember now, but there was a time when the iPhone didn’t exist. That time was five years and one day ago, and up to that point the idea of standing in line overnight for a mobile phone was almost as ridiculous as the notion of Apple being thought of as an innovator in security. But the former is now commonplace and the latter is straight fact, if only in discussions about the iPhone.
Text messages are great, but they have the annoying property of being out of the sender’s control as soon as they’re sent. That’s resulted in all kinds of fun for the Internet, and it’s also presented a big opportunity for a security company to pick up the slack and impose some sanity and privacy on these communications. A new start-up called Wickr is aiming to do just that with a mobile app that enables users to send anonymous, encrypted texts, photos and videos that self-destruct after a set time period and leave no trace for snoops.
Few things tend to spark debates and controversy in the security community like a new piece of cryptographic research. The paper by a group of academic researchers on an improvement to a padding oracle attack on certain hardware security tokens publicized this week is no different, with RSA officials saying the research contributes nothing in the way of breaking new ground. Cryptographers beg to differ.
The dram surrounding the Do Not Track specification and its implementation by browser manufacturers is set to continue on Thursday when the Senate Commerce Committee will hold a hearing to discuss whether the proposed specification is strong enough or has been weakened by the digital advertising industry’s input.
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