About
Dennis Fisher is a journalist with more than 13 years of experience covering information security.
One of the attackers who has been targeting Syrian anti-government activists with malware and surveillance tools has returned and upped the ante with the use of the BlackShades RAT, a remote-access tool that gives him the ability to spy on victims machines through keylogging and screenshots.
The number of compromised sites detected each month by Google’s antimalware and anti-phishing systems has been dropping rather steadily from a peak of more than 300,000 in early 2009 and is now down around 150,000. However, the company’s statistics also show that the number of outright malicious attack sites is back on the rise.
Many people would consider themselves lucky to be a part of one successful start-up company, but for a select group of entrepreneurs, engineers and executives, that’s just the beginning. Such is the case for the team behind new mobile security firm Bluebox, a stealth-mode company that counts SPI Dynamics founder Caleb Sima and Adam Ely, a former top security official at Salesforce.com and Disney among its key executives and has just raised $9.5 million in funding.
In case you thought that the mass exodus of researchers from TippingPoint’s Zero Day Initiative in recent months meant that the demand for third-party vulnerability markets was waning, fear not. Several former members of the ZDI team have come back together to form a new firm called Exodus Intelligence that will have its own vulnerability purchasing program, among other offerings.
There’s a new series of malicious Android applications masquerading as a premium security app for the mobile platform, and researchers say that the malware is part of the Zeus empire.
Less than a week after Microsoft released a patch for a critical vulnerability in Internet Explorer, attack code has become publicly available in the form of a module for the Metasploit Framework. The bug is serious one that enables an attacker to bypass both ASLR and DEP, the two main anti-exploit technologies in IE, and run arbitrary code on the victim’s machine.
When the news about the Flame malware first broke several weeks ago, people from all parts of the security community, political world and elsewhere quickly began trying to figure out what the significance of the tool was and whether it represented anything new. That was difficult at the time, given the lack of data on its exact capabilities and parentage. But, with the information available to us now, it seems safe to say that Flame has changed the way that many people think about the threat landscape and the way attackers work, not just in the security community but in the political arena, as well.
If you use encryption products to protect your data or communications, you owe a debt of gratitude to Phil Zimmermann. Now, Zimmermann is aiming to collect on that debt with his new company, Silent Circle, a startup that will provide secure phone, email and SMS communications.
With attackers already exploiting the MSXML zero-day vulnerability, which affects a wide range of products, Microsoft has issued a FixIt tool for the bug that it is encouraging users to install as they prepare a full patch for the flaw.
Chris Soghoian has made a name for himself as a security and privacy researcher and has been the bane of government agencies and organizations prone to being somewhat less than upfront about their security and privacy practices. In this video from the Personal Democracy Forum in New York this week, Soghoian discusses the implications of the U.S. government’s raid on Osama Bin Laden and usage of offensive cyberwar weapons such as Stuxnet and Duqu.
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