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Dennis Fisher is a journalist with more than 13 years of experience covering information security.
As part of its response to the Flame malware and its usage of a forged Microsoft certificate to sign malicious files, Microsoft has changed the way that Windows handles certificates, releasing an automatic updater function that will recognize and flag untrusted certificates.
UPDATE: Researchers have identified an ongoing series of attacks, possibly emanating from China, that are targeting a number of high-profile organizations, including SCADA security companies, universities and defense contractors. The attacks are using highly customized malicious files to entice targeted users into opening them and starting the compromise.
There is a trivially exploitable vulnerability in MySQL that enables an attacker to gain root access to the database server. The bug, which recently was patched, stems from an error in the way that MySQL and MariaDB handle passwords, giving an attacker a chance of getting root access by supplying any password to an affected server.
Adobe has released a new version of the Flash player that now gives Firefox users the additional security of a sandbox and also includes a background update mechanism for Mac users. Flash has run in a sandbox on Google Chrome and Internet Explorer for some time already.
Claims surfaced earlier this week that the French security firm VUPEN, which is known for selling zero-day vulnerabilities to third parties, had been compromised and more than 100 of the company’s secret bugs had been leaked. However, VUPEN’s CEO said that the claims were totally false and there was no hack, let alone a leak of the company’s vulnerability inventory.
Microsoft has been busy of late, what with the scramble surrounding the Flame malware and the forged certificate that the attackers were able to use to spread the malware via a fake Windows Update service. Now, the company is planning to release seven bulletins next Tuesday covering 28 vulnerabilities in its June Patch Tuesday.
The details of the collision attack used by the Flame malware authors to create a forged code-signing certificate for Microsoft code are beginning to emerge, and the company said that the attackers used an MD5 hash collision specifically to ensure that their attack would work on machines running Windows Vista and later versions of the OS. Microsoft also said that it will roll out some hardening changes to its Windows Update infrastructure to prevent the kind of man-in-the-middle attack that Flame used.
Mozilla has fixed seven security vulnerabilities in its flagship Firefox browser, including four critical bugs. The fixes are included in Firefox 13, which was released Tuesday.
Google, whose users have been frequent targets of suspected attacks by foreign governments, is deploying a new warning system for users who may be victims of those kinds of attacks. The new system is in addition to existing warnings that Google will show Gmail users when their accounts may have been accessed by attackers.
The attackers behind the Flame malware used a collision attack against a cryptographic algorithm as part of the method for gaining a forged certificate to sign specific components of the attack tool. Microsoft officials said on Tuesday that it’s imperative for customers to install the update issued for the problem on Sunday, as it’s possible for other attackers to exploit the same vulnerability without using the collision attack.
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