Google Patches 12 Flaws in Chrome
Google has 12 vulnerabilities in Chrome, including seven high-risk flaws. The new release of Chrome also includes an updated version of the Adobe Flash player.
Dennis Fisher
About
Dennis Fisher is a journalist with more than 13 years of experience covering information security.
Flashback Mac Trojan Hits More than 500K Machines
The Flashback Trojan that has been infecting Mac OSX machines of late appears to have become the most successful piece of Mac-based malware in the short history of such things. Researchers say that there have been upwards of 500,000 Macs infected by the malware, and that number may still rise despite the fact that Apple has now released a patch for the Java flaw that the Trojan exploits.
How to Make a Data Breach Disappear
For companies that are in the business of collecting, storing or monetizing user data or processing large numbers of transactions, it’s a matter of when, not if, they will suffer a major compromise or data loss. Most recently the giant wheel of pain stopped on Global Payments, but a weird thing happened on the way to Internet infamy: the story kind of died.
Dennis Fisher talks with Dan Guido, security researcher and CEO of Trail of Bits, about the new company’s plan to help enterprises defend against targeted attacks, the way that attackers think and the value of exploits versus vulnerabilities. They also discuss a new initiative to help share security knowledge more broadly in the community.
Mozilla has made a change in Firefox that will block all of the older versions of Java that contain a critical vulnerability that’s being actively exploited. The decision to add these vulnerable versions of Java to the browser’s blocklist is designed to protect users who may not be aware of the flaw and attacks.
Adobe has published a free tool that can help administrators and security researchers classify suspicious files as malicious or benign, using specific machine-learning algorithms. The tool is a command-line utility that Adobe officials hope will make binary classification a little easier.
UPDATED–Global Payments, the payment-processing company that was the victim of a massive data breach revealed last week, said that the attack appears to have compromised something less than 1.5 million credit card numbers and that the attack looks to have been isolated to the network in North America. However, there are some details of the incident that are raising questions in the security community about the timing of the intrusion and what data was taken.
Yahoo has decided that it’s now time to start implementing a Do Not Track system across its various Web properties. The company is one of the last large Web content providers to officially commit to using a DNT technology, and Yahoo said that it plans to have the system implemented by early summer.
Google has released version 18 of its Chrome browser and has fixed a number of serious security vulnerabilities in the process. The latest version of Chrome also includes an updated release of the Flash player that now includes the background updated that enables users to set the software to update itself without any help from the user.
The hysteria in Washington regarding the comprehensive infiltration of U.S. government and civilian networks by China has gotten to the point now that the director of the National Security Agency is saying in open Congressional hearings that his agency, the U.S. Cyber Command and others should be presenting the White House with recommendations for non-cyber options for retaliation against Chinese hackers.
