About
Dennis Fisher is a journalist with more than 13 years of experience covering information security.
In the face of mounting evidence that the CA system is inherently flawed, Google officials are in the process of making changes to the way Chrome handles certificate revocations, and no longer will be using online revocation checks. Instead, Chrome will use the existing update system in the browser to accomplish this task.
DDoS attacks come in all shapes and sizes, and in a lot of cases, the victims of the attacks don’t much care who is executing the attack or why. They just know that their network is being overwhelmed with junk traffic. But the last year has seen a major volume of politically motivated attacks, and new research shows that as much as 35 percent of DDoS are the result of some political or ideological motivation.
Adobe, which has spent the last few years trying to dig out of a deep hole of vulnerabilities and buggy code, is making a major change to Flash, adding a sandbox to the version of the player that runs in Firefox. The sandbox is designed to prevent many common exploit techniques against Flash.
Apple has issued a new patch for Mac OS X Snow Leopard to fix a problem that users were reporting with application-compaitibility with the original fix issued last week. The new patch is designed to alleviate problems with the Rosetta technology in Snow Leopard.
CANCUN–For people who follow the developments in the security and research communities, it’s easy to get discouraged by the current state of affairs, given the rash of serious hacks on certificate authorities, military networks and companies such as RSA and VeriSign. But, if you think things are bad there, you may not want to look at what’s happening in the ICS and SCADA communities. It’s getting ugly early.
After a couple of years of seeing headlines announcing a steady stream of pieces of malware and trojaned apps appearing the Android Market, Google finally has taken steps to find and remove malicious apps from the market automatically. The company has unveiled a service called Bouncer that scans apps and looks for known malware as well as potentially malicious behavior.
CANCUN–Facebook is a lot of things, and one of the things that it’s become of late is a fertile green field for attackers and scammers of all stripes. The Koobface worm is perhaps the most famous threat to hit the network, but the more mundane ones, such as scammers generating fake profiles automatically to spread spam and malicious URLs are becoming more and more prevalent, researchers say.
CANCUN–The skill of attackers, combined with the difficulty and cost of finding and fixing vulnerabilities in software–especially after deployment–has reached the point that it’s now more effective and efficient for vendors to concentrate on making life more difficult for those attackers looking to exploit bugs.
Apple has released a massive set of patches for a wide range of security vulnerabilities in a number of its products and components, including OSX Lion and QuickTime. The patches, which are rolled up in OS X 10.7.3, fix a slew of serious bugs, many of which can be used to execute remote code on vulnerable machines.
Researchers have identified a strain of malware that’s being used in a string of targeted attacks against defense contractors, government agencies and other organizations by leveraging exploits against zero-day vulnerabilities. The attacks may have been going on since 2009 in some form and the emails containing the malicious attachments are specifically targeted at executives and officials in various industries using fake conference invitations.
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