About
Dennis Fisher is a journalist with more than 13 years of experience covering information security.
UPDATE: Online retailer Zappos said that its network has been compromised and attackers were able to access personal information belonging to more than 24 million of its customers. Zappos said that its database that contains customers’ credit card numbers was not compromised, however.
MIAMI BEACH–There has been a lot of discussion and research in the last decade on exploiting heap overflows in various platforms, especially Windows. But one researcher has found that there is a heap allocator in the Linux kernel that is, as he describes it, “beautifully exploitable.” Meet SLOB.
MIAMI BEACH–It’s been a decade now since Microsoft began focusing on product security as a top priority and there have been a lot of successes and some failures along the way. But in that time, one of the things that most definitely has changed as a result of the Trustworthy Computing program is how difficult and expensive it’s become for attackers to compromise Windows machines. That’s not to say, however, that the fight has been won. It’s only beginning, in fact, a senior Microsoft security official said.
MIAMI BEACH–Researchers and attackers have had no shortage of mobile platforms and devices to sink their teeth into in recent years, thanks to the explosion of iOS and Android phones and tablets in the consumer and enterprise markets. Now, the spotlight is slowly beginning to turn in the direction of RIM, and specifically its BlackBerry PlayBook tablet.
Ten years.That’s a really long time. Think about what you were doing 10 years ago. Can you even remember? Maybe you were in college or high school, or cripes, even grade school. Or maybe you were working in security already, trying to figure out why your network kept getting overrun by viruses and attackers.
Microsoft on Tuesday patched the vulnerability in Windows that was exploited by the BEAST SSL attack tool developed by Juliano Rizzo and Thai Duong last year. The patch is one of several rated important that was issued by Microsoft in January’s Patch Tuesday release, and there also was a critical bulletin released, fixing two separate vulnerabilities in Windows Media Player.
The White House has launched a new initiative designed to help companies in the electric power industry measure the maturity of their security programs against a new maturity model. The program is being run in tandem with the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Energy and is meant to help the utility companies find their weak spots and where they need to improve.
Security researcher Michal Zalewski has released a new version of a passive fingerprinting tool called P0f that has the ability to diagnose a wide range of components in an Internet connection, even uncovering clients that are trying to forge some part of their identity in the connection.
Governments in some countries have not been shy about trying to block their citizens from using the Tor network to access censored or sensitive Web content. The Chinese government has become quite proficient at this, and a recent analysis of the methods the country is using to accomplish this shows that officials are able to identify Tor connections in near real-time and shut them off basically at will.
A few days after MIcrosoft released a patch to fix a vulnerability in ASP.NET that could enable a denial-of-service attack, someone has released exploit code for the vulnerability.
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