About
Dennis Fisher is a journalist with more than 13 years of experience covering information security.
Dennis Fisher talks with Adam Shostack of Microsoft about the taxonomy he helped develop for classifying how PCs are compromised, what he would and wouldn’t change in The New School of Information Security and who he’s learned the most from.
There are multiple reports emerging of two new vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash that could lead to remote code execution. There’s little information about the exact nature of the bugs available right now, and Adobe has not released any advisories or information about them either.
Microsoft has released a beta version of a new tool that can help victims of malware attacks recover from ugly infections, even if they don’t have the ability to reach the Internet. The Windows Defender Offline tool enables users to clean their systems of malware from a CD or other removable media.
Officials at Cnet’s Download.com site have issued a statement apologizing for bundling the popular open source Nmap security audit application with adware that changed users’ search engine and home page to Microsoft properties. Fyodor, the author of Nmap, raised the issue earlier this week, saying that his app was being wrapped in malware on Download.com.
Another certificate authority in The Netherlands has been hacked, though this time the attack does not appear to have affected the certificate-issuing operations of Gemnet, a subsidiary of KPN. The company, which does business with the Dutch government among other organizations, said it has taken its Web site offline while it investigates the attack.
Dennis Fisher talks with Paul Judge of Barracuda Networks about the company’s Clicks For Meals program, which is aiming to provide 10,000 meals during the holidays through the World Food Programme.
The newly discovered vulnerability in Adobe Reader and Acrobat that the company is planning to patch next week is being used to install a known Trojan that has been used in attacks against other Adobe vulnerabilities in the past.
A lot has been said about the Carrier IQ software, the way that it’s used by carriers and whether it’s capable of intercepting calls, texts and data on users’ handsets. It’s still not clear exactly what’s going on, but one lesson that has emerged from all of this is this: The mobile devices people buy and use for personal and sensitive taks every day simply do not belong to them.
DNS provider OpenDNS has developed a new open-source tool that will encrypt all of the traffic between customers and the OpenDNS servers. The tool is designed to address the slew of techniques that enable attackers to eavesdrop on plain-text DNS traffic.
Adobe is warning users about a critical vulnerability in its Reader and Acrobat applications that could lead to remote code execution. There are reports that attackers already are using the Reader bug in targeted attacks, and Adobe said it plans to have a patch ready by next week.
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