Dennis Fisher

Apple has informed developers that, as of March 2012, any app submitted to the Mac App Store will have to include a sandbox. The move is an intriguing one from Apple, which has kept a low profile on security and typically handles Mac security on its own.

The Poison Ivy malware kit is old. It was first seen in 2005, which makes it about 762 years old in Internet years. But that doesn’t mean it’s no longer useful, as evinced by the data collected by Microsoft in a new report on the tool, which shows that it is still in active use and is turning up on thousands of infected PCs.

The Black Hole exploit kit is really becoming a serious pain in the neck for people trying to use the Internet. At some point, it may become easier to start a list of the URLs that aren’t hosting the exploit kit, rather than the ones that are. For the time being, the latest entry in the latter category is a group of thousands of WordPress blogs that have been compromised and are now redirecting visitors to sites serving the Black Hole exploit kit.

A newly discovered installer for the Duqu malware includes an exploit for a previously unknown vulnerability in the Windows kernel that allows remote code execution. Microsoft is working on a fix for the kernel vulnerability right now. The exact location and nature of the flaw isn’t clear right now.

The Linux Foundation has released a document outlining ways in which the UEFI secure boot specification can be used to support the installation of Linux and other open operating systems on UEFI-enabled hardware. As long as hardware vendors set up their systems in the proper way, UEFI should be no obstacle to using Linux or other alternate operating systems on forthcoming systems, they say.

The Android platform has become one of the go-to choices for developers and device manufacturers in the last year or so, and that popularity has of course attracted the attention of attackers who have been busily coding up as much malware as they can for the platform. They’ve been quite successful, with hits such as DroidDream and its sequels popping up in dozens of compromised apps in the Android Market this year. Now, defenders are getting some tools of their own to help address the problem, with the release of the Android Reverse Engineering suite.

Microsoft Research has proposed a mitigation for a known potential attack against verifiable electronic voting machines that could help prevent insiders from being able to alter votes after the fact. The countermeasure to the “trash attack” involves adding a cryptographic hash to the receipts that voters receive.