About
Dennis Fisher is a journalist with more than 13 years of experience covering information security.
Oracle on Tuesday plans to release patches for 56 new vulnerabilities in a huge number of its products through its scheduled quarterly critical patch update. The company said that the various vulnerabilities in this month’s CPU affect hundreds of Oracle products.
Hacker forums function as a kind of combination training academy, social network and central bazaar for attackers looking for new tools, methods and techniques. They’re also often patrolled by law enforcement agents and security researchers, but it’s rare that any of the information that those people gather ever makes it into the hands of the public. One security company is now laying out some of the details of a year-long observation of a large hacker forum.
A group of people affected by the TRICARE data breach in September has filed a class-action lawsuit against the Department of Defense, alleging that the department and its health care organization didn’t properly safeguard personal information that was stored on backup tapes stolen last month.
The new version of NoScript, the popular browser add-on that blocks JavaScript and other embedded objects from running on Web pages, is out in alpha form and it can now run on Android-based smartphones, giving users protection against script-based attacks on their mobile devices.
Search-engine poisoning has been the bane of many Internet users’ existence for a long time, and it’s one of many security problems that seems to not be getting any better. In some ways, it may be getting worse, actually. One of the main problems these days is the use of legitimate-looking ads that direct users to malicious sites rather than sites to download applications such as Flash or Firefox.
The Securities and Exchange Commission has issued new guidance to help public companies determine when they may need to disclose an attack–or even a potential attack–in order to make potential investors aware of possible risks to the company’s business. The guidance, which does not constitute a rule or requirement for companies to disclose, is meant to help “registrants in assessing what, if any, disclosures should be provided about cybersecurity matters.”
If there’s one thing that can be said about Apple, it’s that the company operates on its own timeline. It does what it pleases at whatever time suits it, and the customers appear. Actually, they don’t simply appear, they wait expectantly and move as one when asked. This has proven to be enormously profitable for Apple and quite satisfying for most of its customers. But the one area where this has not worked so well is security.
A new exploit pack has appeared on the scene in the last week or so and it already is causing trouble for users, with thousands of compromised Web sites redirecting users to a page that is hosting the pack and exploiting vulnerabilities on their machines to install malware.
Apple has released iOS 5, which includes a significant number of security updates, most notably the removal of the DigiNotar root certificates from the iOS trusted root list. The new operating system for iPhones, iPads and iPods also includes support for newer versions of the TLS protocol and eliminates support for the MD5 algorithm in almost all cases.
Apple has released a new version of its iTunes software, patching an enormous number of vulnerabilities in the popular music application. Version 10.5 of iTunes includes fixes for several dozen flaws in WebKit alone, and also has some updated functionality designed to support new components coming in iOS in the near future.
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