About
Dennis Fisher is a journalist with more than 13 years of experience covering information security.
QR codes have been showing up everywhere in the last few months, from magazine ads to the sides of buses to, oddly, billboards. And now they’ve shown up on the list of ways that attackers are delivering malware to victims, with the emergence of a new Android-based Trojan that is hiding on malicious sites linked to by some QR codes.
With the use of social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Google+ becoming more and more prevalent in the enterprise, companies are having to come to grips with additional security concerns that they bring with them. But, according to the results of a new survey of IT and security professionals, that process is still in its early stages in many companies.
Cisco has patched a string of serious vulnerabilities in its IOS networking software, including some that could be used for remote code execution, and also fixed flaws in some of its other products. In all, Cisco released 10 advisories, nine of which concerned IOS vulnerabilities.
Dennis Fisher talks with Kaspersky Lab Researcher Tillmann Werner about the takedown of the Kelihos botnet, the network’s unique multi-tiered architecture, its custom protocol and the ethics and legality of pushing updates to disable bots on users’ machines.
Mozilla has released Firefox 7, the latest version of its flagship browser, which includes a number of security fixes and other improvements. The new version is being touted as the fastest yet and also includes a new feature meant to conserve memory on users’ PCs.
Bug bounty programs have been around in various forms for more than 15 years now, and many of the larger software companies, including Mozilla and Google, have established rewards for people who report bugs. But, aside from the amount of money that’s paid out when bugs are fixed, there hasn’t been much raw data available about the the way the programs operate. Now, Mozilla has released some numbers on its program that show how effective it has been.
InMotion, a large hosting provider based in California, was compromised in recent days and the attackers were able to replace the index files of thousands of sites, defacing them and in some cases making it difficult for site owners to recover and reload their sites.
Dennis Fisher talks with Gary McGraw of Cigital about the release of the data collected during the BSIMM 3 software security measurement project, the most pressing challenges facing companies involved in software security programs and the reasons that the US government is falling farther behind on this front.
Continuing its legal assault on botnet operators and the hosting companies that the criminals use for their activities, Microsoft has announced new actions against a group of people it contends are responsible for the operation of the Kelihos botnet. The company has also helped to take down the botnet itself and says that Kelihos’s operators were using it not only to send out spam and steal personal information but also for some more nefarious purposes.
Microsoft has relased a security advisory about the TLS/SSL attack developed by Juliano Rizzo and Thai Duong and also has made a FixIt tool available to help server administrators switch on support for newer versions of the protocol that aren’t vulnerable to the attack.
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