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Dennis Fisher is a journalist with more than 13 years of experience covering information security.
A group of researchers have developed a new attack that enables them to find AES keys several times faster than was previously thought possible, reducing the complexity of finding the keys on AES-128, AES-192 and AES-256. However, the attack does not pose any practical threat to currently deployed systems that use the AES encryption algorithm, the researchers said.
The attack against RSA earlier this year has become a case study in how data breaches occur and how companies respond. In this video, Uri Rivner, Head of New Technologies, Identity Protection and Verification, at RSA discusses the attack, the aftermath and the lessons learned from it.
The evolution of mobile malware seems to be accelerating, especially as it applies to Android malware. The newest example of this rapid change is the appearance of GingerMaster, a variant of the DroidKungFu malware that now sports a root exploit for Android 2.3 and gives the attacker complete control of the infected device.
Google has a hugely privileged view of the Internet and it uses that position for all kinds of things, one of which is to collect data and intelligence on malicious Web site behavior and malware trends. In a new report based on four years’ worth of data on site and malware activity, the company found that attackers are now deploying highly specialized evasion and obfuscation techniques that play off what researchers and users do and then adjust and adapt.
There has been a huge spike in spam volume in the last few days, including a massive amount of malicious spam with infected attachments, and researchers say that levels of junk mail are now far higher than they were before the takedown of the notorious Spamit affiliate program last fall.
Mozilla has released Firefox 6 through its automatic update mechanism and the new version of the group’s popular browser includes fixes for 10 vulnerabilities, several of them critical flaws that could allow remote code execution.
A new report shows that the latest version of Internet Explorer, equipped with some new anti-malware functionality, catches more Web-based malware attacks than any of the other major browsers on the market. IE 9 caught nearly 100 percent of the attacks thrown at it in a new test done by NSS Labs.
The steady drumbeat of malware and spyware targeting the Android platform is continuing, this time with the emergence of a new variant of an Android Trojan that masquerades as a Google+ app and has the ability to not only record phone calls, but also to answer incoming calls and respond to remote commands that arrive via SMS.
Rep. Mary Bono Mack, chair of the influential House committee that oversees information security, is asking for more information about the Shady RAT attacks that McAfee publicized last week, saying that the “details of the report are alarming at the least,” and asking that researchers brief members of the committee.
A security researcher has released a new workaround for the critical vulnerability in the Apple iOS operating system related to the way that the OS handle SSL certificate validation. The workaround makes some key checks in the certificate chain that the vulnerable versions of iOS and a previous workaround fail to execute.
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