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Dennis Fisher is a journalist with more than 13 years of experience covering information security.
There are remotely and easily exploitable vulnerabilities in the BlackBerry Enterprise Server that could allow an attacker to gain access to the server by simply sending a malicious image file to a user’s BlackBerry device.
A security researcher known for his work on cracking cryptographic ciphers on mobile networks has found a method that enables him to capture and decrypt data traffic on virtually any GPRS network. The attack, developed by Karsten Nohl, enables him to eavesdrop on traffic within a radius of about three miles.
The takedown of the Rustock botnet earlier this year has had ripple effects throughout the malware and spam ecosystems, with some large reductions in spam levels and attacks. However, some of the components of the malware machine driven by Rustock are beginning to come back online now. Researchers say that the Harnig pay-per-install malware is making a comeback, sans Rustock, however.
In his keynote address at the SOURCE Boston conference this year, independent security researcher Dino Dai Zovi discussed the attacker mentality and they way that defenders can adopt it to better protect their networks.
LAS VEGAS–The way that things are right now in mobile security, there does not look to be much hope for keeping corporate and personal data secure. A panel of researchers who focus on looking for attacks and bugs at various levels of the mobile device and infrastructure said at Black Hat that there are so many ways an attacker can compromise phones from the infrastructure all the way down to the application level, defending against all of them is highly problematic.
LAS VEGAS–In the face of mounting external pressure to begin paying bug bounties, Microsoft is instead launching a new program that will pay a $200,000 top prize to a security researcher who develops the most innovative defensive security technology. The program is designed to “inspire researchers to focus their talents on defensive technologies,” the company said.
LAS VEGAS–Researchers from IBM’s ISS X-Force plan to unveil a new system for running an open wireless network in a secure mode at the Black Hat conference here this week. The system mimics the way that Web sites browsers use digital certificates to establish a trusted connection with one another.
The world moves fast, but much of the world of vulnerability research and exploitation has been stuck in stasis for the last few years. Much of the focus has been on memory-corruption vulnerabilities, application-level bugs and using Java and Flash to get around exploit mitigations and other protections. But that seems to be changing now, if the topics and depth of research at this week’s Black Hat conference are any evidence.
A controversial bill that would force ISPs to retain records for up to 12 months that would allow them to identify users by IP address has cleared a key hurdle and passed the House Judiciary Committee by a wide margin, setting it up for passage by the full House.
Nearly six months after first introducing two-step verification for its Gmail service, Google has expanded the security feature to users outside the English-speaking world, opening it up to people in more than 150 countries.
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