About
Dennis Fisher is a journalist with more than 13 years of experience covering information security.
Apple has released the newest version of its OS X operating system, dubbed Lion, and it includes a batch of new security protections that bring it up to the level of Windows and Internet Explorer. The most significant additions, experts say, is the full implementation of ASLR and a sandbox that make it much more difficult for attackers to exploit browser bugs via a drive-by download to install malware on a victim’s machine.
It’s a sad day when attackers turn on each other, cannibalizing one another for cheap thrills and easy profits. But that’s the situation now, as phishers have begun going after the weakest among their kind: the lazy, unmotivated wannabe phisher with no skills.
It has come to this: CNN is now running segments on the attacks attributed to LulzSec, Anonymous and other groups and the FBI raids on suspected members of those crews. The network had Dave Aitel of Immunity Inc. on this morning to discuss the effects of the recent arrests and what the groups’ agendas might be.
Google is taking the unusual step of displaying a message at the top of its search results pages for some users, alerting them to the fact that their computers may be infected with malware. The action is the result of an investigation in which the search giant discovered that some malware-infected PCs were sending their search requests through one of a number of proxies.
Microsoft’s Vulnerability Research team is keeping itself busy finding bugs in other vendors’ products, with the two latest being a vulnerability in Google’s Picasa photo editing and sharing application and a bug in Facebook that could lead to the compromise of a victim’s account.
There has been a spate of spear-phishing attacks against a number of high-profile targets in the last few months, including RSA and others, and that trend is continuing unabated. Researchers have come across a fresh attack using the familiar malicious PDF attachment that appears to be targeting users in the defense industry.
A group of researchers from the University of Michigan and the University of Waterloo have developed a proxy system called Telex that provides a method for users to circumvent state-level censorship of the Web. It uses an architecture that includes a proxy at the ISP level and uses connections to benign sites to disguise traffic going to censored sites. Threatpost editor Dennis Fisher spoke with J. Alex Halderman, one of the creators of the system, about its potential, its limits and what remains to be done before it can be deployed broadly.
Microsoft is now offering a $250,000 reward to help track down the people behind the notorious Rustock botnet. The company, which helped take down the botnet several months ago, said that it already has some good information on the crew behind the network and is now looking for information to bring the investigation to a close.
As state-level censorship continues to grow in various countries around the globe in response to political dissent and social change, researchers have begun looking for news ways to help Web users get around these restrictions. Now, a group of university researchers has developed an experimental system called Telex that replaces the typical proxy architecture with a scheme that hides the fact that the users is even trying to communicate at all.
Apple has pushed out iOS 4.3.4 to fix a vulnerability in the iPhone operating system that affects the way the device handles PDF files. That PDF bug is the same one that was used by the Jailbreakme.com site to enable users to jailbreak their iPhones.
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