About
Dennis Fisher is a journalist with more than 13 years of experience covering information security.
Attackers are beginning to host their malicious domains and drive-by download sites, and most recently researchers have discovered a number of domains on Amazon’s cloud platform that are being used to install malware as part of a spam and phishing campaign designed to steal banking credentials and other sensitive data.
Adobe has released an out-of-cycle update for Flash that fixes a serious vulnerability in the application on all platforms. The bug is a cross-site scripting flaw that can be used in drive-by download attacks and Adobe said that is being used in some targeted attacks right now.
The group behind the TDSS rootkit has developed a new method for getting the pernicious malware onto as many machines as possible: a worm-like, self-propagating loader. The new mechanism has the ability not only to install new copies of the rootkit on PCs, but also set up its own DHCP server on a network and force machines to connect to a malicious remote DNS server.
The security woes for Sony are continuing unabated, and the latest entry in the laundry list of attacks against the company came Thursday when a group of hackers posted a large amount of data that it stole from databases belonging to Sony Pictures and a couple of other subsidiaries.
The release of the International Strategy for Cyberspace late last month marked a major shift in the way that United States officials think about and treat information security, which now seems as if it will have a place at the table during diplomatic discussions. However, experts and U.S. officials say that there still is quite a lot of road ahead if security is to become one of the country’s top priorities.
Researchers have identified a second large batch of apps in the Android Market that have been infected with the DroidDream malware, estimating that upwards of 30,000 users have downloaded at least one of the more than 30 infected apps. Google has removed the apps from the market.
Google has been criticized widely for its privacy practices, and some of the harshest critiques have come from outside privacy advocates. In this video, Simon Davies and Gus Hosein of Privacy International discuss the ways in which companies such as Google that have large amounts of user data can avoid serious privacy problems.
Apple on Tuesday shipped the promised update to help remove the MacDefender malware, and in a surprise move, also added functionality to Mac OS X that will now check for new malware definitions daily.
With not even half of the year gone, 2011 is becoming perhaps the ugliest year on record for major attacks, breaches and incidents. Lockheed Martin, one of the larger suppliers of technology and weapons systems to the federal government, has become the latest high-profile target of a serious attack, and while such incidents are bad news indeed for the victims, they may serve a vital purpose in forcing companies to disclose more data about breaches and attacks.
Dennis Fisher and Paul Roberts discuss the re-emergence of the MacDefender malware, Apple’s decision to push out an OS X update to protect against and the release of Google Wallet and the security implications of the system.
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