Dennis Fisher

About

Dennis Fisher is a journalist with more than 13 years of experience covering information security.

Mozilla to Remove Turkish CA From Firefox Trust Store

Mozilla is removing a Turkish root CA from the Firefox trust store, not because of a compromise or a mistakenly issued certificate, but because the certificate authority hasn’t lived up to the audit requirements Mozilla has for trusted CAs. Like other browser vendors, Mozilla has a lengthy policy that sets out the requirements for CAs to […]

Second Crypto Bug in Networking Library Could Affect 25,000 Apps

A few weeks after the developers of the AFNetworking library that’s popular among iOS and OS X app developers patched a serious bug in the library that enabled man-in-the-middle attacks, another, similar flaw has surfaced. The new vulnerability is related to how the AFNetworking library handles domain name validation for certificates. As it turns out, the library […]

Siemens Patches Ghost Flaw in Simatic Product

Siemens has released an update for some of its ICS products that are affected but the glibc Ghost vulnerability that was disclosed in January. The vulnerability affected both the Siemens Sinumerik and Simatic HMI Basic applications, which are used in a variety of industrial situations. “The affected products, SINUMERIK, SIMATIC HMI Basic, and Ruggedcom, are used as an […]


The high-profile DDoS attack against GitHub that went on for several days last month was the end result of an operation that included several phases and extensive testing and optimization by the attackers. Researchers at Google analyzed the attack traffic over several weeks and found that the attackers used both Javascript replacement and HTML injections. […]

SAN FRANCISCO–For years, Apple has enjoyed a pretty good reputation among users for the security of its products. That halo has been enhanced by the addition of new security features such as Gatekeeper and XProtect to OS X recently, but one researcher said that all of those protections are simple to bypass and gaining persistence […]

SAN FRANCISCO–The discussion about information sharing has been going on in the security community since before there was a security community, but the tone and shape of the conversation have changed recently thanks to an executive order from the Obama administration and the relentless drumbeat of attacks and data breaches. The benefits of sharing threat intelligence are […]

SAN FRANCISCO–The more things change, the more they stay the same. Thirty years ago, Adi Shamir, one of the inventors of the RSA algorithm, was asked to do a keynote speech at a conference and spoke about his laws of computer security. They were a set of principles that he developed over the years relating […]

SAN FRANCISCO–Encryption is the hot new topic in security at the moment, as it has been any number of times in the last few decades. And, as in the past, the notions of key escrow, mandated legal access to encrypted systems and other ideas for helping governments defeat cryptosystems have followed right along with the latest crypto […]

Google engineers have spent the last several years moving many of the company’s online services to encrypted links. Gmail is HTTPS by default, and Google search is done over SSL for much of the world. Now the company is working to move its ad-serving and ad-buying platforms to HTTPS, as well. Google’s ad networks are pervasive […]