Google Chrome Warns Users About Vulnerable Plugins
Google has added a new security feature to the latest versions of its Chrome browser that will now warn users when the browser encounters out-of-date plugins and will automatically disable them.
Dennis Fisher
About
Dennis Fisher is a journalist with more than 13 years of experience covering information security.
Microsoft Cites Progress in SDL Report, Advocates More Adoption of ASLR, DEP
In the more than nine years since Bill Gates’s Trustworthy Computing email kicked off Microsoft’s comprehensive, company-wide security initiative, the company has not only committed a tremendous amount of money and resources to the project but also has been quite open and public about the process. This week, Microsoft released its first major report on the progress and changes in the Security Development Lifecycle program, detailing not only its progress but also the things that still need to be improved.
Samsung Keylogger Case Revealed As False Positive
The panic that arose yesterday about Samsung allegedly shipping laptops that contained a pre-installed keylogger turns out to have been a complete mistake after further investigation by security researchers and the company itself. In fact, the controversy was the result of a false positive from one commercial antimalware suite and nothing else.
In his talk at the TED2011 Conference, Ralph Langner, a control systems security expert, discusses the work he and his team did to tear apart the Stuxnet worm and work out exactly what it does and what it’s target and ultimate purpose were.
Officials at Comodo have acknowledged that an additional two registration authorities affiliated with the company have been compromised in the wake of the high-profile attack on the company that was disclosed last week. However, no forged certificates were issued as a result of the new attacks.
BOSTON–Since virtually the dawn of the commercial Web and the advent of widespread email use, spam has been a major problem and it has grown to a point that botnets are now spewing trillions of spam messages every month. But, email spam is just one piece of a much larger ecosystem that now is mainly dominated by Web-based spam pushing users to malicious, or at best, worthless, pages.
BOSTON–The Tor Project has become a vital mechanism for privacy advocates, human rights activists, journalists and others in sensitive positions to evade online censorship and persecution. And while the governments interested in limiting user access to the Internet and controlling content have had some recent success in preventing the use of the anonymity network, Tor members have been working on new methods for circumventing those restrictions.
The unnamed hacker who has taken credit for the attack on Comodo last week that resulted in a number of fraudulent certificates being issued for high-value sites belonging to Google, Yahoo and Microsoft has posted the certificate that he issued himself for a Mozilla domain, as well as the private key for that certificate, in an effort to prove his claims.
Researchers have found a new version of the virulent GPCode ransomware that infects users’ machines and then encrypts their hard drives. The new version uses AES encryption and demands payment in the form of Ukash cards in exchange for the key to decrypt the files.
Someone claiming to be the person behind last week’s attack on a registration authority tied to Comodo
has posted an explanation of the methods he supposedly used and the
reasons for the attack. The rambling, disjointed message claims that the
Comodo attack was not the act of an organized, state-sponsored group,
but was instead the work of a lone actor who stumbled upon a way in.
