About
Dennis Fisher is a journalist with more than 13 years of experience covering information security.
As attacks on mobile devices such as iPhones, iPads, Android phones and tablets have surged in recent months, security researchers and customers have continued to look for ways to lock down their devices and protect the data they store on them. Whisper Systems has jumped into the fray with WhisperCore, a new device-level encryption application for Android.
Google has reacted very quickly to the news this week of a new vulnerability in Adobe Flash and on Tuesday released a new version of Chrome that includes a fix for the Flash bug. Adobe said it plans to have its own fix ready for the flaw next week.
Twitter has changed the way that users access the company’s main site, now giving them the option to enable HTTPS by default, forcing a secure connection for most interaction with the service. However, the change does not apply to all of the popular apps users employ to access Twitter on smartphones and other devices.
Dennis Fisher talks with Microsoft’s Katie Moussouris about the way that the Trustworthy Computing effort at Microsoft has changed, how the security community has evolved since she got involved in the 1990s and the challenges–and fun–of being a woman in security.
A new, detailed analysis of the operations of the infamous Cutwail/Pushdo botnet shows that the network, which had been he target of several takedown attempts in the last couple of years, is not only amazingly resilient, but also is incredibly prolific, with one section of the botnet sending more than 1.7 trillion spam messages, and quite profitable, generating as much as $4 million in profits for its owners.
In this video, Tim Armstrong, a malware researcher at Kaspersky Lab talks with Ryan Naraine about the strengths and weaknesses of the Android operating system. Armstrong looks at strengths and weaknesses of the open-source platform and warns about the risks associated with jailbreaking/rooting Android devices.
Adobe is warning its users about a critical vulnerability in Flash that affects Adobe Reader and Acrobat, as well. The bug can be used by remote attackers to run arbitrary code and Adobe officials said that they’ve already seen some attacks that are targeting the vulnerability.
There is a wave of ongoing attacks against a bug in MHTML that affects all of the current versions of Windows, and there seems to be little recourse for sites trying to protect their users from the attacks.
Google has patched one of the vulnerabilities that a team of researchers used last week to win one portion of the Pwn2Own contest at CanSecWest. The bug is in the WebKit rendering engine.
VANCOUVER–For the fourth consecutive year, researcher Charlie Miller won one of the prizes at the annual Pwn2Own contest here. The difference this time is that Miller successfully exploited an iPhone 4 to win, rather than Safari, which he’s gone after the last three years. The BlackBerry Torch 9800 also was taken down, by a multinational team of researchers who were able to exploit the device’s browser by chaining three exploits together.
Infosec Insider content is written by a trusted community of Threatpost cybersecurity subject matter experts. Each contribution has a goal of bringing a unique voice to important cybersecurity topics. Content strives to be of the highest quality, objective and non-commercial.
Sponsored Content is paid for by an advertiser. Sponsored content is written and edited by members of our sponsor community. This content creates an opportunity for a sponsor to provide insight and commentary from their point-of-view directly to the Threatpost audience. The Threatpost editorial team does not participate in the writing or editing of Sponsored Content.
