About
Dennis Fisher is a journalist with more than 13 years of experience covering information security.
ARLINGTON, VA–Pulling valuable data out of corporate networks is the end goal of many, if not most, attacks these days and the tactics that attackers use to get into their targets are fairly well understood and publicized. But it’s not often that you get a look at the way that the data is actually removed from the victims’ networks.
ARLINGTON, VA–A number of researchers showed off interesting new attack techniques at the Black Hat DC conference this week, including one that enables an attacker to execute malicious code on handsets over the air.
ARLINGTON, VA–There is a growing sentiment among security researchers that the programmers behind the Stuxnet attack may not have been the super-elite cadre of developers that they’ve been mythologized to be in the media. In fact, some experts say that Stuxnet could well have been far more effective and difficult to detect had the attackers not made a few elementary mistakes.
ARLINGTON, VA–In order to address the fundamental questions surrounding the concept of cyberwar and what it might mean for both the government and the enterprise, the United States should develop a skunk works-type think tank comprising highly skilled private-sector security experts as well as operational and policy experts from the government, a former deputy Secretary of Defense said.
Phishers and scammers have developed a new tactic for separating victims from their money that involves getting them to pay for software that’s normally free, such as Mozilla Firefox or Adobe Flash.
George Hotz, one of the hackers sued this week by Sony in connection with the jailbreaking of the PlayStation 3, has hired a pair of attorneys who say they plan to “vigorously defend the baseless accusations asserted by Sony.”
Google has released version 8.0.552.237 of its Chrome browser, which includes fixes for 16 security vulnerabilities. The company also paid out more than $14,000 in bug bounties for the flaws fixed in this release, including the first maximum reward of $3133.7.
Research in Motion, the maker of the BlackBerry devices and software, has released a patch for a flaw in its BlackBerry Enterprise Server software that could enable an attacker to execute arbitrary code on an affected server.
Sony has filed a lawsuit against a group of hackers who were able to bypass the DRM protections in the company’s PlayStation 3, compromised the root key and later published tools allowing others to follow in their footsteps and play pirated software on the console.
The amount of spam hitting users’ inboxes fell off a cliff in late December, with many security experts attributing the decline to the sudden disappearance of the Rustock botnet and other networks from the spam business. But the level of spam has begun to gain back some of the ground it lost today as other spammers have taken up the slack.
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