Dennis Fisher

On the same day that it plans to release a patch for a critical flaw in Shockwave, Adobe confirmed on Thursday morning that there is a newly discovered bug in Flash that is being actively exploited already in attacks against Reader. The vulnerability affects Flash on all of the relevant platforms, including Android, as well as Reader on Windows and Mac, and won’t be patched for nearly two weeks.

Samy Kamkar has been making quite a bit of noise lately, beginning with his release of the Evercookie earlier this month and continuing with his talk at the SecTor conference this week on novel methods for stealing users’ cookies without any browser bugs. In this interview, he discusses both of those methods, as well as a new technique he developed that can use Google data and simple attacks to find a user’s physical location within a few feet.

Mozilla is working on a patch for the recently disclosed critical bug in Firefox that has been exploited on at least one prominent Web site this week.

TORONTO–A Google malware researcher gave a rare peek inside the company’s massive anti-malware and anti-phishing efforts at the SecTor conference here, and the data that the company has gathered shows that the attackers who make it their business to infect sites and exploit users are adapting their tactics very quickly and creatively to combat the efforts of Google and others.

TORONTO–If the spate of vulnerabilities and sophisticated attacks against browsers in the last couple of years has done nothing else, it’s certainly shown just how vulnerable users are as they go about their daily business on the Web. In a talk at the SecTor conference, a researcher showed several methods for combining a variety of new and existing attacks that can not just compromise users’ Web accounts but also allow attackers to use that information to extend their attacks in a number of directions.

The cryptographic underpinnings of the Internet, as presently constituted, are messy, chaotic and rather randomly constructed. And that infrastructure is not only ripe for a variety of attacks, but is not easily fixable, a group of experts said Friday.

With bank fraud and attacks against financial institutions and online banking applications having turned into an epidemic, researchers, banks and other concerned parties have been looking for new ways to protect the integrity of financial transactions. A researcher at the University of Cambridge working on the problem has developed a new device that can act as a trusted intermediary to ensure the validity of electronic transactions.