About
Dennis Fisher is a journalist with more than 13 years of experience covering information security.
Dennis Fisher talks with Paul Judge and David Maynor of Barracuda about new research the pair will be presenting at BSides Las Vegas and Defcon this week on the start of a reputation system for Twitter accounts, how attackers use search engines to spread malware and what kinds of sites are most likely to be serving you SEO-related malware.
At the Defcon conference later this week, Chris Paget, a well-known security researcher who focuses on wireless and RFID issues, will give a demonstration of a technique that enables him to intercept calls made on GSM wireless handsets without any interaction with the user’s handset.
This week brought us the rare double rainbow of a re-emergence of the disclosure discussion and major security news from Microsoft, all wrapped into one. It truly was a gift from Mother Nature. But Microsoft’s decision to change its disclosure stance–and refusal to pay bug bounties–wasn’t the only big news. The Stuxnet saga continued to widen and weirden, a major privacy leak cropped up in Safari and the roots of the mass SQL injection attacks were exposed. What does it all mean? Read on for the full week in review.
Dennis Fisher talks with independent security researcher Dino Dai Zovi about his upcoming Black Hat talk on return-oriented exploitation, the value of exploit mitigations such as DEP and ASLR, the new crop of vendor bug bounties and why we don’t have any good data on zero-day attacks.
Researchers have found two distinct new malware families that are exploiting the newly discovered Windows shell LNK vulnerability, leading to concerns that the development of a worm could be in the offing.
Microsoft has no plans to follow in the footsteps of Mozilla and Google and pay researchers cash rewards for the bugs that they find in Microsoft’s products.
Microsoft is changing the way in which it handles vulnerability disclosures, now moving to a model it calls coordinated vulnerability disclosure, in which the researcher and the vendor work together to verify a vulnerability and allow ample time for a patch. However, the new philosophy also recognizes that if there are attacks already happening, it may be necessary to release details of the flaw even before a patch is ready.
As more information continues to come out about the Stuxnet worm and the vulnerabilities that it exploits, it’s becoming increasingly clear that this kind of attack may be a preview of the attacks that are likely to become commonplace in the months and years ahead.
In the first few months of 2009, security researchers began seeing signs of a new piece of malware that was somewhat baffling to them. It didn’t act like other Trojans or rootkits and try to bury itself on an infected machine and try to do nasty stuff like deleting registry keys or copying the contents of the hard drive. Instead, this malware, which came to be called Gumblar, was about the business of stealing Web site credentials and compromising as many legitimate sites as possible, creating something entirely new: a botnet of infected Web servers that has highlighted the horrific state of Web application security and become the new model for Web-based malware.
Microsoft has released a FixIt tool for the unpatched LNK Windows shell vulnerability and also has updated its guidance on how to deal with the flaw. The company also said it is continuing to work on developing a patch for the vulnerability.
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