About
Dennis Fisher is a journalist with more than 13 years of experience covering information security.
The recent admission by a top Department of Defense official that a classified network was compromised in 2008 through an infected USB drive has brought the spotlight back onto the myriad threats that these portable devices pose to corporate networks.
There has never been more focus on security than there is right now, whether it’s from software vendors looking to eliminate flaws in their products, from attackers looking to exploit those flaws or from customers who are sick of having their PCs compromised. And as the focus has intensified in recent months, researchers say that, for a variety of reasons, it has become increasingly difficult to find exploitable client-side bugs–particularly memory-corruption flaws–leading them to dig deeper and find more exotic bugs.
Microsoft has released some updated guidance on the recent DLL-hijacking bug, including a new FixIt tool that enables the workaround for the vulnerability that Microsoft shipped late last month.
It looks like the group behind the Gumblar mass Web-site infections is beginning to get serious about making some money from all of the servers that the attacks have compromised in the last 18 months. The group has begun using some of its compromised servers in spam operations that are pushing the usual array of male ego-boosters: Viagra and fake watches.
In this video from the OWASP AppSec Research conference, Tom Brennan of WhiteHat Security discusses the current trends in vulnerabilities in Web applications and what’s driving them.
A Spanish security researcher has discovered a new vulnerability in Apple’s QuickTime software that can be used to bypass both ASLR and DEP on current versions of Windows and give an attacker control of a remote PC. The flaw apparently results from a parameter from an older version of QuickTime that was left in the code by mistake.
A few days after the majority of the command-and-control servers belonging to one of the variants of the Pushdo botnet were taken offline, some researchers say that there are indications that portions of the botnet are back to their old tricks, downloading new spam templates for a resumption of spam operations.
In an effort to help mitigate man-in-the-middle attacks that make normal HTTP connections look like secured HTTPS sessions, Mozilla is adding support in Firefox 4 for a new technology called HTTP Strict Transport Security that enables site operators to tell browsers to always request an HTTPS session on future visits.
Researchers have made a huge dent in a major variant of the Pushdo botnet, virtually crippling the network by working with hosting providers to take down about two thirds of the command-and-control servers involved in the botnet.
In the wake of all of the stories about the Windows DLL hijacking bug, it appears that certain Linux distributions may be vulnerable to a similar problem related to the way that Linux handles a specific variable in some cases. The bug apparently was introduced via a Debian patch last year.
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.
