Dennis Fisher

About

Dennis Fisher is a journalist with more than 13 years of experience covering information security.

Mozilla Releases Open Source Masche Forensics Tool

Mozilla has released an open source memory forensics tool that some college students designed and built during the company’s recent Winter of Security event. The new tool, known as Masche, is designed specifically for investigating server memory and has the advantage of being able to scan running processes without causing any problems with the machine. […]

BlackBerry Warns Many Products Vulnerable to FREAK Attack

BlackBerry is warning customers that a large portion of the company’s product portfolio is vulnerable to the FREAK SSL attack. Many versions of the BlackBerry OS and BlackBerry Enterprise Server are vulnerable to FREAK, as are a number of versions of BlackBerry Messenger. The advisory from BlackBerry says that there are no workarounds for the […]

Obama Administration Seeks More Legal Power to Disrupt Botnets

The federal government is seeking more legal power to step in and shut down botnets through an amendment to the existing criminal law, which would allow the Department of Justice to obtain injunctions to disrupt these malicious networks. The Obama administration has proposed an amendment to existing United Stated federal law that would give it […]


UPDATE–A security researcher has identified a pair of security issues in Facebook, one of which can be used to to upload an arbitrary file to the site, and the other of which can allow an attacker to gain control of a victim’s machine under some limited circumstances with user interaction. The more serious of the vulnerabilities, which […]

DDoS attacks have been a persistent problem for the the better part of 20 years, and as ISPs and enterprises have adjusted their defenses, attackers have adapted their tactics. One of the more effective tools in the attackers’ arsenal now is the use of botnets to generate massive numbers of DNS queries for a target […]

Apple has patched the FREAK SSL vulnerability, along with a nasty bug that could’ve allowed a remote attacker to restart a user’s iPhone via SMS, with the release of iOS 8.2. The new version of Apple’s mobile operating system contains a number of vulnerability fixes, with the FREAK patch being the most prominent among them. […]

Open Whisper Systems is phasing out support for encrypted SMS and MMS messages in its TextSecure messaging product. The move does not spell the end for encrypted messaging for users of the Android app, as the company plans to switch to its own transport protocol to address some of the security and performance issues inherent […]

The Mandarin Oriental luxury hotel chain is investigating a data breach that affects credit cards used in an “isolated number” of its hotels in the United States and Europe. Company officials said that the attack involved “undetectable” malware on some of its systems and emphasized that only credit card data, and no other personal information, […]