About
Dennis Fisher is a journalist with more than 13 years of experience covering information security.
A broad group of civil-rights, technology and political groups from across the spectrum has developed a new initiative to advocate for the repeal of Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, the part that provides the authority for the bulk collection of phone metadata and other information. The new group is calling itself Fight215.org and […]
Less than a week after introducing the new opportunistic encryption feature in Firefox, Mozilla has had to disable it because of a security vulnerability in the browser’s implementation of the HTTP Alternative Services specification. The bug puts a kink in the new feature, which was designed to allow clients to connect securely to a server […]
Snapchat has released its first transparency report, covering a four-month period from November through February, and the data shows that the company didn’t receive any National Security Letters and got fewer than 400 total requests for data from the United States government. Snapchat, a California company that runs a popular chat and media-sharing service, said in the report […]
Dennis Fisher and Mike Mimoso talk about Google’s decision to drop Chinese CA CNNIC from Chrome’s trust store, the scope of the malvertising threat and Verizon’s super cookie use.
UPDATE–Google has taken the unusual step of completely removing trust from Chrome for the Chinese certificate authority CNNIC in the wake of an incident in which certificates issued by the CA were misused. Mozilla followed suit on Thursday, also removing CNNIC from its trust store. Google officials announced the severe decision on Wednesday, saying that […]
Verizon Wireless has made a change that now allows customers to opt out of the ad-targeting program that relies on the so-called supercookie identifier that was inserted into Web requests users send. The use of the identifier, known as a UIDH, drew the ire of privacy advocates and users when it was exposed last year. […]
Mozilla has released Firefox 37, and along with the promised addition of the OneCRL certificate revocation list, the company has included a feature that enables opportunistic encryption on connections for servers that don’t support HTTPS. The new feature gives users a new defense against some forms of monitoring and doesn’t require any setup from users. When […]
Google is preparing to release new research on the prevalence of ad injectors, the often-unwanted browser extensions that inject ads onto Web pages, and the numbers will show just how widespread and problematic the software is. Ad injectors belong to that great, amorphous pile of applications that aren’t necessarily classed as malware but exhibit behavior that is […]
The ongoing DDoS attack on GitHub, which has made the social coding site intermittently unresponsive since March 25, is essentially a side effect of an older operation from the Chinese government against a site run by the anti-censorship project GreatFire.org. Officials at GreatFire said that the attack on their infrastructure began on March 17 and involved […]
eBay has fixed a pair of security vulnerabilities in its site that could enable attackers to upload executable files disguised as benign file types, construct full path URLs and then point victims to them through drive-by download attacks. The first bug resulted from the failure of an eBay page to check the headers of image files uploaded by […]
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