About
Dennis Fisher is a journalist with more than 13 years of experience covering information security.
From Information Week (George Hulme)
Today the Center for Internet Security released a set of benchmarks designed to help consumers and businesses alike communicate using their favorite toy. Whoops, I meant smartphone. The guidance is worth a look.
There is a series of vulnerabilities in the widely used BlackBerry Enterprise Server software that could allow an attacker to compromise BlackBerry devices by sending a malicious PDF file. Research in Motion, the software’s maker, has issued a patch that fixes the problem in BES, as well as in BlackBerry Professional Software.
From The Washington Post (Ellen Nakashima)
The Obama administration is set to announce the creation of a new high-level position to run the cybersecurity program for the country. The announcement is expected on Friday, along with the release of the report on the administration’s 60-day review of the country’s cybersecurity posture.
The latest large-scale malware outbreak to hit the Web, known variously as Gumblar and Geno and Martuz, is a multi-stage attack that not only infects compromised machines with a number of separate pieces of malware but also has the ability to steal credentials and block the victim from taking actions to clean his PC.
Dennis Fisher talks with Brad Arkin, director of product security and privacy at Adobe, about the company’s new quarterly patch release program, its Secure Product Lifecycle and how the JBIG2 flaw spurred major changes at Adobe.
Adobe has become the third major software vendor to begin shipping its security updates on a regular schedule. Following the lead of Microsoft and Oracle, who have been releasing patches on a set schedule for many years, Adobe now will ship its patches once per quarter. It’s a move that’s overdue for Adobe and one that other vendors (read: Apple) would do well to follow.
There is an easily exploitable vulnerability in the Java implementation in Apple’s Mac OS X which could allow an attacker to run arbitrary code on a remote machine. The flaw, which is similar to a vulnerability that has been public for five months and affect other vendors’ products, affects even the most recent version of OS X, which was released last week.
Dennis Fisher talks with Jeremiah Grossman, CTO and founder of WhiteHat Security, about the company’s new Website Vulnerability Statistics report, why SQL injection is still such a problem and when Web application security may improve.
Microsoft has confirmed the reported vulnerability in the WebDAV implementation in IIS 5.0, 5.1 and 6.0, saying that the flaw could be used to bypass the authentication mechanism on the Web server. However, the company said that there are a number of mitigating factors involved and that company security officials have not seen any attacks against the weakness so far.
From Federal Computer Week (Ben Bain)
Attackers have penetrated a network that the Department of Homeland Security uses to share sensitive information with state and local authorities, gaining access to important, but unclassified, data. The attack began in March and occurred again a few weeks later, according to a report in Federal Computer Week.
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