Dennis Fisher

About

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

U.S. falling far behind on cybersecurity

In the next few weeks President Barack Obama will be handed a report detailing the country’s cybersecurity defenses and laying out what’s needed to protect America’s technology resources from hostile nations and organized crime groups.

How to identify and clean Conficker infections

As the world prepares for the complete destruction of the Internet tomorrow when the Conficker worm makes a small change in its communication protocol, a voice of reason has emerged from the wilderness. The Honeynet Project on Monday released a paper with a detailed analysis of the worm as well as some weaknesses in its design that allow for identification of infected machines.


VoIP phones have taken off in both the enterprise and the consumer markets, thanks to their ease of deployment and low operating costs. But, as this video from Enablesecurity shows, there are a number of security risks that have yet to be addressed.

When Mark Dowd and Alex Sotirov demonstrated a technique for bypassing Vista’s memory protections at Black Hat last year, the security community was stunned. Microsoft officials said at the time they were working on ways to defeat the pair’s attack and now that protection has arrived, in the form of Internet Explorer 8.

By Paul F. Roberts, The 451 Group
The security of smartphones such as the iPhone, Windows Mobile devices and the T-Mobile G1 has come under a lot of scrutiny lately. Each device has its own unique security model, and in the case of the iPhone, Apple has kept its platform closed to third-party security vendors. But that’s not stopping some of them from making an end run around Apple and creating their own security applications for the hugley popular device.

It’s been the better part of a decade now since Microsoft got religion about the security of its products, following the release of Bill Gates’s famous Trustworthy Computing memo. In that time, the reliability, security and resiliency of the company’s products has improved greatly, as has Microsoft’s standing in the security community.