About
Dennis Fisher is a journalist with more than 13 years of experience covering information security.
PDFs containing exploits for the recent 0-day vulnerability in Acrobat Reader are now being actively sent out through spambots. The folks at the IBM ISS X-Force say they’re seeing infected PDFs being spammed out and that it looks like the traffic is mainly coming from Taiwan, though those may be spoofed addresses.
User names and passwords belonging to more than 8,000 Comcast Internet customers were left exposed on the Web for at least two months. A post by Brad Stone on the Bits blog [NYTimes.com] details the situation, which was exposed by a Comcast customer from Pennsylvania.
The SANS Internet Storm Center has a fascinating look [isc.sans.org] today at a recent incident in which a Web server was compromised through the use of a remote Web application flaw. The attack might have stopped there, but a series of cascading failures led to further problems and damage. It’s a classic boy-meets-server, boy-0wns-server tale.
Five of the brighter minds in the security industry spent two hours Thursday afternoon arguing, needling each other and generally disagreeing about everything under the sun and at the end of it all settled absolutely nothing on the topic of partial disclosure.
Sprint has sent letters to thousands of its customers informing them that a former employee compromised their personal account data over the course of two months in 2008 and 2009. Brian Krebs [Security Fix] says that the company mailed warnings to several thousand customers and that the breach could have been far worse had Sprint not recently upgraded its security controls.
Despite all the grief that Microsoft has taken over the years for the security problems with Windows, Internet Explorer and its other products, Apple’s Mac OS X has turned out to be a hacker’s dream. As Rob Westervelt reports [SearchSecurity.com], security researcher Dino Dai Zovi made quick work of OS X Wednesday at the SOURCE Boston conference.
The economy is still terrible and will likely continue to get worse in the near term, and the picture is just as ugly for enterprise security staffs. Peter Kuper, a longtime investment banker and software analyst at Morgan Stanley, said security shops can expect to see their budgets be flat at best this year and cut sharply next year for the first time in more than half a decade.
The two most highly publicized vulnerability disclosures last year also were the most highly criticized disclosures: Dan Kaminsky’s DNS bug and the SSL flaw discovered by a group of independent and academic researchers. The two events played out in similar fashions, with some details coming out in advance of the full disclosures, a partial disclosure, if you will. And that’s where the trouble started.
Jeff Moss, the founder of DEFCON and Black Hat, discusses the unfolding of the vulnerability economy. Nowadays, instead of exposing high profile zero-day vulnerabilities at conferences, many researchers opt for selling their discoveries on a growing market.
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