About
Dennis Fisher is a journalist with more than 13 years of experience covering information security.
While Congress is enjoying its annual summer recess, privacy advocates are worried that the White House’s recent endorsement of the controversial CISA bill–which has been criticized by DHS officials, among others–will push the information-sharing bill over the goal line. The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act is the latest incarnation of Congress’s decade-long effort to legislate some […]
Dennis Fisher and Mike Mimoso talk about the news from Black Hat, car hacking, the Mary Ann Davidson blog post, and the Android security mess.
The OwnStar attack that hacker Samy Kamkar revealed late last month can be used against not only GM vehicles, but cars manufactured by Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and Chrysler, as well. The attack allows Kamkar to intercept the traffic from nearby mobile phones that have specific apps open that control safety and security features on their vehicles. […]
The Android security team at Google is having a busy month. First the Stagefright vulnerabilities surfaced last month just before Black Hat and now researchers at MWR Labs have released information on an unpatched vulnerability that allows an attacker to bypass the Android sandbox. The vulnerability lies in the way that the Google Admin application […]
A new version of OpenSSH has been released, fixing four security vulnerabilities and a number of non-security related bugs. OpenSSH 7.0 includes patches for a use-after-free vulnerability and three other flaws, two of which only affect Portable OpenSSH. The maintainers of the software also gave users notice that the next version of the software would […]
Lenovo is under fire again for installing a covert utility on laptops and desktops that some users have compared to a rootkit. The issue stems from a utility called the Lenovo Service Engine, that is designed to collect some system information and send it to Lenovo at the time the machine connects to the Internet. But […]
Cisco is warning enterprise customers about a spike in attacks in which hackers use valid credentials on IOS devices to log in as administrators and then upload malicious ROMMON images to take control of the devices. The ROM Monitor is the program that initializes the hardware and software on IOS devices, and an attacker who […]
With Tuesday’s release of Firefox 40, Mozilla has begun the process of requiring all add-ons for the browser to be signed. The company announced the forthcoming change in February, and Firefox 40 is the first version to warn users about unsigned add-ons. The goal for the change in policy is to protect users from malicious extensions […]
The number of information requests Twitter is receiving from the United States government is increasing steadily, having risen roughly 50 percent in the first six months of this year compared to the last six months of 2014. In its latest transparency report, Twitter said that it received 2,436 information requests from the U.S. government from […]
UPDATE–Oracle, never the most researcher-friendly software vendor, has taken its antagonism to another level after publishing a blog post by CSO Mary Ann Davidson that rails against reverse engineering and saying that the company has no need for researchers to look at Oracle’s code for vulnerabilities because “it’s our job to do that, we are […]
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