Dennis Fisher

About

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

Government Asks for Security Community’s Help on Technical Issues

LAS VEGAS–Washington is looking for a few good hackers. Politicians and policymakers in the United States generally are not thought of as being the most technically savvy lot. It’s a reputation that’s well-earned in some cases, with some politicians boasting about their inability to use email and affinity for flip phones. But the lack of understanding […]

‘Software Liability Is Inevitable’

LAS VEGAS–The push for some form of liability for vendors who sell faulty or insecure software is nearly as old as software itself. Software makers have pushed back hard against it for decades, but the day may soon come when software liability is a reality. Bugs, defects, and security vulnerabilities are problems inherent with any […]


A major information-sharing bill that’s in the Senate right now would allow private organizations to share threat data with any government agency, something that the Department of Homeland Security says could have severe privacy implications and cause confusion and inefficiencies inside the federal government. The bill, known as the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, would allow […]

After years of discussions, disagreements, and digressions, the Do Not Track header is supported by all of the major browsers. But because there’s no real requirement for sites or advertisers to respect it, DNT is not as effective as it could be. Now, the EFF, Disconnect, and several other organizations are publishing a new DNT standard […]

Online scammers constantly are looking for new ways to reach into the pockets of potential victims, and the FBI says it is seeing an increase in the number of companies being targeted by scammers threatening to launch DDoS attacks if they don’t pay a ransom. The scam is a variation on a theme, the familiar […]

The Xen Project has patched a serious vulnerability that could allow an attacker in a guest virtual machine to escape and gain the ability to run arbitrary code on the host machine. The vulnerability is in the QEMU open source machine emulator that ships as part of the Xen hypervisor. The problem is related to the […]

Cisco has patched a denial-of-service vulnerability in its ASR 1000 line of routers, a bug that’s caused by an issue with the way the routers handle some fragmented packets. The company said the DoS vulnerability affects all of the ASR 1000 Series Aggregation Services Routers that are running a vulnerable version of the IOS XE […]

Moonpig has warned customers that some of their email addresses, passwords, and account balances have been published after what it calls a “security issue”. The company, which sells custom greeting cards, said in a message to users that attackers were not able to get any credit card information, as Moonpig does not store that data. […]