About
Dennis Fisher is a journalist with more than 13 years of experience covering information security.
Google is planning a major changes in the way that Chrome handles many plug-ins. Beginning early next year, Chrome will no longer support the old Netscape Plug-In API and will block plug-ins that use it. Eventually, that will mean that some plug-ins such as Google Earth, Microsoft Silverlight and others eventually will be blocked by […]
Nearly two years after a security researcher published details of the hard-coded credentials that ship with a slew of industrial control system products made by Schneider Electric, the company has released updated firmware that fix the problems. The vulnerabilities, which were discovered by researcher Ruben Santamarta and published in December 2011, affect dozens of products […]
Hackers from the venerable Chaos Computer Club in Germany have found a method for bypassing the new iPhone 5S Touch ID fingerprint security mechanism. The method, which is the first known technique for circumventing the iPhone’s newest security feature, involves taking a picture of a user’s fingerprint and then creating a latex copy of it to unlock the phone.
It’s no fun being a cynic, thinking that everything is bad and getting worse. It’s easy–especially in the security community–but it’s not fun. But, in light of the latest in the interminable string of revelations about the NSA’s efforts to eat away at the foundation of the security industry, the only alternative available is the equivalent of believing in unicorn-riding leprechauns.
With all of the disturbing revelations that have come to light in the last few weeks regarding the NSA’s collection methods and its efforts to weaken cryptographic protocols and security products, experts say that perhaps the most worrisome result of all of this is that no one knows who or what they can trust anymore.
A researcher has discovered a privacy bug in the Facebook Android app that enables an attacker to view and download any images that a user sends to Facebook. The problem derives from the fact that the app, along with the official Facebook Messenger app for Android, don’t send those images over HTTPS, even though the […]
A newly declassified opinion from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court from this summer shows the court’s interpretation of the controversial Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act that’s used to justify the National Security Agency’s bulk telephone metadata collections, and reveals that none of the companies that have been served with such orders has ever challenged one.
Microsoft is looking into reports of targeted attacks against a new vulnerability that exists in all supported versions of Internet Explorer. The attacks are targeting IE 8 and 9 and there’s no patch for the vulnerability right now, though Microsoft has developed a FixIt tool for it.
The decision by the Ninth Circuit Court last week to allow the class-action suit against Google over its collection of WiFi data to continue was welcomed as good news by privacy advocates, but it may have considerable consequences for security researchers who collect such data during legitimate research projects.
A newly public contract shows that the NSA last year bought a subscription to the zero-day service sold by French security firm VUPEN.
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