About
Dennis Fisher is a journalist with more than 13 years of experience covering information security.
Software vendors often give intentionally vague and boring names to the updates they use to fix security vulnerabilities. The lamer the name, the less attention it may attract from attackers looking to reverse-engineer the patch. There was one patch in Microsoft’s August Patch Tuesday release earlier this month that fit that bill, MS13-059, Cumulative Security […]
It has been a rough few months for the National Security Agency, and specifically for its director, Gen. Keith Alexander. Now, there’s a petition, on the White House’s own Web site, to have Alexander removed from his position.
There are 25 fresh security patches in the newest version of Google Chrome, including fixes for a number of high-severity vulnerabilities. Chrome 29 also includes a number of performance enhancements.
An attacker, who may have gotten the information from the database of a third party, claims to have access to the OAuth login tokens and secrets for every Twitter user. He has posted more than 15,000 of the entries online and claims that he can now access the account of any user he wishes. Twitter officials, however, say no accounts have been compromised.
Old malware tricks never really die, they just get recycled and passed down to the next generation of attackers. The latest technique to get run through the wayback machine is the use of the right-to-left override character in Unicode, a tactic that enables malware authors to hide the real name of a malicious executable or, in a recent case, a registry key.
Microsoft has re-released one of the August security patches for Windows Server 2008 in order to fix a regression issue that would cause some servers to stop working. The MS13-066 patch was released again Monday after Microsoft discovered the problem last week.
The Internet is a big thing. Or, more accurately, a big collection of things. Figuring out exactly how many things, and what vulnerabilities those things contain has always been a challenge for researchers, but a new tool released by a group from the University of Michigan that is capable of scanning the entire IPv4 address space in less than an hour.
Dennis Fisher talks with Joe Grand of Grand Idea Studio about his current project, the JTAGulator, which helps hardware hackers find the OCD connections on devices. They also discuss Joe’s hardware-hacking background and the current resurgence of hardware research.
One day after the New York Times Web site was offline for several hours due to what experts speculated was an attack, the site of the Washington Post was hacked, apparently by the Syrian Electronic Army. Officials at the Post said that the attack followed closely on the heels of the SEA hacking the Twitter account of one of its employees.
Buried in the details of the Microsoft Patch Tuesday release for August is the explanation of an important change that the company made to Windows that defeats a group of exploit mitigation bypasses. The change is a small one, but it prevents dangerous attacks that previously worked on most supported version of Windows.
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