Dennis Fisher

Alma Whitten, the director of privacy at Google, is stepping down from that role and leaves behind her a complicated legacy in regards to user privacy. Whitten has been the company’s top product and engineering privacy official since 2010 and was at the helm as the company navigated a number of serious privacy scandals and controversies.

There is a critical vulnerability in several current versions of the BIND nameserver software that could allow an attacker to knock vulnerable DNS servers offline or compromise other applications running on those machines. The bug is present in several versions of the ubiquitous BIND software and the maintainers of the application have released a patch for it that they recommend users install as soon as possible.

China has become the go-to bogeyman behind every cyber attack or malware campaign, but if you’re looking for the most malicious hosting providers on the Web, you won’t find any of the top 10 in China. In fact, the United States and Russia have many more bad hosting providers in the top 20 than China does.

Google Chrome 26, the latest version of the company’s browser, is out and it contains a number of security patches, most notably a fix for a high-priority use-after-free vulnerability in the Web Audio component of the browser.

Android attacks have become all the rage in the last year or two, and targeted attacks against political activists in Tibet, Iran and other countries also have been bubbling up to the surface more and more often lately. Now those two trends have converged with the discovery of a targeted attack campaign that’s going after Tibetan and Uyghur activists with a spear-phishing message containing a malicious APK file. Researchers say the attack appears to be coming from Chinese sources.

With less than three full months gone in 2013, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft all have admitted publicly to serious security breaches, something that would have seemed like an elaborate practical joke just a couple of years ago. But the times and the climate have changed, and if you needed more evidence of these facts, it arrived last week in the form of the first Microsoft Transparency Report. 

Hardly a week goes by without some new vulnerability in WordPress or one of its components showing up on a mailing list or in a security advisory. This week’s first entrant is a newly disclosed flaw in a plugin that displays ad banners on WordPress sites, a bug that enables an attacker to inject malicious Javascript or HTML code on any vulnerable site.