About
Dennis Fisher is a journalist with more than 13 years of experience covering information security.
Evernote, the online service that enables users to store and sync all kinds of data across multiple devices, has become the latest major Web property to suffer a serious intrusion. The company said on Saturday that attackers had compromised some user information, including email addresses and hashed passwords.
With Dennis Fisher out of pocket at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, Ryan Naraine hijacks the Digital Underground podcast and gets on the phone with Kaspersky Lab research guru Costin Raiu to talk about the intricacies of the miniDuke malware campaign.
SAN FRANCISCO–The discipline of software security has been gaining traction in a lot of organizations both large and small in recent years, thanks in part to the success that vendors such as Microsoft, Adobe and others have had with it. However, for many companies, the time and money spent on software security initiatives could be put to better use simply fixing flaws after products ship or are deployed, an expert said during a constructed debate.
SAN FRANCISCO–In the current climate of continuous attacks and intrusions by APT crews, government-sponsored groups and others organizations, cryptography is becoming less and less important and defenders need to start thinking about new ways to protect data on systems that they assume are compromised, one of the fathers of public-key cryptography said Tuesday. Adi Shamir, who helped design the original RSA algorithm, said that security experts should be preparing for a “post-cryptography” world.
Dennis Fisher talks with Anup Ghosh of Invincea about the recent wave of companies admitting to being hacked by APT groups, the difference between cyberespionage and cyberwar, what the government can do to encourage more intelligence sharing and whether compromised companies are spending enough time on attribution.
Google has fixed nine high-severity vulnerabilities in its Chrome browser, as well as a dozen other flaws with the release of Chrome 25. This release is one of the few for which the company did not pay out much in the way of bug bounties, only giving out $3,500.In Chrome 25 Google also disabled the MathML implementation in the browser, fixing what the company said is a serious security problem.
In the wake of high-profile compromises of companies such as Facebook, the New York Times, Apple and others, officials at Zendesk, an online customer support provider, said that the company also had been compromised and the attackers had made off with the email addresses of customers of Twitter, Tumblr and Pinterest, all of which use Zendesk’s services.
People looking to download and read the Mandiant report on Chinese government attacks on U.S. infrastructure should look carefully at the name of the file before opening it. Researchers say that there are at least two different spear-phishing attacks going on right now that are using rigged copies of the China APT1 report as lures.
Mozilla has released Firefox 19, the latest version of its flagship browser, which includes not only fixes for a number of serious security vulnerabilities but also a built-in PDF viewer. The native PDF viewer in Firefox could help protect against some of the ongoing attacks that use vulnerabilities in Adobe Reader and other PDF readers as infection vectors.
Gmail accounts are high-priority targets for attackers of all stripes, particularly spam crews and state-sponsored attackers who use them to monitor the activities of activists and journalists. Hijacking those accounts can be quite useful for spammers and malware gangs as well, but Google said that it has put security measures in place that have greatly reduced the number of successful hijack attempts.
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