About
Dennis Fisher is a journalist with more than 13 years of experience covering information security.
Laptops belonging to several Facebook employees were compromised recently and infected with malware that the company said was installed through the use of a Java zero-day exploit that bypassed the software’s sandbox. Facebook claims that no user data was affected by the attack and says that it has been working with law enforcement to investigate the attack, which also affected other unnamed companies.
Passwords are the keys to our online identities, and as a result, they’re also near the top of the target list for attackers. There have been countless breaches in the last few years in which unencrypted passwords have been stolen from a database and leaked online, and security experts often shake their heads at the lack of use of encryption or even hashing for passwords. Now, a group of cryptographers is sponsoring a competition to come up with a new password hash algorithm to help improve the state of the art.
A group of large certificate authorities, including some that have been the victims of recent compromises of their CA systems, have formed an alliance designed to develop strategies for strengthening the CA infrastructure through education and industry initiatives. Comodo, DigiCert, Entrust, Symantec and Go Daddy and other companies announced the alliance on Thursday.
There are a set of easily exploited vulnerabilities in the appliances used in the emergency alert system (EAS) that could be used by attackers to log in to these boxes remotely and send fake emergency alerts like the one that interrupted a TV broadcast in Montana on Monday. The vulnerabilities include authentication bypasses and other bugs that a researcher says can be used to compromise the ENDEC machines that are responsible for sending out alerts over the EAS on TV and radio.
The executive order that President Barack Obama signed yesterday in advance of his State of the Union Address contains a lot of provisions for information sharing on attacks and threats on critical infrastructure, and also calls for the development of a framework to reduce cybersecurity risks in federal agencies and critical infrastructure. What the order does not include are any mandates, required changes or a plan for significant action.
Dennis Fisher talks with Ryan Naraine, the founding editor of Threatpost, about the Security Analyst Summit in San Juan, the reason why so many talks at security conferences sound the same and why surprise talks are so valuable.
Researchers are tracking a new version of the Kelihos botnet, one that comes complete with better resistance to sinkholing techniques and a feature that enables it to remain dormant on infected machines for long periods to help avoid detection. The botnet also is using an advanced fast-flux capability to hide the domains it uses for command-and-control and malware distribution.
Dennis Fisher talks with cryptographer and PGP inventor Phil Zimmermann about the specter of mobile eavesdropping, his new venture Silent Circle and how the threat landscape has changed in recent years.
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico–Phil Zimmermann has seen more changes in the the threat landscape in his career than he may care to remember. The inventor of the PGP encryption software and one of the key movers in the crypto wars of the early 1990s, Zimmermann is back in the game now with a new mobile crypto system that’s designed to help take the prospect of government eavesdropping and criminal attacks on mobile communications off the table.
Chris Soghoian of the ACLU discusses the looming crisis of mobile security caused by the failure of mobile carriers to push Android updates to users at the Kaspersky Lab Security Analyst Summit Monday.
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