On a day when Java zero day exploits were fingered in attacks against Apple, Facebook and Twitter, Oracle released the remainder of its quarterly security patch updates for the Java platform.Five vulnerabilities were patched in Java 7 Update 15 today, all of them remotely exploitable, and three of them rated of the highest criticality by Oracle.
Apple is the latest major American company to enter the security confessional and disclose it has been breached. The company told Reuters today it was attacked by the same crew that hit Facebook, which disclosed its breach last Friday, and that like the social media giant, no data had been stolen.
China has been blamed for cyberattacks on every major industrial base in the United States—and even in some corners for the Super Bowl blackout. But most of it has been rampant speculation coupled with the lacing together of a number of loose ends. Examples of the kind of direct attribution to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) presented in a report today by security company Mandiant have been rare.
Adobe released an advisory yesterday suggesting a manual mitigation for zero-day vulnerabilities in its Reader and Acrobat products that are being actively exploited in the wild. The exploit is the first sandbox escape in Adobe Reader X and above.
A ransomware ring was taken down Wednesday in the United Arab Emirates and Spain by Europol and Spanish law enforcement, smashing an operation that netted more than €1 million annually.
The Industrial Control System CERT released an advisory this week warning of a vulnerability in a popular sensor monitoring system used in a number of critical industries, including energy, water and manufacturing.
UPDATE-Attackers are using malicious PDFs posing as an application for an international travel visa to exploit a zero-day vulnerability in Adobe Reader and Acrobat, a researcher at FireEye told Threatpost today. The exploit is the first to escape the sandbox included in Reader X and above.
What’s better than one Flash Player update a week? Why two, of course.Adobe released its regularly scheduled security updates today, including another set of fixes for its ubiquitous Flash Player, less than a week after an emergency patch took care of two zero-day vulnerabilities being exploited in the wild.
Internet Explorer continues to dominate Microsoft’s 2013 security updates. Among the 12 bulletins and 57 vulnerabilities patched in today’s release was a cumulative update for the maligned browser and another fix for a bug being exploited in the wild.Last month, an out-of-band fix for IE 6-8 patched zero-day flaws being exploited in a series of watering hole attacks against government, telecommunications, manufacturing and human rights sites.
This week figures to be a high-profile time for cybersecurity on Capitol Hill. Reports say President Barack Obama will issue a long-awaited executive order shortly after tonight’s State of the Union address, while another stab at getting the controversial CISPA cybersecurity bill signed into law could make its way to Congress tomorrow as well. The president is expected to discuss the executive order during tonight’s address.
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