Michael Mimoso


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.

Week one of the Mega cloud storage service bug bounty is in the books and at least three payouts have been made. Controversial entrepreneur and MegaUpload founder Kim Dotcom made the challenge last week offering a €10,000 reward to anyone who could break the encryption protecting the service.

Tired of all those malware and vulnerability reports that count how many of each have been reported to security companies? Well, Microsoft has taken a different tack in its latest Security Intelligence Report (SIR) by globally comparing regions’ relative security against socio-economic factors including the maturity of a national or regional cybersecurity policy.The results aren’t so surprising; areas such as Europe with well-defined, long-standing and enforceable policies rate much better than less developed nations where crime per capita is higher, there’s less broadband penetration and a higher rate of piracy.