A class action lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in California against Hewlett-Packard could have wide ranging implications for software makers, should the court agree with the plaintiff’s claim that the company violated the state’s consumer protection laws by failing to disclose a serious vulnerability in the software that runs some of its printers.
Another certificate authority in The Netherlands has been hacked, though this time the attack does not appear to have affected the certificate-issuing operations of Gemnet, a subsidiary of KPN. The company, which does business with the Dutch government among other organizations, said it has taken its Web site offline while it investigates the attack.
The newly discovered vulnerability in Adobe Reader and Acrobat that the company is planning to patch next week is being used to install a known Trojan that has been used in attacks against other Adobe vulnerabilities in the past.
Adobe said a previously undisclosed vulnerability in its Reader and Acrobat applications was passed along by defense contractor Lockheed Martin, raising the specter of a targeted attack on the important military supplier.
The researchers who last week said they had succeeded in jailbreaking the RIM PlayBook tablet have now posted a detailed walkthrough of how users can accomplish the same task on their own. The technique requires the use of a custom tool, but otherwise is fairly straightforward.
The Black Hole exploit kit and the Carberp Trojan have a lovely, symbiotic relationship and they’ve recently decided to take that relationship to the next level. In the last month, there has a been a major spike in the volume of Carberp infections related to attacks from sites hosting Black Hole, mostly exploiting Java vulnerabilities.
The half life of the CarrierIQ “rootkit” scandal proved to be a little more than a week. That’s about how long it took for Trevor Eckhart, a young, Connecticut-based Android developer to begin raising questions about some stealth software he discovered running on Android phones by HTC and speculation in the media and online to run rampant about what kinds of spying said software might be engaged in. It was time enough for CarrierIQ to issue a lawyer letter threatening to sue the Eckhart and the Electronic Frontier Foundation to come to his defense and even for Congress to get involved – each of which ensured even more news cycles would be taken up with the mini-controversy. And it was time, at long last, for more information to become available about what was really going on with CarrierIQs software, and for cooler heads to prevail on both sides. The question, now, is why incidents like this provoke our anger so – and what we can do to stop them from happening again.
Security researchers at BitDefender are warning users about a new Yahoo! Messenger vulnerability that allows an attacker to change victims’ status updates.
Many of the apps that come pre-installed on a variety of Android devices from manufacturers such as HTC, Samsung, Google and others have access to more services and capabilities on the devices than they should or that users are aware they have, according to new research. These “capability leaks” can sometimes be inherited from other apps, but the researchers say that they constitute significant security weaknesses on the Android devices.
Join Dennis Fisher, Threatpost editor-in-chief, and his guests, Josh Corman, Director Security Intelligence Akamai, and Gene Kim, Founder / Former CTO Tripwire, and Author, “Visible Ops,” as they discuss the changing threat landscape and how technology plays a pivotal role in the security challenges facing businesses today.
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