Microsoft Releases Attack Surface Analyzer Tool

Microsoft has released a public version of its internal Attack Surface Analyzer tool, which helps organizations identify changes to a system’s attack surface as new applications are added. The tool has been in beta for a few months, but this is the first official release.

U.S. Still Tops at Hosting Phishing Sites

There are a lot of things that the United States is no longer so good at doing: eating vegetables or winning major marathons, for example. But one thing that the U.S. still does really well is provide comfortable hosting platforms for phishing sites. In fact, about 60 percent of all phishing sites are hosted in the U.S., and no other country had more than seven percent, according to a new report.

New Study Shows Surge in Fake Twitter Users

Dealers–Twitter scammers who create fake profiles on the social media site and sell their sets of followers–are adapting their workflow just enough to stay under the social media site’s radar, according to security firm Barracuda Labs, who recently wrapped up a 75 day study analyzing the buying and selling of Twitter followers.


SQL injection attacks have been going on for years, and the vulnerabilities and exploitation techniques are well-understood and widely discussed. However, they’re still quite prevalent and are used in a variety of scenarios. One recent example is the attack on a Yahoo site that resulted in a breach of 450,000 usernames and passwords. In this video, Ryan O’Boyle of Veracode discusses the nature of SQL injection attacks and how to defend against them.

It’s been nearly two months since Oracle patched the CVE-2012-1723 Java vulnerability, a serious remote pre-authentication flaw that’s present in the Java Runtime Environment. It’s taken a little time, but the attacker community has decided that this bug deserves some serious attention, and as a result, attacks trying to exploit it have ramped up significantly in recent weeks.

For the last few weeks there have been a series of quite authentic-looking phishing emails making the rounds, purporting to come from AT&T and informing the recipient that their bill is ready to view. The emails look nearly identical to a real bill and researchers say that users who fall for the ruse are going to be rewarded with a redirection to a site hosting the Blackhole exploit kit.

On average, there were almost five fraudulent phone calls every minute earlier this year according to a report released today from security firm Pindrop Security. The Atlanta-based company found phone fraud was up 29 percent January to June this year from the last half of 2011 after it analyzed 1.3 million different instances as part of its 2012 State of Phone Fraud Report.