Vulnerabilities


Facebook Patches OAuth Authentication Vulnerability

Social media supersite Facebook has fixed a vulnerability that could have allowed a hacker to access a user’s account simply by getting them to click through to a specially crafted website. The flaw essentially mimicked the functionality of an authentic Facebook application without actually installing an application to their profile.

Two More Java Zero Days Found by Polish Research Team

The seemingly endless list of critical zero day bugs found in Java grew longer today with news that one of the flaws fixed in Oracle’s recent patches for the product is under attack and when that bug is paired with another, separate vulnerability, the sandbox in the latest build of Java can be bypassed.

Anup Ghosh on Cyberespionage, Attribution and APTs

Dennis Fisher talks with Anup Ghosh of Invincea about the recent wave of companies admitting to being hacked by APT groups, the difference between cyberespionage and cyberwar, what the government can do to encourage more intelligence sharing and whether compromised companies are spending enough time on attribution.


Google has fixed nine high-severity vulnerabilities in its Chrome browser, as well as a dozen other flaws with the release of Chrome 25. This release is one of the few for which the company did not pay out much in the way of bug bounties, only giving out $3,500.In Chrome 25 Google also disabled the MathML implementation in the browser, fixing what the company said is a serious security problem.

Mozilla has released Firefox 19, the latest version of its flagship browser, which includes not only fixes for a number of serious security vulnerabilities but also a built-in PDF viewer. The native PDF viewer in Firefox could help protect against some of the ongoing attacks that use vulnerabilities in Adobe Reader and other PDF readers as infection vectors.

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.

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.

UPDATE – With enough work, users can bypass the lockscreen on Apple’s ubiquitous iPhone by exploiting a flaw on its most recent operating system iOS 6.1. By simply making an emergency call and holding down the power button on an iPhone twice, users can gain access to the device’s phone feature, view and edit contacts, check voicemail and look through photos, according to reports today.