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.
Adobe today released a patch for two vulnerabilities being exploited in the wild that enabled attackers to pull off the first confirmed sandbox escape against Adobe Reader.
UPDATE – The missing link connecting the attacks against Apple, Facebook and possibly Twitter is a popular iOS mobile developers’ forum called iPhoneDevSDK which was discovered hosting malware in an apparent watering hole attack that has likely snared victims at hundreds of organizations beyond the big three.
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.
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.
There are a set of easily exploited vulnerabilities in the appliances used in the emergency alert system (EAS) that could be used by attackers to log in to these boxes remotely and send fake emergency alerts like the one that interrupted a TV broadcast in Montana on Monday. The vulnerabilities include authentication bypasses and other bugs that a researcher says can be used to compromise the ENDEC machines that are responsible for sending out alerts over the EAS on TV and radio.
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