Vulnerabilities

Google has released Chrome 22, a major new version of its browser that includes a huge number of security fixes, many of them high-priority vulnerabilities. The company also handed out nearly $30,000 in rewards to security researchers, more than half of it to Sergey Glazunov, who discovered two especially severe bugs that the Chrome security team deemed worthy of special rewards.

A new APT-style espionage campaign launched this summer targeting organizations tied to financial services, government agencies and the defense industry used a technique dubbed water holing to entice victims and silently redirect them to sites hosting zero-day exploits.

Another malicious website has been discovered hosting an exploit for the zero-day vulnerability Internet Explorer patched by Microsoft last week. This site, like the other exploits discovered, targets the defense and space industries, and is dropping an unknown payload, according to Barracuda Labs.

As expected, Microsoft today released a cumulative update for Internet Explorer addressing the zero-day vulnerability in the browser being actively exploited in the wild. Security Update MS 12-063 patches not only the critical remote-execution zero-day, but four other vulnerabilities privately disclosed to Microsoft that are not being exploited.

Dennis Fisher talks with Mike Mimoso, the new editor of Threatpost, about his decade covering security, how the industry and threat landscape have changed and how security researchers are like Bill Parcells.

With tens of thousands camped in line today waiting for the Apple iPhone 5, hackers have already had their hands on the core iOS 6 operating system for some time. Two Dutch hackers managed to successfully beat Apple’s sturdy protections in place, and this week at the EUSecWest conference in Amsterdam presented the first successful hack of a patched iPhone 4S with an exploit that will also work against the new device.

There is a widening gulf between application developers and security decision makers inside the enterprise, and it’s starting to cost companies serious money.