The Air Force Life Cycle Management Center (AFLCMC) posted a broad agency announcement [PDF] recently, calling on contractors to submit concept papers detailing technological demonstrations of ‘cyberspace warfare operations’ (CWO) capabilities.
As attacks on the new Java zero-day vulnerability continue and researchers look for ways to mitigate the flaw, they are encouraging users to disable Java in their browsers. There is now a site that users can visit that will detect whether their browser is running a vulnerable version of Java.
More details about the new Java zero day vulnerability are emerging, and as the seriousness of the problem has become clear, researchers have recommended that users disable Java altogether for the time being if they don’t have a specific need for it.
There is a newly discovered zero day vulnerability in Java 7 that is being used in some targeted attacks right now. The vulnerability works against Internet Explorer and Firefox and researchers say that attackers are exploiting in the wild and installing a version of the Poison Ivy RAT on compromised systems.
There have been nearly 33,000 phishing attacks globally each month this year, totaling a loss of $687 million, according to new statistics released by security firm RSA earlier this week.
Adobe pushed out the latest build of its Flash Player (11.4) and AIR (3.4) runtime environment Tuesday, patching six critical vulnerabilities that if left unpatched, could have allowed an attacker to gain control of or crash any affected system.The fixes address flaws for Flash Player in Windows, Macintosh, Linux and several Android versions (2.x, 3.x, 4.x) and updates AIR for Windows, Macintosh and the AIR SDK.
Espionage has gone digital and we’re just now seeing the beginnings of what will prove to be a “cyber arms race,” according to Mikko Hypponen, Chief Research Officer for the F-Secure, the Finnish security firm. Hypponen laid out his thoughts and recapped the last seven months in threats in the latest edition of the company’s Threat Report (.PDF), released today.
There is no such thing as a trivial detail when it comes to the impending release of an Apple product and scammers are well aware of this. A recent attack is exploiting the public’s fascination with all things Apple and the ubiquitous interest in anything iPhone 5-related with an email phishing scam that includes a file that claims to contain pictures of the unreleased iPhone’s battery but actually contains a malicious Word document.
Google’s recent announcements that the company is doubling some of the rewards in its Chromium Vulnerability Reward Program and will also be committing up to $2 million for another round of the Pwnium contest in a couple of months brought a round of cheers from the security research community. The Google rewards programs have been quite successful in drawing submissions from researchers, as have similar programs from Mozilla, Facebook, Barracuda, PayPal and others, but the question around all of these programs is whether they actually succeed in making software, and by extension, the Web, safer.
Google has been handing out rewards to researchers who discover vulnerabilities in the company’s products and Web properties for several years now, both through its Chrome bug bounty program and its Pwnium contest at this year’s CanSecWest conference. Company officials say that the programs have been quite successful at finding and fixing bugs, so much so, in fact, that the number of new submissions have been dropping off lately. Instead of closing down the reward program, however, Google this week said it will pay even more for some bugs and also announced that is reprising the Pwnium contest at Hack in the Box in Malaysia this Fall, offering up to $2 million in rewards.
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