Vulnerabilities

A scheduled talk at the Black Hat Briefings security conference in Las Vegas later this month may have dealt a fatal blow to the once ballyhooed Windows Sidebar and Windows Gadgets. Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft, on Tuesday, issued a software “fix” that disables gadgets and the Windows sidebar on Vista and Windows 7 entirely.

Network security firm Cyberoam issued an over the air update for all of its Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) devices today after a decrypted version of the company’s universal private key was leaked online over the weekend.

Venture funded startup CrowdStrike has launched a new platform that will allow security researchers to work collaboratively to reverse engineer and analyze malicious code.

Microsoft has announced it will issue nine bulletins for its July Patch Tuesday release next week. Included in the update are three critical patches for security holes that, if left unaddressed, could result in remote code execution on vulnerable systems.

Followers and supporters of Tibetan Buddhist leader the Dalai Lama were the targets of an e-mail borne attack that used news of the spiritual leader’s birthday to trick recipients into installing a surreptitious monitoring program on their computers.

UPDATE: Residents in two Illinois communities are settling their nerves after civil defense sirens blared for around 30 minutes last Saturday – an incident that authorities say may be the result of hacking. 

Here’s the good news on America’s birthday: the last year has seen the U.S. emerge as an undisputed global leader in the use of offensive cyber operations. Averting another “Sputnik” moment, the nation’s longest running and most successful democracy blazed new trails in non-kinetic warfare, effectively ending speculation that the world’s lone superpower was asleep at the wheel as nations like China and Russia dashed ahead in the cyber realm. Now for the bad news: we’re screwed.