PayPal is the latest company to join the ranks of software vendors and Web properties that offer bounties to security researchers who privately disclose new bugs to them. The company isn’t saying how much it will pay for each bug, just that its security team will determine the severity of each flaw as well as the ultimate payout.
Software failures were behind 24 percent of all the medical device recalls in 2011, according to data from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which said it is gearing up its labs to spend more time analyzing the quality and security of software-based medical instruments and equipment.
The number of compromised sites detected each month by Google’s antimalware and anti-phishing systems has been dropping rather steadily from a peak of more than 300,000 in early 2009 and is now down around 150,000. However, the company’s statistics also show that the number of outright malicious attack sites is back on the rise.
New evidence suggests that a Web site hosting software updates for life saving medical equipment was the victim of a massive SQL injection attack and may have been redirecting visitors to a site serving up attacks and malicious software for months before the company became aware of the compromise.
A flaw exists in the way that a specific instruction is handled on some types of Intel 64-bit chips that could open up some operating systems and types of virtualization software to attacks, according to an alert issued last week but revised today by the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT).
In case you thought that the mass exodus of researchers from TippingPoint’s Zero Day Initiative in recent months meant that the demand for third-party vulnerability markets was waning, fear not. Several former members of the ZDI team have come back together to form a new firm called Exodus Intelligence that will have its own vulnerability purchasing program, among other offerings.
Independent business owners may find themselves deep in debt after hackers wipe out their bank accounts, with banks reluctant to recoup losses caused by online attacks, according to a report in the New York Times.
A joint letter from some of Washington D.C.’s leading minds in the areas of defense and diplomacy is urging Congress to pass a cyber security bill in some form this year, saying that the U.S. is urgently in need of a new policy and ill-prepared for cyber attacks.
Microsoft wasn’t the only company that recognized patch Tuesday yesterday; Oracle patched 14 vulnerabilities in Java Standard edition as well.
There is a trivially exploitable vulnerability in MySQL that enables an attacker to gain root access to the database server. The bug, which recently was patched, stems from an error in the way that MySQL and MariaDB handle passwords, giving an attacker a chance of getting root access by supplying any password to an affected server.
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