VANCOUVER–A group of researchers from VUPEN, a French security firm, was able to compromise Google Chrome in the initial stages of the Pwn2Own contest. But because of the new rules this year, that doesn’t guarantee them a win in the contest. Rather, it just gives them a nice head start.
The seeds of LulzSec’s downfall were sown long before the FBI and Scotland Yard went knocking on doors this week. In fact, the group owes its downfall to a series of small, internal skirmishes, unforced errors and unlikely clues that created a virtual trail to its leaders, a Threatpost investigation found.
By Vitaly KamlukAs Eugene Kaspersky had written earlier, we were expecting new DDoS attacks on resources covering the Russian presidential election. So, as the country went to the polls on 4 March, we were on the lookout for new DDoS attacks.We were surprised to hear a news report from one mass media source that claimed a series of attacks from foreign countries had targeted the servers responsible for broadcasting from polling stations. The announcement came at about 21:00, but there was no trace of any attack on our monitoring system. The media report did not clarify exactly what sort of attacks had been staged. Instead of a DDoS attack, the journalists might have been referring to a different method of seizing unauthorized access, such as an SQL injection.
As information filtered out about the arrests of senior members of the group Anonymous and LulzSec on Tuesday, a portrait emerged of a group of mostly teenaged and 20 something hackers who blended greed and ideology in a string of high profile hacks stretching back more than a year.
Many industries tend to run in identifiable cycles. Financial services, the auto industry, entertainment–they all have cycles. Because the security industry isn’t nearly as old as any of these, it hasn’t had much of a chance to establish such cycles. But one seems to be appearing now in the form of renewed criticism and distaste for offensive security research.
Adobe on Monday issued two emergency fixes for critical security vulnerabilities in its Flash Player product. The vulnerabilities, if left unpatched, could allow an attacker to take control of a system running a vulnerable version of Flash Player.
An Adobe Flash vulnerability fixed last month is being used in targeted attacks right now, with attackers attempting to persuade victims to open a malicious Word document that contains the payload for the Flash bug. The vulnerability has been patched for nearly a month, but history has shown that flaws that have been patched for several months or even years are still quite valuable for targeted attacks.
Dennis Fisher talks with Paul Judge of Barracuda Labs about his new project, which uses data on the vendors and products on display at the RSA Conference to determine which topics and technologies are the hottest at the moment.
The security community might understand what the Stuxnet worm did. Now the war is over what the worm means – Stuxnet’s legacy, if you will. The latest to weigh in on that question is Steve Croft, of the CBS news magazine 60 Minutes.
Just two days before the annual Pwn2Own contest is set to begin at CanSecWest, Google has patched a huge set of serious vulnerabilities in its Chrome browser. In addition to the 14 high-risk flaws fixed in Chrome, the company also handed out rewards of $10,000 each to three researchers who regularly submit bugs to Google and have taken home quite a bit of cash in the past as part of the company’s reward program.
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