Vulnerabilities


Threats From Third Party Vendors Demand Vigilance

by B.K. DeLongWikileaks’ decision this week to post the first of five million emails from Texas-based strategic intelligence firm Stratfor shone a spotlight on what experts say is a serious and growing problem: lax data, network and physical security at third party vendors and service providers.  But organizations that think they can wash their hands of the security mess caused by business partners and contractors may be in for a rude awakening.

Mobile Apps Space A ‘Wild West’ For Enterprises

SAN FRANCISCO – Companies that are hoping to catch a ride on the mobile wave should pay close attention to the application development firms they choose to work with, unless they want to be saddled with a buggy and insecure albatross bearing their corporate logo, a leading application security expert warns.


A new attack against online banking customers uses a malware platform to trick its victims into verifying bogus transactions.The attack, first described by Trusteer CTO Amit Klein, waits for an unsuspecting business banking customer to log online before telling them that “security checks” need to be performed.

Right on cue this week, the anarchic hacking collective Anonymous stepped up and grabbed the story line away from the lions of the IT security industry.With the annual RSA Conference set to begin, the whistle blowing site Wikileaks released the first of some five million e-mail messages stolen from the security intelligence firm Stratfor. Ever sensitive to the fickle attention of the media, Anonymous inserted itself into the story, claiming responsibility for leaking the data and pointing a finger of blame at Stratfor and its media, private and public sector customers, which Anonymous accuses of spying and other dark offenses.

When Ralph Langner, an independent security researcher, presented his analysis of specialized code used by the Stuxnet worm to an audience of his peers at the S4 Conference in Miami last month, it was a chance to get down in the weeks with one of the world’s top experts on Stuxnet and threats to industrial control system.

Just a few days after releasing a fairly large set of patches for its Chrome browser, Google has pushed out another update, fixing 13 vulnerabilities, more than half of them being high-severity bugs.