Google is extending its nascent bug-bounty program to the Web applications that the company owns, including its flagship search service, YouTube and Blogger. The program will pay researchers rewards of up to $3133.7 for bugs that they find in Google Web services and report directly to the company.
If, like most Americans, you’ve developed an attachment to your mobile phone that borders on the unnatural and have a hard time going 11 seconds without checking email or texts, you’d do well not to attend a talk by Zach Lanier and Mike Zusman anytime soon. The pair discussed a variety of weaknesses in several mobile platforms and showed off enough clever attacks in their talk at SecTor in Toronto last week to make the listener want to pull the SIM card from his phone, set it down and back quietly away.
The piece of malware that’s being used to exploit the unpatched Adobe Flash bug that was disclosed Thursday looks like sort of a run-of-the-mill Trojan, but an analysis shows that it does have some unique features.
Autumn conferences grabbed the headlines this week as presentations at the Toorcon Conference in San Diego and SecTor in Toronto wrapped up October, with revelations about the vulnerability of social networking sessions and critical infrastructure headlining.
TORONTO–The months-long hysteria over Stuxnet and its hyper-sophistication and passel of unknown vulnerabilities has had the effect of creating a secondary wave of panic about the vulnerability of industrial control and SCADA systems. But the concern about spontaneous utility outages and surreptitiously poisoned food supplies are overblown and largely misplaced, an expert says.
On the same day that it plans to release a patch for a critical flaw in Shockwave, Adobe confirmed on Thursday morning that there is a newly discovered bug in Flash that is being actively exploited already in attacks against Reader. The vulnerability affects Flash on all of the relevant platforms, including Android, as well as Reader on Windows and Mac, and won’t be patched for nearly two weeks.
Samy Kamkar has been making quite a bit of noise lately, beginning with his release of the Evercookie earlier this month and continuing with his talk at the SecTor conference this week on novel methods for stealing users’ cookies without any browser bugs. In this interview, he discusses both of those methods, as well as a new technique he developed that can use Google data and simple attacks to find a user’s physical location within a few feet.
Days after researchers at the ToorCon Security Conference in San Diego released a tool to hijack insecure Web sessions on Facebook, iGoogle and Flickr, a developer has released a similar tool, dubbed “Idiocy” that does the same for insecure Twitter sessions.
Mozilla is working on a patch for the recently disclosed critical bug in Firefox that has been exploited on at least one prominent Web site this week.
A flaw in the iOS software that runs Apple’s iPhone allows any user to bypass the password entry screen by manipulating the emergency call feature, essentially rendering iPhone passwords useless.
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