Web Security


Dropbox Users Reporting More Spam Following Last Summer’s Breach

It appears the breach of cloud-based storage service Dropbox last year has spurned another wave of spam over the last week or so. Users began posting complaints on the service’s Bugs and Troubleshooting forum yesterday claiming that their Dropbox-specific accounts started receiving spam again last weekend.

China Publicly Claims to Be the Victim of U.S. Cyberattacks

On Thursday the Chinese government, long considered the aggressor in highly publicized U.S. cyberattacks, publicly spoke about being the victim. Two of its military Web sites were attacked an average of 144,000 per month and two-thirds of those strikes came from the United States, according to a ministry spokesman.


Adobe released yet another security update for its Flash Player product, it’s third this month, earlier today. The emergency update patches three vulnerabilities, including two critical (CVE-2013-0643 and CVE-2013-0648) that are targeting Flash Player in Mozilla’s Firefox browser and could let an attacker crash and compromise affected systems.

Website hosting provider cPanel is calling on some users to change their passwords after it informed them on Friday that hackers compromised one of its technical support department’s servers. The hosting provider does not know for certain the extent of the hack or what, if any, information was stolen during the compromise.

Social media supersite Facebook has fixed a vulnerability that could have allowed a hacker to access a user’s account simply by getting them to click through to a specially crafted website. The flaw essentially mimicked the functionality of an authentic Facebook application without actually installing an application to their profile.

The entertainment industry is teaming with five major Internet service providers to this week launch a new Copyright Alert System that will first warn online pirates and then start to strangle bandwidth of repeat offenders.Dubbed “Six Strikes,” the new system began roll out Monday, putting consumers on notice that content owners would be monitoring for illegal downloading or uploading of copyrighted movies, music and televsion shows and notifying participating ISPs such actvitity is detected.

The seemingly endless list of critical zero day bugs found in Java grew longer today with news that one of the flaws fixed in Oracle’s recent patches for the product is under attack and when that bug is paired with another, separate vulnerability, the sandbox in the latest build of Java can be bypassed.

Dennis Fisher talks with Anup Ghosh of Invincea about the recent wave of companies admitting to being hacked by APT groups, the difference between cyberespionage and cyberwar, what the government can do to encourage more intelligence sharing and whether compromised companies are spending enough time on attribution.

Google has fixed nine high-severity vulnerabilities in its Chrome browser, as well as a dozen other flaws with the release of Chrome 25. This release is one of the few for which the company did not pay out much in the way of bug bounties, only giving out $3,500.In Chrome 25 Google also disabled the MathML implementation in the browser, fixing what the company said is a serious security problem.