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Since last summer’s Stagefright vulnerabilities toppled the Android world for a few weeks, researchers inside and out of Google have been taking a close look at not only the maligned media playback engine, but also at Mediaserver where it lives. Today’s release of the monthly Android Nexus Security Bulletin includes patches for another critical vulnerability...
The Tor Project announced last week that it will launch a bug bounty program later this year to encourage security researchers to responsibly report issues they find in the software. Tor Browser and Tor Performance Developer Mike Perry announced the news during the “State of the Onion” address last week at the Chaos Communication Congress conference...
Crimeware services are nothing new. Criminals for years have advertised on the underground not only malware, but management services and support for banking Trojans, exploit kits and more. Researchers this week turned up a new ransomware-as-a-service operation that pushes the first ransomware coded entirely in JavaScript. Ransom32 is available for download on a Tor hidden...
Well, if you thought you had it rough in 2014 because of big, bad Poodles and an irritating case of Heartbleed, things only got worse this year. Rather than intrusions permeating our IT systems and stealing our data, attacks got a bit more personal in 2015. Not only were privacy and civil liberties put at...
With 2015 more or less in the rear view mirror Mike Mimoso and Chris Brook discuss the year in security: Wassenaar, ransomware, Carbanak and Equation Group,how big of a deal Stagefright was, that Juniper backdoor, and more. Download: tp_2015_in_review.mp3 Music by Chris Gonsalves
Microsoft has taken steps to impede the next Superfish from impacting users. Superfish was pre-installed adware found on new Lenovo laptops earlier this year. The software exposes users to man-in-the-middle attacks because of the way it injects advertisements into the browser. It comes with a self-signed root cert that generates certs for HTTPS connections, replacing...
The NSA’s subversion of encryption standards may have come home to roost. As more eyes examine the Juniper backdoor in ScreenOS, the operating system standing up its NetScreen VPNs, it’s becoming clear that someone backdoored the NSA backdoor in Dual_EC_DRBG, opening the door to passive decryption of any VPN traffic moving through a NetScreen gateway....
Yahoo has announced it will follow in the footsteps of Twitter and Facebook and begin warning users when it believes their accounts have been targeted by a state-sponsored actor. Bob Lord, who was hired as the company’s new CISO in October, discussed the initiative in a blog post Monday. Lord said Yahoo will only notify users...
Oracle’s stewardship of Java has been scrutinized by the security community, which in 2013 languished through nearly a full year of targeted attacks exploiting zero days and other vulnerabilities in the platform. Since then, Oracle has improved the Java user experience by denying unsigned applets the ability to execute by default, and putting security restrictions...
Researchers from two security firms have uncovered the password guarding one of the backdoors discovered in Juniper Networks’ ScreenOS, the operating system behind its NetScreen enterprise-grade firewalls. Fox-IT and Rapid7 found the secret code, which was disguised to look like debug code, said Rapid7 chief research officer HD Moore. “This password allows an attacker to...