Java’s miserable 2013 just will not go away. One of the endless parade of bugs found in the platform throughout 2013—many of which were zero-day vulnerabilities exploited in targeted attacks—apparently wasn’t closed off completely by an October 2013 patch released by Oracle. Researchers at Polish security company Security Explorations last week disclosed that Oracle’s patch...

Mike Mimoso and Chris Brook discuss the news of the week, including the latest on the BlackEnergy APT Group, Amazon getting into the SSL certificate game, and government agencies being told to audit their systems for the Juniper backdoor. Download: news_wrap_01-29-16.mp3 Music by Chris Gonsalves

It’s the end of an era. Oracle has announced its intent to nail the coffin shut on the Java browser plugin. The company confirmed Wednesday that it expects to deprecate the plugin in JDK 9, slated for release in September, and JRE, in a future Java SE release. Dalibor Topic, a member of Oracle’s Java Strategy...

Oracle’s quarterly Critical Patch Updates (CPU) are known for their daunting volume, usually a disproportionately big number of fixes that database and system administrators have to deal with every three months. Yesterday’s CPU, however, takes the cake. Oracle pushed out the door a record 248 patches on Tuesday, for vulnerabilities across its product lines. That...

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...