Despite calls to eliminate Adobe Flash Player, researchers inside and outside the vendor continue to invest in and build mitigations against modern attacks. As recently as three weeks ago, Adobe announced it had rewritten its memory manager, laying the groundwork for widespread heap isolation, which is an important protection against use-after-free vulnerability exploits. Today, however,...

An attacker in a man-in-the-middle position could abuse a STARTTLS downgrade vulnerability in the Cisco Jabber client-server negotiation in order to intercept communication. Cisco warned its customers yesterday, but has yet to patch the vulnerability, which affects the Cisco Jabber clients for Windows, iPhone, iPad and Android. Researchers Renaud Dubourguais and Sébastien Dudek of Synacktiv...

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...

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

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....

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...

Automation and energy management company Schneider Electric patched a vulnerability in a product line this week that was leaving a handful of programmable automation controllers at risk of being hacked. Thirteen different builds of the Modicon M340 PLC are affected by the vulnerability, a buffer overflow that could let an attacker crash the device, or carry out...

Juniper Networks today has released an emergency patch that removes what it’s calling “unauthorized code” from ScreenOS that could allow attackers to decrypt VPN traffic from NetScreen devices. Juniper has not commented on the origin of the code it found. However, Juniper’s products were singled out, among others, in the National Security Agency’s product catalog...