Developers at WordPress are encouraging users of the content management system to download and apply the most recent update, pushed yesterday, to address a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability. According to WordPress the bug exists in all versions before 4.4 and if exploited, could allow a hacker to take control of an affected website. An independent security researcher based...

If you’re hanging on to the theory that collision attacks against SHA-1 and MD5 aren’t yet practical, two researchers from INRIA, the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation, have demonstrated new attacks that raise the urgency to move away from these broken cryptographic algorithms. Karthikeyan Bhargavan and Gaetan Leurent recently published an...

A number of issues exist in the content management system Drupal that could lead to code execution and the theft of database credentials via a man-in-the-middle attack, a researcher warns. The vulnerabilities lie in the way Drupal processes updates, according to Fernando Arnaboldi, senior security consultant with IOActive. Arnaboldi wrote a blog entry describing three...

Cloud-based webhost Linode absorbed another body blow on Tuesday when it said it was resetting customer passwords after a suspected breach. The development compounded the company’s existing woes as it continues to battle a distributed denial-of-service attack that began on Christmas. A Linode representative said late Tuesday its executives were unavailable for comment and that...

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...

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...

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

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...