Once or twice each year, some security company trots out a “study” that counts the number of vulnerabilities that were found and fixed in widely used software products over a given period and then pronounces the most profligate offenders in a Top 10 that is supposed to tell us something useful about the relative security of these programs. And nearly without fail, the security press parrots this information as if it were newsworthy.
The Web site for the Nobel Peace Prize has been serving up malicious software that takes advantage of a newly-discovered security hole in Mozilla Firefox, computer security experts warned today. Oslo-based Norman ASA warned that visitors who browsed the Nobel… Read More »
Adobe and Apple have released security updates or alerts in the past 24 hours. Adobe has pushed out a critical patch that fixes at least 20 vulnerabilities in its Shockwave Player, while Apple issued updates to correct 13 flaws in Mac OS X systems.
Mozilla has shipped a new version of Firefox that corrects a number of vulnerabilities in the browser. Separately, a new version of Opera is available that fixes at least five security flaws in the software. Firefox version 3.6.4 addresses seven… Read More »
Mozilla’s Plugin Check Web site, which inspects Firefox browsers for outdated and insecure plugins, now checks other browsers — including Apple’s Safari, Google’s Chrome, Opera, and (to a far lesser extent) even Internet Explorer.
Not long after I launched this blog, I wrote about the damage wrought by the Eleonore Exploit Kit, an increasingly prevalent commercial hacking tool that makes it easy for criminals to booby-trap Web sites with malicious software. That post generated tremendous public interest because it offered a peek at the statistics page that normally only the criminals operating these kits get to see.
I’m revisiting this topic again because I managed to have a look at another live Eleonore exploit pack panel, and the data seems to reinforce a previous hunch: Today’s attackers care less about the browser you use and more about whether your third-party browser add-ons and plugins are up-to-date.
Purveyors of rogue anti-virus, a.k.a. “scareware,” often seize upon hot trending topics in their daily efforts to beef up the search engine rankings of their booby-trapped landing pages. So it’s perhaps no surprise that these scammers are capitalizing on search terms surrounding McAfee, which just yesterday shipped a faulty anti-virus update that caused serious problems for a large number of customers.
Mozilla is disabling the Java Development Toolkit plugin for Firefox users, in a bid to block attacks against a newly-discovered Java security hole that attackers have been exploiting of late to install malicious code.
Many anti-virus products — particularly the “Internet security suite” variety — now ship with various Web browser toolbars, plug-ins and add-ons designed to help protect the customer’s personal information and to detect malicious Web sites. Unfortunately, if designed poorly, these browser extras can actually lower the security posture of the user’s system by introducing security and stability issues.
Adobe is urging users of its PDF Reader and Acrobat software to install an update that fixes a couple of critical security holes in the products. The patches come amid news that booby-trapped PDF files were responsible for roughly 80 percent of the exploits detected in the 4th quarter of 2009.
