Microsoft is urging Windows users who browse the Web with Internet Explorer to use a free tool called EMET to block attacks against a newly-discovered and unpatched critical security hole in IE versions 7, 8 and 9. But some experts say that advice falls short, and that users can better protect themselves by using an alternative browser until Microsoft can issue a proper patch.
A working exploit that takes advantage of a previously unknown critical security hole in Internet Explorer has been published online. Experts say the vulnerability is being actively exploited in the wild, and that it appears to be connected to the same group of Chinese hackers responsible for unleashing a pair of Java zero-day exploits late last month.
Apple has issued an update for Mac OS X installations of Java that fixes at least one critical security vulnerability in the software.
New analysis of a zero-day Java exploit that surfaced last week indicates that it takes advantage of not one but two previously unknown vulnerabilities in the widely-used software. The latest figures suggest that more than a billion users may be vulnerable to attack.
The U.S Federal Bureau of Investigation is warning about an uptick in online extortion scams that impersonate the FBI and frighten people into paying fines to avoid prosecution for supposedly downloading child pornography and pirated content. This post offers an inside look at one malware gang responsible for orchestrating such scams.
In an alert published last week, the FBI said that The Internet Crime Complaint Center — a partnership between the FBI and the National White Collar Crime Center — was “getting inundated with complaints” from consumers targeted or victimized by the scam, which uses drive-by downloads to hijack host machines. The downloaded malware displays a threatening message (see image to the right) and blocks the user from doing anything else unless he pays the fine or finds a way to remove the program.
I recently began publishing a series of advice columns for people who are interested in learning more about security as a craft or profession. For the third installment in this series, I interviewed Jeremiah Grossman, chief technology officer of WhiteHat Security, a Web application security firm.
A frequent speaker on a broad range of security topics, Grossman stressed the importance of coding, networking, and getting your hands dirty (in a clean way, of course).
Vulnerability management firm Secunia has shipped a new version of its auto-patching tool — Personal Software Inspector 3.0 – a program for Windows users that can drastically simplify the process of keeping up-to-date with security patches for third-party software applications.
The final release of PSI 3.0 supports programs from more than 3,000 software vendors, and includes some key changes that address shortcomings identified in the beta version that I highlighted back in February.
An earlier version of this blog post incorrectly stated that Oracle had shipped security updates for its Java software. Oracle did push out an update for Java earlier this month — Java 6 Update 32 — but the new version… Read More »
A number of readers responded to the story I published last week on the Flashback Trojan, a contagion that was found to have infected more than 600,000 Mac OS X systems. Most people wanted to know how they could detect whether their systems were infected with Flashback — and if so — how to remove the malware. This post covers both of those questions.
If your computer is running Java and you have not updated to the latest version, you may be asking for trouble: A powerful exploit that takes advantage of a newly-disclosed security hole in Java has been rolled into automated exploit kits and is rapidly increasing the success rates of these tools in attacking vulnerable Internet users.
