Over the past few weeks we’ve seen yet two more security stories get completely blown out of proportion in the press. The first was, of course, the DDoS attacks that were improperly attributed by most commentators to North Korea. The second, no surprise, was the Great Twitter Hack of 2009, which might also be referred to the Great Cloud Security Collapse.
There was an article in Sunday’s Arizona Republic regarding to the Federal Trade Commission’s requirements for any company handling sensitive customer information. Technically this law went into effect back in January 2008, but it was enforced due to lack of awareness. Now that the FTC has completed their education and awareness program, and enforcement will begin August 1st of this year, it’s time to begin discussing these guidelines. This means that any business that collects, stores, or uses…
I apologize to those of you reading this on Saturday morning – with the stress of completing some major projects before Black Hat, I forgot that to push the Summary out Friday morning, we have to finish it off Thursday night. So much for the best laid plans and all.
If you have read my overviews of Oracle database patches long enough, you probably are aware of my bias against the CVSS scoring system. It’s a yardstick to measure the relative risk of the vulnerability, but it’s a generic measure, and a confusing one at that. You have to start somewhere, but it’s just a single indicator, and you do need to take the time to understand how the threats apply (or don’t) to your environment. In cases where I have had complete understanding of the nature of a…
I am kind of a car nut. Have been since I was little when my dad took me to my first auto race at the age of four (It was at Laguna Seca, a Can-Am race. Amazing!). I tend to get emotionally attached to my vehicles. I buy them based upon how they perform, how they look, and how they drive. I am fascinated by the technology of everything from tires to turbos. I am a tinkerer, and I do weird things like change bushings that don’t need to be changed, rebuild a perfectly good motor or tweak engine…
While Microsoft releases patches for various vulnerabilities, including the two active zero day attacks, Firefox is being actively exploited.
According to the Mozilla Security Blog, there is a flaw in how Firefox handles JavaScript. We suggest you follow the instructions in that post to mitigate the flaw until they release a patch (which should be soon).
Encrypting data within a database doesn’t always present a clear-cut value proposition. Many of the features/functions of database encryption are also available through external tools, creating confusion as to why (or even whether) database encryption is needed. In many cases, past implementations have left DBAs and IT staff with fears of degraded performance and broken applications – creating legitimate wariness the moment some security manager mentions encryption. Finally, there is often a…
Microsoft released an advisory today that an unpatched vulnerability in the Office Web Components ActiveX control allows an attacker to run arbitrary code as the logged-in user. Worse yet, this is being actively exploited in the wild. Fortunately it is easy to protect against.
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We have a few Securosis news items that hopefully you will find useful. We get a lot of feedback and ideas from readers about how they want to use our site, or when and how they view the posts. It’s an amazingly diverse group of preferences, scattered like a shotgun blast across the spectrum of options. We hear you, so in our quest to deliver the blog content through every new media medium we think you might like, we have implemented a couple new ways to read the blog and the research library.