Security

On Monday, Adobe released a security update for a serious vulnerability within Reader and Acrobat. The vulnerability described in CVE-2008-2641 is being circulated on the Internet. Adobe says if exploited the vulnerability could crash applications and could allow an attacker to take control of the affected system.

The update affects Adobe Reader 8.0 through 8.1.2, Adobe Reader 7.0.9 and earlier, Adobe Acrobat Professional, 3D and Standard 8.0 through 8.1.2, Adobe Acrobat Professional, 3D and Standard 7.0.9 and earlier. It does not affect Adobe Reader 7.1.0 and Acrobat 7.… Read more

Building on the Trojan released last week, a group of hackers appear to be targeting the Mac OS X platform with more variations.

Last Thursday, Mac antivirus vendors Intego and SecureMac reported a serious vulnerability within the Apple Remote Desktop Agent (ARDAgent). It is part of the remote-management component of Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5 and is owned by root. Thus, the ARDAgent executable runs this malicious code as root without requiring a password.

The Washington Post's Brian Krebs reported on Monday the presence of a hacker forum devoted to the development of Trojans around this … Read more

A group including Equifax, Google, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, and PayPal, plus nine leaders in the technology community announced on Monday the creation of the Information Card Foundation (ICF) with the goal of increasing awareness of the use of electronic ID cards on the Internet, and encouraging interoperability in business around new standards.

"We need to come together in a neutral body to continue to promote the adoption of this technology," said Paul Trevithick, CEO of Parity and chairman of the ICF.

Information cards are online equivalents of physical ID cards, such as a driver's license. The basic … Read more

Greg Hoglund is no stranger to security. In the last few years, he's founded Bugscan, Cenzic, and HBGary, where he is currently CEO. He is also the co-author of Exploiting Software, Rootkits: Exploiting the Windows Kernel, and Exploiting Online Games. Hoglund has presented at numerous Black Hat Briefings and taught several training sessions there as well.

This week he stopped by the Security Bites studio for a conversation with CNET's Robert Vamosi on rookits, software vulnerabilities, and online gaming.

On Thursday, security vendor SecureMac reported seeing new variants of AppleScript.THT Trojan horse in the wild affecting users of Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5.

The new variations exploit a vulnerability within the Apple Remote Desktop Agent, and can avoid detection by opening ports in the firewall and turning off system logging. The new Trojans can log keystrokes, take screen shots, take pictures with the Apple iSight camera, and enable file sharing, according to SecureMac.

The Trojans are using an AppleScript called ASthtv05 and/or may be bundled as an application. You must download and execute the … Read more

Apple on Thursday released a new version of Safari for Windows that includes a security fix for a high-profile carpet-bombing desktop attack vulnerability previously dismissed by the Cupertino vendor. The Safari update is only for Windows users, not Mac OSX versions. Version 3.1.2 of Safari for Windows can be downloaded and installed from Apple Downloads, or you can download Safari 3.1 here.

BMP or GIF image memory error This patch only affects users of Windows XP or Vista. The update addresses CVE-2008-1573, an out-of-bounds memory read vulnerability. The error may occur in the handling of BMP and … Read more

According to Tipping Point's Zero Day Initiative, the vulnerability, which it rates as critical, was reported within the first five hours of Firefox 3's release.

"Once the vulnerability was verified in TippingPoint's DVLabs and acquired from the researcher, the vulnerability was promptly reported to the Mozilla security team," said a representative.

Although the Zero Day Initiative team does not offer specifics until the vendor has a chance to patch it, the blog post did say this vulnerability, which also affects Firefox 2, requires … Read more

On Wednesday, Trend Micro CEO and co-founder Eva Chen unveiled a new vision for her company that includes "in-the-cloud" malware analysis.

Unlike the computer viruses of 20 years ago, which were slow to evolve and infected thousands of systems worldwide, malware today evolves rapidly and infects relatively few systems, creating thousands of new variants each day. Chen admits that traditional signature-based antivirus strategies may seem a bit outdated, but argues that pattern matching is still faster than running a full heuristic check of each new malware specimen. Her answer is to throw all the unknown samples up into … Read more

I recently spoke with Johnathan Nightingale, Mozilla's "Human Shield," the man who designed the security interface within Firefox 3. One of the big changes is how Firefox communicates the authenticity of a given site. Located on the left hand side of the address bar is a tiny icon associated with the site. Sites using Extended Verification Secure Socket Layers (EV SSL) go an additional step.

Nightingale explains: "If you go to PayPal.com, for instance, that will expand out and it'll say PayPal Inc USA because PayPal is a site that presents this enhanced identity … Read more