Dennis Fisher

The new English-language Web site of controversial Qatar-based satellite news channel Al-Jazeera was knocked off-line Tuesday by what may have been a denial-of-service attack. The site was just launched Monday and was put together rather quickly in order to deliver news on the U.S.-led attack on Iraq. However, the site became overloaded very soon after […]

A Danish security company, angry over what it perceives as censorship on several popular mailing lists, is launching “a revolution to remove SecurityFocus and CERT from power.” At present, the revolution consists of a new mailing list that will aggregate vulnerability advisories and other security-related reports from a variety of sources. Employees of Secunia Ltd. […]

Government officials and private organizations alike are reviewing their vulnerability disclosure processes after several incidents over the past 10 days exposed major shortcomings in the way new bugs are handled. The most dramatic case for change came early last week when an anonymous member of a security mailing list posted three unpublished vulnerability advisories. None […]

Security experts say the latest Windows vulnerability revealed last week by Microsoft Corp. has already been used by crackers to attack at least one machine belonging to the U.S. Army. And, it turns out, the flaw used to attack the Web server was discovered not by Microsoft or independent researchers but by the attacker himself. […]

Now that the federal government has shown its cards on the issue of Internet security, a newly formed task force of security company executives is planning a response it hopes will make measurable progress in the effort to improve computer security. The CEO Cybersecurity Task Force by the end of this year will release a […]

Hoping to rally support for its nascent integrated security effort, Symantec Corp. on Monday unveiled a new partner program that provides technical assistance for security vendors who commit to integrating their products with Symantecs. The Symantec Technology Partner Program is designed to create an ecosystem of vendors around the companys Enterprise Security Architecture and Security […]

The same person who earlier this week posted three unpublished CERT Coordination Center vulnerability reports to a security mailing list has again posted more of CERTs internal communications and has promised to post further documents on a weekly basis. This time, the person going by the name Hack4life, has published an e-mail message from a […]

Security researchers say that they have identified several additional attack vectors that can exploit the critical Windows 2000 vulnerability disclosed this week, and are urging everyone running the operating system to patch their machines. When Microsoft Corp. released its advisory and patch for this vulnerability on Monday, it said that only Windows 2000 machines running […]

Symantec Corp. on Monday will unveil a new set of anti-spam capabilities that introduce a layered approach to beating back the torrents of junk mail that flood corporate mail servers. The functionality, included in the companys AntiVirus for SMTP Gateways 3.1, is separated into three main categories: detection, false positive prevention and false positive management. […]

An independent group of security experts is close to finalizing details of a document that it hopes will become a de facto standard for the reporting and handling of software vulnerabilities. The Organization for Internet Safety is currently putting the finishing touches on its vulnerability disclosure plan, which members say could be released within a […]

There is a vulnerability in a Sun Microsystems Inc. code library that enables a remote attacker to execute code on a users machine. The flaw also affects libraries derived from the Sun library, including any BSD-derived libraries with XDR/RPC routines and the GNU C Library with sunrpc. The vulnerability is located in the Sun Network […]

Microsoft Corp. has released a patch for a critical vulnerability in every version of Windows from 98 forward. The flaw lies in the Windows Script Engine for Jscript, which enables the operating system to execute script code. The engine incorrectly processes the script and does not correctly size a buffer during a memory operation. As […]