Lisa Vaas

During the 2004 presidential campaign, Jeremy Poteet watched as the candidates site he had worked to secure went up. Just 16 minutes later, the site was attacked. But this high-profile site deftly deflected these attacks and the others that followed because Poteet had anticipated—and then protected against—the kinds of exploits he knew would be coming. […]

Security appliance makers are shrugging off CSRF (cross-site request forgery) vulnerabilities in their products—products that sit at the crossroads of enterprise protection. The vulnerable appliances, unified threat management products, “certainly are an important part of an enterprises security,” said Billy Hoffman, lead researcher for SPI Dynamics SPI Labs, in Atlanta. “Im kind of surprised [that […]

Even as the iPhone drew its first breath, security researchers were squeezing it to make it cough up its first bugs. In a nutshell, the security quibbles, theoretical or otherwise, are that at least one Safari browser bug that was known prior to device launch is still on the phone, and that anyone can listen […]

With the CIAs June 26 release of documents detailing 25 years of illegal exploits, data privacy advocates now have a book-length record of misdeeds—including examples of data abuse such as wiretapping—to back up their arguments that personal data is better off when kept out of the hands of an unsupervised government or law enforcement agency. […]

Joanna Rutkowska, the security researcher who one year ago built a working prototype, code-named Blue Pill, of a rootkit capable of creating malware that remains “100 percent undetectable,” has tacitly conceded to a group of security researchers that the detector code they cooked up in the past month will in fact ferret out Blue Pill—at […]

Money is the motivation for scam-spam. The motivation for clicking on it is far less straightforward, and none of us is immune. “Its not like certain people are going to be nailed by spam all the time. Or that there are certain motivations that will just [always] trigger people [who respond] to spam scams. Its […]

The vulnerabilities Errata Security found in Apples Safari beta for Windows—within hours of the browsers June 11 launch—are still open, CTO Dave Maynor said in a blog on June 25. “The vulnerabilities found by Errata Security are still present in the Windows version of the Browser,” he wrote. The posting has since been removed, pending […]

The all-in-one device many businesses think is protecting their security likely has a hole as big as a Boeing, according to new research from Calyptix Security. Calyptix Security, in Charlotte, N.C., has discovered that CSRF (cross-site request forgery), a type of vulnerability that typically concerns large sites like Amazon.com, Google and Digg, also affects a […]

Apple has updates out for security problems in WebCore—Mac OS Xs HTML layout engine—and WebKit, the application framework that serves as an underpinning for Apples Safari browser as well as many other Mac applications. Security Update 2007-006 takes care of an HTTP injection bug that occurs in WebCores XMLHttpRequest when its serializing headers into an […]

The allergy to the iPhone security analysts have acquired? IBM Internet Security Systems isn’t buying it. As a matter of fact, Neel Mehta, team leader of the advanced research group at ISS, says the iPhone is going to suffer less from the malware that’s hit Symbian’s OS and Windows Mobile, thanks to the fact that […]

Apples upcoming iPhone: Its a “security nightmare,” it will “turn your security team into zombies,” and Apple is possibly “using the Windows Safari Beta Test to stamp out iPhone security holes.” Or, then again, depending on which iPhone watcher youre paying attention to, the iPhone security is irrelevant compared with “insecure wireless access points, tape […]

An attacker named “Gabriel” claims to have stolen the text of the upcoming “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” from Bloomsbury Publishing by use of a phishing scam. He has published what he claims are all of the plot points—including main characters who get killed and the final outcome of the seven-book series. Gabriel says […]