web applications

IDS And The IoT: Snort Creator Marty Roesch On Securing The Internet of Things

Martin Roesch is one of the giants of the security industry: a hacker in the truest sense of the term who, in the late 1990s created a wide range of security tools as a way to teach himself about information security. One of them, the open source SNORT intrusion detection system, turned into one of the mostly widely used and respected security tools in the world. SNORT became the foundation for Sourcefire, the company Marty helped found in 2001. And Sourcefire went on to fantastic success: first as a startup, then as a publicly traded company and, as of October of last year, as part of Cisco Systems, after the networking giant bought Roesch’s company for $2.7 billion. These days, Marty serves as a Vice President and Chief Architect of Cisco’s Security Business Group, where he’s helping shape that company’s strategy for securing the next generation of enterprise (and post-enterprise) networks. […]

Continue Reading

Heartbleed For Poets And Other Must-Reads

It’s H-Day + 2 – two full days since we learned that one of the pillars of online security, OpenSSL, has contained a gaping security hole for the past two years that rendered its protections illusory. As I wrote over on Veracode’s blog today: this one hurts. It exposes private encryption keys, allowing encrypted SSL sessions to be revealed. Trend Micro data suggests around 5% of one million Internet top-level domains are vulnerable.  IOActive notes that Heartbleed also appears to leave data such as user sessions subject to hijacking, exposes encrypted search queries and leaves passwords used to access online services subject to snooping, provided the service hasn’t updated their OpenSSL instance to the latest version. In fact, its safe to bet that the ramifications of Heartbleed will continue to be felt for months – even years to come. In the meantime, there is a lot of interesting coverage and […]

Continue Reading

Analysis Finds Blurry Lines Between Rovio, Advertisers

Rovio, the maker of the massively popular Angry Birds, makes no secret about collecting personal data from those who download and play its games. But an analysis from the advanced threat detection firm FireEye is helping to expose the extend of data harvesting, and also to sketch out the blurry line that separates Rovio and third-party advertising networks it contracts with. In a blog post on Thursday, FireEye analysts Jimmy Suo and Tao Wei described the findings of an investigation into the interaction between Rovio’s mobile applications, including the latest version of Angry Birds, and third party ad networks such as Jumptap and Millenial Media. Using FireEye’s Mobile Threat Prevention (MTP), the two gathered and analyzed network packet capture (PCap) information and analyzed the workings of Angry Birds and its communications with third-party ad networks. The two were able to reveal a multi-stage information sharing operation, tracking code paths from the reverse-engineered […]

Continue Reading

Security and The Internet of Things: An RSA Roadmap

The RSA Security Conference starts next week in San Francisco: the central event of a week-long orgy of IT security wheeling and dealing in the Bay Area. Though its roots are as a small and clubby gathering of cryptographers, RSA long ago stopped being that, and started resembling a kind of speed dating event for technology and IT security firms. Sure – there are plenty of interesting talks at RSA, but the important work takes place in private suites of adjoining hotels and chance encounters in the halls of the Moscone. If there’s a big IT security deal in the offing – like IBM’s $1 billion acquisition of Trusteer, or FireEye’s purchase of the firm Mandiant – chances are good that the conversation started at RSA. Long and short: RSA is a snapshot of the security industry at a particular place and time. As such, it tends to be a […]

Continue Reading

Vulnerability Undermines WordPress Two-Factor Plugins

The firm Duo Security* said that it has discovered a vulnerability that affects a range of two-factor authentication plugins for the WordPress content management platform. The vulnerability could allow a malicious insider to use credentials for one WordPress site to log into a different site that is part of a ‘multi-site’ WordPress deployment without needing to pass a multi-factor authentication test. In a blog post on Thursday, DUO co-founder and CTO Jon Oberheide said that the vulnerability was discovered as part of an internal review of DUO’s two factor WordPress plugin, but that researchers realized it affects at least two other multi-factor plugins. DUO issued a warning to users of its plugin. The company also reached out to WordPress and to the publishers of other multi factor authentication plugins to address the issue, Oberheide wrote. DUO makes multi-factor authentication technology that allows users to log-in using a combination of username, […]

Continue Reading
1 … 10 11 12 13 14 15