In this episode of the podcast (#233) Mark Stanislav, a Vice President at the firm Gemini, joins Paul to talk about what went wrong with disclosure of Log4Shell, the critical, remote code execution flaw in the Log4j open source library. Mark talks about how the Internet community can come together ahead of the next vulnerability to make sure the mistakes that are evident in the response to Log4j aren’t repeated.
An expensive, months-long legal tussle between a UK engineer and a healthcare non-profit is spurring calls for reform to the country’s 30 year-old Computer Misuse Act, which Dyke and others contend criminalizes the work of ‘Good Samaritan’ security researchers acting in the public interest.
Chinese electronics giant TCL has acknowledged security holes in some models of its smart television sets, but denies that it maintains a secret “back door” that gives it control over deployed TVs.
In-brief: Researchers at universities in Germany, working with the security firm Trend Micro, discovered more than 100 vulnerabilities in GitHub code repositories simply by looking for re-used code from tutorials and other free code samples. The same method could be harnessed by cyber criminals or other sophisticated attackers to find and exploit vulnerabilities in software applications, the researchers warned.
In-brief: In a damning report, the FDA said that St. Jude Medical* knew about serious security flaws in its implantable medical devices as early as 2014, but failed to address them with software updates or other mitigations, or by replacing those devices. (Editor’s note: updated to include a statement from Abbott and comment from Dr. Kevin Fu. – PFR April 14, 2017)
