» Listen or download now on the podcasts page » Judging by the warnings issued by security vendors, you’d be forgiven for thinking that there’s a malware epidemic on the Android platform. The truth, according to Sean Newman, security evangelist at Sourcefire (now part of Cisco), is somewhat more nuanced. In this interview he explains how the number of published vulnerabilities… Read more »
With an 87% global market share, it’s no wonder that Android devices are attracting malware authors like circling vultures – much to Apple’s delight. There’s a kind of hackers’ arms race going on as they compete to plant nastier and nastier bugs on Android phones. The latest arrival is ransomware, which infects and encrypts your files then (sometimes) releases your… Read more »
» Listen or download now on the podcasts page » Machine-to-Machine (M2M) is a domain that includes industrial systems, telemetry, Scada and so on. And while Scada has increasingly become a focus of security concerns, this has tended to concentrate on the the control systems themselves, rather than the entire chain from sensor to control room. In this episode, we talk to… Read more »
» Listen or download now on the podcasts page » Microsoft recently warned about Man in the Browser (MitB) malware exploiting Facebook sessions. When a user is infected – often by drive-by downloads on infected or malicious sites – the malware uses authenticated sessions on Facebook to post messages, ‘like’ pages and get up to general mischief. But this wasn’t… Read more »
» Listen or download now on the podcasts page » The Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) is the bogeyman of information security. Some people say ‘be afraid, be very afraid’ while others laugh and deny its very existence. The problem, of course, is one of definition. Too often the term gets stretched to fit whatever point someone is trying to make, or… Read more »
Apple’s solution to the Flashback trojan problem is an interesting one, even though I suspect it’s going to annoy some people. The firm has released three Java updates in rapid succession, none of which appear to fix the original flaw that made the Flashback trojan viable. But the third update did include a removal tool for known versions of the… Read more »
And so, with Flashback, Mac users finally have a significant piece of malware to worry about. From the tech news sites, you’d think that the sky is falling for users of Apple’s OS X. And, as usual, they’ve completely missed a more significant point – about how malware is changing. I’ve seen one estimate that puts the number of Flashback… Read more »