Trustwave Blog

5 Security Things to Know for the Week of Aug. 10

Written by Dan Kaplan | Aug 10, 2015

Like it or not, Monday is upon us. Here are five items making news that can help you kick off your work week in style - or at least a little more informed.

  • Hacker summer camp wrapped up Sunday in Las Vegas, after a week of cons (Black Hat, BSidesLV and DefCon). Here is a good wrap-up of DefCon, which included talks on skateboard hacks and unlocking cars with a $32 gadget.
       
  • Apple is planning to fix a serious Mac OS X privilege-escalation zero-day vulnerability. 

  • A patch is now available for a major vulnerability in Firefox's PDF Viewer that could allow attackers to steal sensitive files. The bug was being actively exploited in the wild.
      
  • The FBI is warning businesses about a surge in incidents in which they are threatened with distributed denial-of-service attacks unless they pay a ransom. 
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  • Seven years later, whatever happened to the notorious Conficker worm? A group of researchers are ready to present on lessons learned.

Dan Kaplan is manager of online content at Trustwave and a former IT security reporter and editor.