Trustwave Blog

5 Security Things to Know for the Week of July 13

Written by Dan Kaplan | Jul 13, 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.

  • Following the emergency release last week of a fix to repair an unpatched vulnerability in Flash, Adobe is now scrambling to plug two more Flash zero-day holes that were made public in a recent breach.  
  • Remember Java bugs? The first zero-day exploit in quite some time is making the rounds, and it's going after economic and political targets. Experts suggest disabling Java in the browser in lieu of a fix. 
  • Adding to the laundry list of flaws, the OpenSSL Foundation just patched a critical bug in its software that could have permitted eavesdropping on encrypted traffic. 
  • The simultaneous stock exchange and airline outages last week had some fearing a coordinated attack, but should we be less worried about cyber war and more concerned about old, complex and poorly coded software?  
  • Authorities are trumpeting two big cybercrime busts: one of an Estonian man who allegedly spread DNS malware to attack millions of machines and the other of three alleged Nigerian bank account hackers
  • Bonus: This well-researched story examines the resurrection of the U.S. "crypto wars" that now pit privacy advocates and commercial entities against the FBI, which seeks weakened encryption and backdoors.

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