Faced with the constant threat of cyber attack, software security is evolving at an unprecedented rate. DevOps must ask itself, What’s more likely to lead to long-term survival: investing in better cyber security or reducing the number of software components it must struggle to secure?
Posted in Agile, CI/CD & DevOps | Comments Off on Dan Geer explores the DevOps ‘Law of the Jungle’ dilemma
Last fall, someone released a benign worm looking to protect Internet of Things (IoT) devices from more dangerous worms. Known as Hajime, the vigilante malware appears to be designed to block another IoT worm, Mirai. The two are chasing each other around the world. Each are locked in a weird internet turf war seemingly bent on IoT domination and we have already seen collateral damage from it. Virus vs worm First, some basic terminology here.
Posted in Internet of Things | Comments Off on Hajime and Mirai locked in an IoT botnet turf war
Legacy vulnerabilities are often old “features” that weren’t designed for modern use. Since every new day brings a new attack, it’s time to secure them.
Posted in General, Software Architecture and Design | Comments Off on Sirens in the night: Civil defense systems susceptible to legacy vulnerabilities
The features that drive new car sales today are increasingly based on software. Drivers want their own music. They want to stay connected with their digital world. They want digital assistants to help park or even drive autonomously.
Posted in Automotive Security | Comments Off on Secure automotive software at any speed
Last month a researcher announced that a commercial dishwashing machine contained a dangerous vulnerability allowing a remote attacker to gain access to privileged assets on a connected network. Jens Regel of the German company Schneider & Wulf made the vulnerability public on Full Disclosure after contacting the vendor and waiting the customary 90 days. The vendor, Miele, has yet to respond.
Posted in Internet of Things | Comments Off on What happens when dishwashers attack the network?
Software quality and security assurance both concern risk to the organization, but they do so for different reasons. Risk might be mission critical such as software on a scientific robot crawling another planet. Or risk might be associated with sensitive financial information. In the first example the integrity of the software is paramount; it is hard to fix something on another planet. In the latter example both quality and security are important, with security perhaps paramount.
Posted in Security Standards and Compliance, Software Architecture and Design, Software Composition Analysis | Comments Off on Does software quality equal software security? It depends.
Earlier this month WikiLeaks announced it had in its possession a cache of zero days allegedly from the Central Intelligence Agency. These unpatched vulnerabilities, it said, could affect Apple and Android devices (including TVs). It is suspected that exploitation of these vulnerabilities could allow the spy agency – or anyone else who knows about them — to surveil targets by activating microphones and receivers as well as eavesdropping on communications.
Posted in Fuzz Testing, Static Analysis (SAST) | Comments Off on Zeroing in on zero day vulnerabilities
Sophia Goreczky, Senior User Interface Design Engineer at Synopsys Software Integrity Group, is the recipient of 2017 YWCA Emerging Leader Award. She will be honored, along with four other award honorees, at an awards dinner on May 11, 2017 at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose.
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Sophia Goreczky is the recipient of the 2017 YWCA Emerging Leader Award
Howard A. Schmidt, a friend to many in the security community, has died. A statement on his Facebook page says that he died today “in the presence of his wife and four sons … following a long battle with cancer.”
Posted in General | Comments Off on Howard Schmidt, the United States’ first Cybersecurity Czar, has died
In response to its haphazard patch release cycle in the late 1990s, Microsoft launched an every second-Tuesday-of-the-month “Patch Tuesday” program in 2004. Last week, on February 14 to be exact, Microsoft abruptly canceled its current monthly set of patches and said that its slate of new patches would return on March 14. The problem is the day before was the end of a 90-day window that Google had established as part of its disclosure policy and so the security researchers at Google Project Zero went ahead and released details of the still open vulnerability.
Posted in Healthcare Security, Software Architecture and Design | Comments Off on Responsible disclosure on a timetable