Google’s OSS-Fuzz bug-hunting robot has been hard at work, and in recent months, over 1,000 bugs have been exposed. According to Chrome Security engineers Oliver Chang and Abhishek Arya, software engineer Kostya Serebryany and Google Security program manager Josh Armour, the OSS-Fuzz bot has been scouring the web over the past five months in the pursuit of security vulnerabilities which can be exploited. The OSS-Fuzz bot uses […]
File Photo Spyware developer FlexiSpy planned to lure researchers to disclose vulnerabilities in its software through HackerOne. HackerOne had other ideas. Last month, the surveillance firm revealed plans on Twitter to transfer its bug bounty program to HackerOne. The bug bounty program, created in the “interest of transparency,” would have offered researchers between $100 and $5000 to privately disclose bugs to the company. FlexiSpy said that the […]
Microsoft has shown how Windows Defender ATP detected anomalous updater behavior. Image: Microsoft Microsoft is warning software vendors to protect their updater processes after discovering a “well-planned, finely orchestrated” attack that hijacked an unnamed editing tool’s software supply chain. As Microsoft’s threat response group explains, the attackers used the update mechanism of a popular but unnamed piece of editing software to gain a foothold in several high-profile […]
This past Saturday marked 100 days since Donald Trump became president, and many news organizations marked the occasion with data-intensive packages that measured his progress and made it really easy for the public to understand what’s happened so far. Some highlights: The Guardian published an interactive making it really easy to analyze the first 100 days by putting the numbers in context. They also published daily briefings […]
Credit: North Carolina State University A study comparing acceptance rates of contributions from men and women in an open-source software community finds that, overall, women’s contributions tend to be accepted more often than men’s – but when a woman’s gender is identifiable, they are rejected more often. “There are a number of questions and concerns related to gender bias in computer programming, but this project was focused […]
Editor’s note: This post was originally published on Scott Helme’s blog, and was reprinted to ZDNet with permission. I was recently invited to take part in some research by BBC Click, alongside Professor Alan Woodward, to analyse a device that had quite a lot of people all excited. With slick marketing, catchy tag lines and some pretty bold claims about their security, nomx claim to have cracked […]
The frailty of the DNS system became all too evident last year, when DNS host Dyn was hit by a major Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack that brought down large swaths of the internet. With the threat of DDoS attacks only expected to grow, experts urge organizations to build redundancy into their DNS services. GitHub, the online code sharing and development platform, is introducing a new […]
Credit: George Hodan/public domain Your partner comes in and slams a door. What was that about? Something you did? What if you knew to anticipate it because you were notified in advance from an automated text message that he/she didn’t have a great day at work? Might that change the dynamic of your interactions? You had a bad day. The last thing you need is to get […]
On Friday night, the White House began releasing financial disclosures for scores of key employees — including familiar names such as Press Secretary Sean Spicer, Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway and Chief Strategist Stephen K. Bannon. Reporters from dozens of news organizations, including the Associated Press, the New York Times, ProPublica and the Washington Post, then compiled and reported on the documents, which the White House released one-by-one. The Center for […]
It was an exposé made for the era of social media—and it’s still having an impact. A year ago this week, reporters at the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and more than 100 news organizations around the world released their first stories linked to the Panama Papers—a leaked trove of more than 11 million records from Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca. The documents and thousands of published stories […]
The dominance of GitHub in the project hosting and code sharing space has claimed another victim, with Microsoft announcing plans to shut down its CodePlex site following a period of decreasing use. According to the plan posted by Microsoft vice president for Cloud Developer Services Brian Harry, the creation of new CodePlex projects has already ended, with the site to become read-only during October, followed by its […]
Microsoft announced yesterday that it will be opening its third IoT & AI (Internet of Things and artificial intelligence) Insiders Lab. The new lab, located in Munich, Germany is set to open in April and will provide an EMEA point of presence to round out the existing labs in the Americas (Redmond, Wash.) and Asia (Shenzhen, China). Mission possibleThe mission of the labs is to provide facilities […]
A previously-undisclosed security flaw in an older Windows web server won’t be patched, despite hundreds of thousands of servers still running the outdated software. The vulnerability in Windows Internet Information Services (IIS 6) web server has been remotely exploited since July last year, according to two security researchers at the South China University of Technology, who released a proof-of-concept exploit for the vulnerability on Github this week. […]
Managing containers isn’t easy. That’s where such programs as Docker swarm mode, Kubernetes, and Mesosphere can make or break your containers initiatives. Perhaps the most popular of these, Kubernetes, has a new release, Kubernetes 1.6, that expands its reach by 50 percent to 5,000 node clusters. Conservatively, that means Kubernetes can manage 25,000 Docker containers at once. The latest Kubernetes makes managing huge numbers of containers easier […]
Google lives and dies on open-source software. Without Linux, there would be no Google. The company both uses and makes open-source code every day of the year. In 2017 alone, Google has open-sourced Chrome for iOS; Upspin file-sharing; E2EMail, experimental end-to-end email encryption; and the Guetzli JPEG encoder. There’s only one problem. How do you find all these projects? Google finally has given us the answer: Google […]
Are you sick and tired of opening a new web page and being greeted by a loud, obnoxious advertisement? I sure am. Pop-up and pop-under ads were bad enough, but now it seems like I can hardly go to a site without having a video start up with a blaring voice braying about a great diet, deal, or the like. I’m looking at you, Facebook. It’s easy […]
When Strata + Hadoop World comes around in the US, once a year in New York and once a year, as it is now, in San Jose, CA, it’s a bit of a news feeding frenzy. I’m not even at the event; I was merely pre-briefed by four vendors, last week and yesterday, with announcements they’re making this morning. And still, it’s a lot. Cloudera told me […]
Today at the inaugural Udacity Intersect conference, the online education startup announced new robotics and digital marketing variants of its popular Nanodegrees — an effort to expand its corpus of 21st century skills-based courses. In addition to the new degrees, Udacity is adding 21 new hiring partners spanning the automotive, defense, tech, hardware and telecommunications industries. And, lastly, the company is partnering with Didi Chuxing for a new $100,000 competition to […]
GitHub on Wednesday is rolling out a new option for its paying customers. The GitHub.com plan is similar to the GitHub Enterprise offering, but it is geared for teams that want to host code on GitHub.com rather than on their own servers or a private cloud. Like the GitHub Enterprise plan, the GitHub.com option costs $21 a month, per user. Both plans offer SAML single sign-on, automated […]
Matt Kiser worked in news for many years, and now he works as a product manager at an algorithm startup in Seattle. But every day, Matt spends upwards of six hours working by hand on his single-subject blog, which launched in January. Starting a new project to track what the fuck just happened today. https://t.co/p64yr6BKJ3 — Matt Kiser (@Matt_Kiser) January 29, 2017 Single subject, distinct tone, clear […]
Last year, Google Chrome was the speediest Windows 10 web browser by a mile. This year, it’s a different story. Picking out the best Windows 10 web browser isn’t easy at all. The worse, however, by a country mile, is Internet Explorer 11. sjvn To put today’s browsers to the test I ran them on the latest shipping edition of Windows 10 Home: Version 10240.17236. I ran […]
Researchers from North Carolina State University, Boston University and George Mason University have developed a Bitcoin-compatible system that could make it significantly more difficult for observers to identify or track the parties involved in any given Bitcoin transaction. Bitcoin was initially conceived as a way for people to exchange money anonymously. But then it was discovered that anyone could track all Bitcoin transactions and often identify the […]
If you’re looking for a quick, easy, and affordable way to protect your Google account, Facebook, GitHub, Dropbox, Salesforce admin account (and much more), or looking for a way to harden your Mac or Windows login credentials, then you need to take a look at YubiKey. Must read: Best Raspberry Pi alternatives, starting at only $5 OK, first off, what is YubiKey? YubiKey is a small authentication […]
Leo Lintang, Getty Images/iStockphoto Imagine waking up one morning to discover your email address and current password have been plastered onto a billboard on the side of a major highway. It’s a bit improbable, I know, but play along. For some of you, that would be the end. Anyone could paw through your email history, steal personal identifying information, run password resets for other sites, and generally […]
