Java Attacks on the Rise as Spam Declines
Linked by Hadrien Grasland on Thu 20th Jan 2011 21:16 UTC
Privacy, Security, Encryption "In 2010, exploited Java vulnerabilities outpaced the exploit of Adobe Reader and Acrobat," Landesman, senior security researcher at Cisco, said. "Java was 3.5 times more frequently exploited than were malicious PDFs. That really spells out the need for paying attention to what's making the headlines but also paying attention to the types of things that aren't making the headlines."
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RE[5]: update java
by moondevil on Fri 21st Jan 2011 11:33 UTC in reply to "RE[4]: update java"
moondevil
Member since:
2005-07-08

The main problem is that most JVMs are implemented in C or C++. The languages responsible for bringing a dark era of buffer overruns and pointer mis-indirections to mankind, thus starting an era of insecure software, which we still fight to recover from.

One just needs to create a clever designed sequence of bytes as a .class file that exploits a security issue in a specific JVM version. Then you release the exploit in the wild and for sure a few thousand users will be hit.

As for the users not updating it. It is really a big issue, in most corporate environments there is a big burocracy that you need to go through to update any software, even patch level versions.

Most corporate environments I know, the automatic updates are disabled, and updates are triggered by IT when they approved a certain software version.

Not to mention that recently I saw an offer for a project using Java 1.4 with Tomcat 4!

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