Malware

2010 Data Breach Report from Verizon, US Secret Service

A study conducted by the Verizon Business RISK team in cooperation with the United States Secret Service has found that breaches of electronic records in 2009 involved more insider threats, greater use of social engineering and the continued strong involvement of organized criminal groups. more

Network Security: How Attackers Gain Access from Inside

Most people - mistakenly - believe that they are perfectly safe behind a firewall, network address translation (NAT) device or proxy. The fact is quite the opposite: if you can get out of your network, someone else can get in. Attackers often seek to compromise the weakest link in a network and then use that access to attack the network from the inside, commonly known as a "pivot-and-attack." more

New Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt about Canada’s Anti-Spam Bill C-28

From time to time, we see unenlightened comments about the efficacy of laws in the fight against spam. "Laws won't stop spam" being the most common. No, they won't. What laws do is dissuade some people from undertaking shoddy mailing practices or even outright spam campaigns. Laws don't stop murder, rape and robbery either, but for those un-dissuaded who undertake such heinous crimes, we, as a society, have laws for punitive effect. They pay the price society exacts for their actions. C-28 will attenuate spam in Canada, and help us to fight spam internationally. more

Phishing Attack: An Open Letter to the Anti-Spam and Mailbox Operator Community

I'm sure many of you are familiar with the targeted ESP phishing attack that has been ongoing for almost a year now and has led to multiple known ESP system breaches. Return Path was recently a victim of this same attack... In short, a relatively small list of our clients' email addresses was taken from us, meaning those addresses are now the targets of the phishing campaign that are intended to compromise those client systems. more

J.D. Falk Award

This morning M³AAWG announced the creation of the J.D. Falk award to recognize and honor people like J.D. who work to make the Internet safer for all users... J.D. was a legend in the abuse prevention world when I first started learning about spam and abuse prevention back in the late 90's. more

CNN.Com, Politically Motivated DDoS, and Asymmetric Warfare

Once again I find myself thinking about the nature of the asymmetric warfare threat posed by politically motivated DDoS (Estonia in 07, Korea in 02, and now China vs. CNN in 08). I keep thinking about it in terms of asymmetric warfare, a class of warfare where one side is a traditional, centrally managed military with superior uniformed numbers, weaponry, and skill. On the other we have smaller numbers, usually untrained fighters with meager weapons, and usually a smaller force. Historical examples include the North Vietnamese in the 20th century and even the American Revolution in the 18th century. Clearly this can be an effective strategy for a band of irregulars... more

Germany’s Leading ISP Deutsche Telekom Under Cyberattack, Close to 900K Customers Affected

Close to a million Deutsche Telekom customers have had trouble getting online since Sunday afternoon which the company on Monday confirmed to be the result of an "outside" attack. more

Is Australia a Hot-Bed of Zombie Activity?

About a week ago, I posted that Australia was getting ISPs to boot infected computers off of their network. I commented on whether or not this was a good policy. However, there was one thing in that article that I wanted to comment on but didn't... more

The Tale of Thousands of Hacked Modems in Brazil, Affecting Millions

Kaspersky Lab Expert, Fabio Assolini, has provided detailed description of an attack which as been underway in Brazil since 2011 using 1 firmware vulnerability, 2 malicious scripts and 40 malicious DNS servers, affecting 6 hardware manufacturers, resulting in millions of Brazilian internet users falling victim to a sustained and silent mass attack on DSL modems. more

Another One (Partially) Bites the Dust

Following in the footsteps of Lethic, Waledac and Mariposa, yet another botnet has been taken offline. Not completely, though, it was only a partial disconnect. The Zeus botnet, also known as Zbot, is a trojan password stealer that captures passwords and sends them to the attacker. more

Security, Privacy Issues and USB Drives

In an article on CSO.com.au a report from Sophos Australia is reported on. The anti-virus software company had bought 50 usb drives for analyses at a public transport auction of devices left on the Sydney trains. When they wrote that 66% was infected with malware, I presumed that they were left behind consciously, but were they? more

Thoughts on the Best Western Compromise

The Sunday Herald reported on Sunday that Best Western was struck by a trojan attack that lead to the possible compromise of about 8 million victims. There is some debate as to the extent of the breach and not a small amount of rumor going around. I'm not entirely disposed to trust corporate press releases for the facts, nor am I going to blindly accept claims of security researchers whose first call is to the PR team when discovering a problem. That said, here is what seems to be the agreed upon facts... more

There are Reports of Widespread Post-Election Spear Phishing Campaigns Targeting Think Tanks, NGOs

In the wake of the 2016 United States Presidential Election, not even six hours after Donald Trump became the nation's President-Elect, an advanced persistent threat (APT) group launched a series of coordinated and well-planned spear phishing campaigns. more

Google Reveals Top 10 Malware Sites From Its Index

While scanning its index, Google in the last two months reports to have found more than 4,000 different websites suspected of distributing malware by massively compromising popular websites. "Of these domains more than 1,400 were hosted in the .cn TLD. Several contained plays on the name of Google such as goooogleadsence.biz, etc.," says Google's security team member, Niels Provos, in a blog post today. more

Rustock, Xarvester Spambots Capable of Sending 25,000 Messages Per Hour, Says New Study

A recent study suggests Rustock and Xarvester malware provided the most efficient spambot code, enabling individual zombie computers to send 600,000 spam messages each over a 24 hour period. "Over the past few years, botnets have revolutionized the spam industry and pushed spam volumes to epidemic proportions despite the best efforts of law enforcement and the computer security industry. Our intention was to better understand the origins of spam, and the malware that drives it," said Phil Hay, senior threat analyst, TRACElabs (a research arm of security company Marshal8e6)... more