Threat Intelligence

A Closer Look at the Flame/Flamer/sKyWIper Malware

The world is abuzz this week with some flaming malware - well "Flame" is the family name if you want to be precise. The malware package itself is considerably larger than what you'll typically bump into on average, but the interest it is garnering with the media and antivirus vendors has more to do with the kinds of victims that have sprung up - victims mostly in the Middle East, including Iran - and a couple of vendors claiming the malware as being related to Stuxnet and Duku. more

The Antivirus Uncertainty Principle

The antivirus industry has been trying to deal with false positive detection issues for a long, long time - and it's not going to be fixed anytime soon. To better understand why, the physicist in me draws an analogy with Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle - where, in its simplest distillation, the better you know where an atom is, the less likely you'll know it's momentum (and vice versa) - aka the "observer effect". more

Google Notifying Half a Million Users Affected By DNSChanger

Google has announced that it has started undertaking an effort to notify roughly half a million people whose computers or home routers are infected with a well-publicized form of malware known as DNSChanger. "After successfully alerting a million users last summer to a different type of malware, we've replicated this method and have started showing warnings via a special message that will appear at the top of the Google search results page for users with affected devices." more

Rethinking Protection Technologies: A Change Has Occurred

Talking technical is easy. Distilling technical detail, complex threats and operation nuances down to something that can be consumed by people whose responsibility for dealing with cybercrime lays three levels below them in their organizational hierarchy is somewhat more difficult. Since so many readers here have strong technical backgrounds and often face the task of educating upwards within their own organizations, I figured I'd share 4 slides from my recent presentation that may be helpful in communicating how the world has changed. more

Hosters: Is Your Platform Being Used to Launch DDoS Attacks?

As anyone who's been in the DDoS attack trenches knows, large multi-gigabit attacks have become more prevalent over the last few years. For many organizations, it's become economically unfeasible to provision enough bandwidth to combat this threat. How are attackers themselves sourcing so much bandwidth? more

Gas Pipeline Firms Under Targeted Phishing Attacks

The United States Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team (ICS-CERT) has issued a warning about an active "spear phishing" campaign targeting companies in the natural gas pipeline sector. In an advisory issued last week, ICS-CERT said it has received information about targeted attacks and intrusions into multiple organizations over the past several months. more

The Dangers of Asking for Social Network Passwords

In the last year or so, there's been a lot of controversy about some employers demanding social network passwords from employees or applicants. There's even been a bill introduced in Congress to bar the practice. The focus has been the privacy violation implied by such demands... The first issue is that a password gives the holder write access, not just read access, to the account. more

The Take Away from Global Payments Breach

Global Payments, an Atlanta-based payment card processing firm, announced yesterday that they had suffered "unauthorized access into a portion of its processing system". Sometime in early March they uncovered the attack, and there are some indications that the breach occurred between January 21st and February 25th of this year... There are a number of unverified reports that a New York City street gang with Central American ties took control of "an administrative account that was not protected sufficiently". more

U.S. Outgunned in Hacker War

The Wall Street Journal has an interview with the outgoing head of the FBI's cyber crime investigation Shawn Henry. In it, he has a blunt assessment of the US's capabilities when it comes to combatting online crime, especially data theft and hacking... The more I read around the Internet, the more clear it's becoming at how cyber security is becoming a central focus. This has pretty big implications for the cloud. more

Kelihos Is Dead: Long Live Kelihos

The King is dead. Long live the King! Or, given this week's events, should the phrase now be "Kelihos is dead. Long live Kelihos"? It is with a little amusement and a lot of cynicism that I've been watching the kerfuffle relating to the latest attempt to take down the Kelihos botnet. You may remember that a similar event ("Kelihos is dead") occurred late last year after Microsoft and Kaspersky took it on themselves to shut down the botnet known as Kelihos (or sometimes as Waledac 2.0 or Hlux). more

I Don’t Need a Signature to Know It’s Going to Be Bad…

There was a period of time not long ago in which signature-based threat detection was cutting-edge. Antivirus, intrusion detection systems (IDS), data leakage prevention (DLP), content filtering and even anomaly detection systems (ADS) all continue to rely heavily upon static signatures. In recent years vendors have shied away from discussing their dependence on such signatures -- instead extolling supplemental "non-signature-based" detection technologies. more

Household Botnet Infections

Pinning down the number of infected computers is really, really hard. I'd go as far as saying it's practically impossible to calculate, let alone observe. Still, that's not going to stop people from attempting to guess or extrapolate from their own observations. Over the years I've heard "reliable" numbers ranging from 10% through to 60% -- and I don't trust any of them. There's a whole gaggle of reasons why the numbers being thrown out to the public are inaccurate and should ideally be interpreted with a lot of skepticism by any right-minded folks. more

Microsoft Disrupts the Zeus Infrastructure

Over the weekend and this morning, Microsoft, working in conjunction with others, issued civil lawsuits to sinkhole numerous domains associated with the Zeus botnet. When I say "botnet", I use the term loosely because Zeus is not a botnet in the sense that Rustock or Waledac is (or was). Rather, Zeus is a tool kit that online criminals can buy that lets them create phishing pages, perform fast fluxing, host drive-by downloads in addition to spamming. It's more like infrastructure than a botnet, although it does have a large botnet under its control. more

Microsoft and Financial Services Groups Disrupt Zeus Botnet Servers

Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit - in collaboration with Financial Services - Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FS-ISAC) and NACHA - The Electronic Payments Association, as well as Kyrus Tech Inc. - has executed a coordinated global action against some of the worst known cybercrime operations fueling online fraud and identity theft, said Microsoft in an announcement today. "With this legal and technical action, a number of the most harmful botnets using the Zeus family of malware worldwide have been disrupted in an unprecedented, proactive cross-industry operation against this cybercriminal organization." more

US Government Networks Thoroughly Penetrated by Foreign Spies, Experts Tell Senate

Network security experts from across the U.S. government told a U.S. Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Tuesday that federal networks have been thoroughly penetrated by foreign spies, and that current perimeter-based defenses that attempt to curb intrusions are outdated and futile. more