Threat Intelligence |
Sponsored by |
|
If you haven't been reading the news of late, venerable anti-spam service Spamhaus has been the target of a sustained, record-setting Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack over the past couple of weeks... Of course, bad guys are always mad at Spamhaus, and so they had a pretty robust set-up to begin with, but whoever was behind this attack was able to muster some huge resources, heretofore never seen in intensity, and it had some impact, on the Spamhaus website, and to a limited degree, on the behind-the-scenes services that Spamhaus uses to distribute their data to their customers. more
As attack vectors go, very few are as significant as obtaining the ability to insert bespoke code in to an application and have it automatically execute upon "inaccessible" backend systems. In the Web application arena, SQL Injection vulnerabilities are often the scariest threat that developers and system administrators come face to face with (albeit way too regularly). more
Ah, BYOD. How I love thee. BYOD, or "Bring Your Own Device", gives me choices. I can use a device at work I actually like and am most effective with. (How did I ever get by without my iPad?) But BYOD comes with challenges. Personal devices can be infected with malware. Once they're connected to an enterprise's network, they can be controlled by a bot master to hijack enterprise resources and wreak havoc as part of a botnet. more
It is just another phishing case. Why should I care? I happened to receive my own copy of the phishing email message. Most Internet users will just smile bitterly before deleting it. I checked it to see why it had gone through the spam filters. It had no URL in the text but a reply-to address. So it needed a valid domain name, and had one: postfinances.com. PostFinance (without trailing "s") is the payment system of the Swiss Post. It has millions of users. more
The capabilities IPv6 provides will enhance online security, but the shift to the new Internet address scheme may also present risks if not properly managed. Previously, Internet security was largely an after-thought for the early Internet, as its primary purpose was to facilitate open, end-to-end, any-to-any communications and information exchange for bridging and accelerating research efforts. Today, we have a much more complex online ecosystem that spans billions of users across the globe and serves not only as an engine for e-commerce, but as an engine for all commerce. more
Declan McCullagh recently opined that the "FBI [and the] DEA warn [that] IPv6 could shield criminals from police." His post was picked-up relatively widely in the past few days, with the headlines adding more hyperbole along the way. So just how real is this threat? Let's take a look. more
At the end of January, the DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) specification was publicly announced and resulted in widespread media coverage, blog posts and discussion. Since that time various individuals and organizations have been working on writing code for DMARC validators and report parsers. The dmarc-discuss list has been fairly active as various questions and issues have been raised and clarified. Now it is time to see how well the various implementations play together in live testing. more
The technical press is full of reports about the leak of a hashed password file from LinkedIn. Worse yet, we hear, the hashes weren't salted. The situation is probably both better and worse than it would appear; in any event, it's more complicated. more
Eugene Kaspersky has warned global leaders that the world needs international agreements about cyber-weapons in the same way as it needs agreements about nuclear or biological weaponry. The chairman and chief executive officer of Kaspersky Lab, warned delegates at CeBIT Australia that cyber-warfare and terrorism was the number one internet threat facing the world today. He said the Stuxnet industrial virus had demonstrated that cyber-weapons were capable of damaging physical infrastructure, and were "a thousand times cheaper" to develop than conventional weaponry. more
In case you haven't been watching cyber news recently, last week various security researchers published that Macs were infected by the Flashback Trojan and that the total number of infections worldwide was 600,000. This number was published by a couple of blogs. I debated writing about this topic since we had a previous Mac outbreak last year that initially spiked up, caused Apple to go into denial about the affair before issuing a fix, and then the malware kind of went away. Will this follow the same pattern? more
Most of the good thrillers I tend to watch have spies and assassins in them for some diabolical reason. In those movies you'll often find their target, the Archduke of Villainess, holed up in some remote local and the spy has to fake an identity in order to penetrate the layers of defense. Almost without exception the spy enters the country using a fake passport; relying upon a passport from any country other than their own... So, with that bit of non-fiction in mind, why do so many people automatically assume that cyber-attacks sourced from IP addresses within China are targeted, state-sponsored, attacks? more
This morning, Global Payments held a conference call with investors and analysts covering their earlier breach announcement and projected earnings. Global Payments had also released an update advisory yesterday stating that "the company believes that the affected portion of its processing system is confined to North America and less than 1,500,000 card numbers have been exported" and that only Track 2 card data may have been stolen. more
Last week at RSA, Bruce Schneier gave a talk on the top 3 emerging threats on the Internet. Whereas we in the security field usually talk about spam, malware and cyber crime, he talked about three meta-trends that all have the potential to be more dangerous than the cybercriminals. Here are my notes. more
Brian Krebs reporting in Krebs on Security: "Millions of computers infected with the stealthy and tenacious DNSChanger Trojan may be spared a planned disconnection from the Internet early next month if a New York court approves a new request by the U.S. government. Meanwhile, six men accused of managing and profiting from the huge collection of hacked PCs are expected to soon be extradited from their native Estonia to face charges in the United States." more
A recent study took an in-depth look at the scale and the risk of domain name typosquatting -- the practice of registering mis-spellings of popular domain names in an attempt to profit from typing mistakes. "Applying every possible one-character typo to the domain names of Facebook, Google, Twitter, Microsoft, Apple and Sophos," Paul Ducklin, Sophos' Asia Pacific head of technology collected HTTP data and browser screenshots from 1502 web sites and 14,495 URLs. In this report, Ducklin analyses the data revealing unexpected results within the typosquatting ecosystem. more
A World-Renowned Source for Internet Developments. Serving Since 2002.
