Threat Intelligence

I’m Shocked, Shocked to Find There’s Cryptanalysis Going On Here (Your plaintext, sir.)

There's been a lot of media attention in the last few days to a wonderful research paper on the weakness of 1024-bit Diffie-Hellman and on how the NSA can (and possibly does) exploit this. People seem shocked about the problem and appalled that the NSA would actually exploit it. Neither reaction is right. In the first place, the limitations of 1024-bit Diffie-Hellman have been known for a long time. RFC 3766, published in 2004, noted that a 1228-bit modulus had less than 80 bits of strength. That's clearly too little. more

Head of UK Intelligence Agency Says Tech Companies Should Provide a Way Around Encryption

In a speech at the Internet Policy Research Initiative at MIT, British intelligence agency GCHQ director Robert Hannigan said Monday that law enforcement and intelligence officials want only targeted ways to stop what he called "abuse of encryption" by ISIS and other terrorists and criminals. more

More Denial of Service Attacks

There are quite a lot of NTP-amplified denial of service attacks going around at the moment targeting tech and ecommerce companies, including some in the email space. What does NTP-amplifed mean? NTP is "Network Time Protocol" - it allows computers to set their clocks based on an accurate source, and keep them accurate. It's very widely used - OS X and Windows desktops typically use it by default, and most servers should have it running. more

DNSSEC Maintenance - Just Like Mowing the Lawn

DNSSEC is a hot topic. It's a technology newly unleashed on popular networking, which has led to countless articles and posts on the subject, including right here on CircleID. The way a lot of articles try to get your attention is to talk about a technology, like DNSSEC, in a way that makes the technology either seem really significant or really complicated. That is why a lot of articles about DNSSEC make it sound like something huge, complicated, and scary. But it's not. more

Persistent Threat Detection on a Budget

If there's one simple - high impact - thing you could do to quickly check whether your network has been taken over by a criminal entity, or uncover whether some nefarious character is rummaging through your organizations most sensitive intellectual property out of business hours, what would it be? In a nutshell, I'd look to my DNS logs. It's staggering to me how few security teams have gotten wise to regularly interrogating the logs from their recursive DNS servers. more

How To Build A Cybernuke

The Internet infrastructure has been having a bad month. Not as bad as, say, the world's aviation infrastructure, but bad enough. First, Chinese Internet censorship leaked out to a few massively unlucky users of the I root server. Then China Telecom failed to filter someone who leaked thousands of hijacked routes to other people's networks through them, probably by accident. And then, inexplicably, Forbes went where no one had gone before... more

Bug Bounty Programs: Are You Ready? (Part 1)

The premise of crowdsourcing the task of uncovering new bugs and vulnerabilities in an organization's web applications or consumer products sounds compelling to many. What's not to like with the prospect of "many eyes" poking and prodding away at a corporate system for a minimal reward -- and preemptively uncovering flaws that could have been exploited by hackers with nefarious intent? 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

Remote Work Demands Encryption

Now that we are all working from home (WFH), the need for encryption must also increase in priority and awareness. Zoom's popular video conferencing solution got in hot water because they promised "end-to-end" encryption but didn't deliver on it - prompting some organizations to ban it from use altogether. Encryption protects confidential information from being exposed in transmission, providing a secure way for the intended recipient to get the information without snooping by others. more

White House Issues Update on Cybersecurity Report

J. Nicholas Hoover reporting in InformationWeek: "The White House on Wednesday issued an update of the Obama administration's ongoing cybersecurity work, detailing some of the steps being taken in an effort to secure the nation's networks against cyber attacks and in the process offering some new insight into the administration's future plans. The progress report, issued immediately after a meeting held by White House cybersecurity coordinator Howard Schmidt with agency secretaries, cybersecurity experts..." more

United States Steps Up Digital Incursions Into Russia’s Electric Power Grid, According to NYT

The United States has shifted its Russia strategy more toward offense and inserted potentially crippling malware inside Russia's electric power grid at a depth and with an aggressiveness that had never been tried before, according to a New York Times's story that broke over the weekend. more

U.S. Government Takes Steps Towards Increased Transparency for Vulnerabilities Equities Process

The White House has released a charter offering more transparency into the Vulnerabilities Equities Process. more

Researchers Demonstrate How Smart Bulbs Can Be Hacked to Cause Mass Disruptions

A team of researchers have released a report detailing a new type of threat in which adjacent IoT devices, such as Internet-connected light bulbs, will infect each other with a worm that will spread explosively over large areas in a kind of nuclear chain reaction. more

New Cyberthreats: Have You Been Exposed at Home?

There are new threats that you may have already been exposed to. Here are some of the new threats and advice on how to protect yourself. During this pandemic, Zoom has emerged as a very popular teleconferencing choice for companies and educational institutions, but a new weakness for Zoom was also discovered. Some online conferences and classes that had not password protected their sessions fell victim to eavesdroppers using the screen sharing feature to "Zoom Bomb" those sessions with graphic images. 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