Domain: net-security.org
Stories and comments across the archive that link to net-security.org.
Stories · 444
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Researchers Beat Google's Bouncer
An anonymous reader writes "When earlier this year Google introduced Bouncer — an automated app scanning service that analyzes apps by running them on Google's cloud infrastructure and simulating how they will run on an Android device — it shared practically nothing about how it operates, in the hopes of making malicious app developers' scramble for a while to discover how to bypass it. As it turned out, several months later security researchers Jon Oberheide and Charlie Miller discovered — among other things — just what kind of virtual environment Bouncer uses (the QEMU processor emulator) and that all requests coming from Google came from a specific IP block, and made an app that was instructed to behave as a legitimate one every time it detected this specific virtual environment. Now two more researchers have effectively proved that Bouncer can be rather easily fooled into considering a malicious app harmless." -
Researchers Beat Google's Bouncer
An anonymous reader writes "When earlier this year Google introduced Bouncer — an automated app scanning service that analyzes apps by running them on Google's cloud infrastructure and simulating how they will run on an Android device — it shared practically nothing about how it operates, in the hopes of making malicious app developers' scramble for a while to discover how to bypass it. As it turned out, several months later security researchers Jon Oberheide and Charlie Miller discovered — among other things — just what kind of virtual environment Bouncer uses (the QEMU processor emulator) and that all requests coming from Google came from a specific IP block, and made an app that was instructed to behave as a legitimate one every time it detected this specific virtual environment. Now two more researchers have effectively proved that Bouncer can be rather easily fooled into considering a malicious app harmless." -
Researchers Beat Google's Bouncer
An anonymous reader writes "When earlier this year Google introduced Bouncer — an automated app scanning service that analyzes apps by running them on Google's cloud infrastructure and simulating how they will run on an Android device — it shared practically nothing about how it operates, in the hopes of making malicious app developers' scramble for a while to discover how to bypass it. As it turned out, several months later security researchers Jon Oberheide and Charlie Miller discovered — among other things — just what kind of virtual environment Bouncer uses (the QEMU processor emulator) and that all requests coming from Google came from a specific IP block, and made an app that was instructed to behave as a legitimate one every time it detected this specific virtual environment. Now two more researchers have effectively proved that Bouncer can be rather easily fooled into considering a malicious app harmless." -
2.4 Million Ontario Voters' Private Info Compromised
An anonymous reader writes "Elections Ontario, an agency tasked with the organization and conduct of general elections and by-elections in Canada's Ontario region, is warning voters about the loss and potential theft of two USB sticks containing private information of 2.4 million voters from approximately 20–25 electoral districts. The information at issue is limited to full name, gender, birth date, address, whether or not an elector voted in the last provincial election and any other personal information updates provided by voters to Elections Ontario during that time, as well as administrative codes used solely for election purposes. The information does not include how an individual voted." -
Yahoo! Closes Security Hole That Led To Breach
An anonymous reader writes "Yahoo! has patched the security hole that allowed hackers to access some 450,000 email addresses and passwords associated with Yahoo! Contributor Network and ultimately publish them last week. In the meantime, the group responsible for the hack of the official forum site of technology company NVIDIA has also dumped some user 800 records taken during the breach." -
Yahoo! Closes Security Hole That Led To Breach
An anonymous reader writes "Yahoo! has patched the security hole that allowed hackers to access some 450,000 email addresses and passwords associated with Yahoo! Contributor Network and ultimately publish them last week. In the meantime, the group responsible for the hack of the official forum site of technology company NVIDIA has also dumped some user 800 records taken during the breach." -
How Exploit Kits Have Changed Spammers' M.O.
An anonymous reader writes "Spammers used to depend on email recipients to tie the noose around their own necks by inputing their personal and financial information in credible spoofs of legitimate websites, but with the advent of exploit kits, that technique is slowly getting sidelined. Prompted by the rise in numbers of spam runs leading to pages hosting exploit kits, Trend Micro researchers have recently been investigating a number of high-volume spam runs using the Blackhole exploit kit. According to them, the phishing messages of today have far less urgency and the message is implicit: 'Your statement is available online'; or 'Incoming payment received'; or 'Password reset notification.'" One thing that's long worried me is that the bulk of spammers and malware writers may hire copywriters with a better grasp of English than most of the ones I see now. "I send you this file in order to have your advice" was funny, because it stuck out. -
Nearly Half a Million Yahoo Passwords Leaked [Updated]
An anonymous reader writes "Some 450,000 email addresses and associated unencrypted passwords have been dumped online by the hacking collective 'D33Ds Company' following the compromise of a Yahoo subdomain. The attackers said that they managed to access the subdomain by leveraging a union-based SQL injection attack, which made the site return more information that it should have. According to Ars Technica, the dump also includes over 2,700 database table or column names and 298 MySQL variables retrieved during the attack." Update: 07/12 20:03 GMT by T :Reader techfun89 adds this update: "Yahoo has confirmed that the usernames and passwords of more than 400,000 accounts were stolen from their servers earlier this week and that data was briefly posted online. The information has since been removed but it wasn't just credentials for Yahoo, but also Gmail, AOL, Comcast, Hotmail, MSN, SBC Global, BellSouth, Verizon and Live.com as well." -
Facebook API Bug Deletes Contact Info On Phones
An anonymous reader writes "If you thought that Facebook's recent unannounced change of its users' email address tied with their account to Facebook ones was bad, you'll be livid if you check your mobile phone contacts and discover that the change has deleted the email addresses of many of your friends. According to Facebook, the glitch was due to a bug in its application-programming interface, and causes the last added email address to be pulled and added to the user's phone Contacts. The company says they are working hard at fixing the problem, but in the meantime, a lot of users have effectively lost some of the information stored on their devices." -
Older Means Wiser To Computer Security
An anonymous reader writes "Growing up in the digital age, 18 – 25s may appear to be a more tech-savvy generation, but that does not translate into safer computing and online practices. A new study reveals that they are the most at-risk group, and prone to cyber-attacks. That makes this group even more vulnerable to online security threats. Younger users tend to prioritize entertainment and community over security, perhaps due to overconfidence in their security knowledge. For example, they're more concerned about gaming or other social activities than their online security. They also have less sophisticated security software, and hence, have reported more security problems than other groups." -
Google Detects 9500 Malicious Sites Per Day
An anonymous reader writes "Five years after it was first introduced, Google's Safe Browsing program continues to provide a service to the 600 million Chrome, Firefox, and Safari users, as well as those searching for content through the company's eponymous search engine. According to Google Security Team member Niels Provos, the program detects about 9,500 new malicious websites and pops up several million warnings every day to Internet users. Once a site has been cleaned up, the warning is lifted. They provide malware warnings for about 300 thousand downloads per day through their download protection service for Chrome." -
MariaDB and MySQL Authentication Bypass Exploit
JohnBert writes "A security bug in MariaDB and MySQL has been revealed, allowing a known username and password to access the master user table of a MySQL server and dump it into a locally-stored file. By using a tool like John the Ripper, this file can be easily cracked to reveal text passwords that can provide further access. By committing a threaded brute-force module that abuses the authentication bypass flaw to automatically dump the password database, you can access the database using the cracked password hashes even if the authentication bypass vulnerability is fixed." -
Lessons Learned From Cracking 2M LinkedIn Passwords
An anonymous reader writes "Qualys researcher Francois Pesce used open source password cracker John the Ripper to try to crack SHA-1 hashes of leaked LinkedIn passwords. He ran the John the Ripper default command on a small default password dictionary of less than 4,000 words. The program then switched to incremental mode based on statistical analysis of known password structures, which generated more probable passwords. The results? After 4 hours, approximately 900,000 passwords had been cracked. Francois then ran numerous iterations, incorporating older dictionaries to uncover less common passwords and ended up cracking a total of 2,000,000 passwords." -
MD5crypt Password Scrambler Is No Longer Considered Safe
As reported here recently, millions of LinkedIn password hashes have been leaked online. An anonymous reader writes "Now, Poul-Henning Kamp a developer known for work on various projects and the author of the md5crypt password scrambler asks everybody to migrate to a stronger password scrambler without undue delay. From the blog post: 'New research has shown that it can be run at a rate close to 1 million checks per second on COTS GPU hardware, which means that it is as prone to brute-force attacks as the DES based UNIX crypt was back in 1995: Any 8 character password can be found in a couple of days. The default algorithm for storing password hashes in /etc/shadow is MD5. RHEL / CentOS / FreeBSD user can migrate to SHA-512 hashing algorithms.'" Reader Curseyoukhan was one of several to also point out that dating site eHarmony got the same treatment as LinkedIn. Update: 06/07 20:13 GMT by T : An anonymous reader adds a snippet from Help Net Security, too: "Last.fm has piped up to warn about a leak of their own users' passwords. Users who have logged in to the site were greeted today by a warning asking them to change their password while the site investigates a security problem. Following the offered link to learn more, they landed on another page with another warning." -
World's Largest Biometric Database
An anonymous reader writes "In the last two years, over 200 million Indian nationals have had their fingerprints and photographs taken and irises scanned, and given a unique 12-digit number that should identify them everywhere and to everyone. This is only the beginning, and the goal is to do the same with the entire population (1.2 billion), so that poorer Indians can finally prove their existence and identity when needed for getting documents, getting help from the government, and opening bank and other accounts. This immense task needs a database that can contain over 12 billion fingerprints, 1.2 billion photographs, and 2.4 billion iris scans, can be queried from diverse devices connected to the Internet, and can return accurate results in an extremely short time." -
World IPv6 Launch Day Underway
A number of readers have written in with stories related to today's permanent rollout of IPv6 by several major organizations. From the looks of it, for the 1% or so of end users with IPv6 support, everything is going smoothly. For those not so lucky to have IPv6 already, an anonymous reader writes with (mostly) good news: 60% of ISPs intend to enable IPv6 by the end of 2012. For business users, darthcamaro provides some words of caution: "...the Chief Security Officer of VeriSign doesn't think IPv6 should be turned on by a whole lot of people. The problem is network security devices in many cases don't scan IPv6. So if you turn IPv6 on, you're screwed. 'If you don't have that visibility into IPv6, you should probably consider explicitly disabling IPv6 on your systems until you can take a very concerted approach to enabling IPv6 in a secure manner,' McPherson said." -
Flame Malware Hijacks Windows Update
wiredmikey writes "As more research unfolds about the recently discovered Flame malware, researchers have found three modules – named Snack, Gadget and Munch – that are used to launch what is essentially a man-in-the-middle attack against other computers on a network. As a result, Kaspersky researchers say when a machine attempts to connect to Microsoft's Windows Update, it redirects the connection through an infected machine and it sends a fake malicious Windows Update to the client. That is courtesy of a rogue Microsoft certificate that chains to the Microsoft Root Authority and improperly allows code signing. According to Symantec, the Snack module sniffs NetBIOS requests on the local network. NetBIOS name resolution allows computers to find each other on a local network via peer-to-peer, opening up an avenue for spoofing. The findings have prompted Microsoft to say that it plans to harden Windows Update against attacks in the future, though the company did not immediately reveal details as to how." And an anonymous reader adds a note that Flame's infrastructure is massive: "over 80 different C&C domains, pointed to over 18 IP addresses located in Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, Poland, the UK, and other countries." -
IE10 Will Have 'Do Not Track' On By Default
An anonymous reader writes "As Microsoft released the preview of the next version of its Internet Explorer browser, news that in Windows 8 the browser will be sending a 'Do Not Track' signal to Web sites by default must have shaken online advertising giants. 'Consumers can change this default setting if they choose,' Microsoft noted, but added that this decision reflects their commitment to providing Windows customers an experience that is 'private by default' in an era when so much user data is collected online.' This step will make Internet Explorer 10 the first web browser with DNT on by default. And while the websites are not required to comply with the users' do-not-track request, the DNT initiative — started by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission — is making good progress." -
Programmer Admits Stealing US Gov't Accounting Software Source Code
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from NetSecurity.org: "A Chinese computer programmer that was charged with stealing the source code of software developed by the U.S. Treasury Department pleaded guilty to the charge on Tuesday. The 33-year-old Bo Zhang, legally employed by a U.S. consulting firm contracted by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, admitted that he took advantage of the access he had to the Government-wide Accounting and Reporting Program (GWA) in order to copy the code onto an external hard disk and take it home." Just such things make me think that the default setting for software created with public money should be released with source code anyhow, barring context-specific reasons that it shouldn't be. -
Your Passwords Don't Suck — It's Your Policies
First time accepted submitter eGuy writes "ZDNet sparked a debate about password policies when John Fontana wrote about my open source (LGPL) password policy project that rewards XKCD-like passwords. Steve Watts of SecurEnvoy replies that it is too little, too late. What think ye? Is there hope for passwords?" -
Most CCTV Systems Come With Trivial Exploits
An anonymous reader writes "The use of CCTV cameras for physical surveillance of all kinds of environments has become so pervasive that most of us don't give the devices a second thought anymore. But, those individuals and organizations who actually use and control them should be aware that most of them come with default settings that make them vulnerable to outside attacks. According to Gotham Digital Science researcher Justin Cacak, standalone CCTV video surveillance systems by MicroDigital, HIVISION, CTRing, and many other rebranded devices are not only shipped with remote access enabled by default, but also with preconfigured default accounts and passwords that are banal and easy to guess." -
IEEE Approves Revision of Wireless LAN Standard
An anonymous reader writes "IEEE announced the publication of IEEE 802.11-2012, which defines the technology for the world's premier wireless LAN products. The new IEEE 802.11-2012 revision has been expanded significantly by supporting devices and networks that are faster and more secure, while offering improved Quality of Service and improved cellular network hand-off. The standard's relevance continues to expand with the emergence of new applications, such as the smart grid, which augments the facility for electricity generation, distribution, delivery and consumption with a two-way, end-to-end network for communications and control." -
Good News: A Sustained Drop In Spam Levels
Orome1 writes "Industry and government efforts have dealt a significant blow to spam, according to a Commtouch report that is compiled based on an analysis of more than 10 billion transactions handled on a daily basis. The sustained decrease in spam over the last year can be attributed to many factors, including: Botnet takedowns, increased prosecution of spammers and the source industries such as fake pharmaceuticals and replicas. However, spam is still four times the level of legitimate email and cybercriminals are increasing their revenues from other avenues, such as banking fraud malware." -
Researchers Break Video CAPTCHAs
Orome1 writes "After creating the 'Decaptcha' software to solve audio CAPTCHAs, Stanford University's researchers modified it and turned it against text and, quite recently, video CAPTCHAs with considerable success. Video CAPTCHAs have been touted by their developer, NuCaptcha, as the best and most secure method of spotting bots trying to pass themselves off as human users. Unfortunately for the company, researchers have managed to prove that over 90 percent of the company's video CAPTCHAs can be decoded by using their Decaptcha software in conjunction with optical flow algorithms created by researchers in the computer vision field of study." -
Researchers Break Video CAPTCHAs
Orome1 writes "After creating the 'Decaptcha' software to solve audio CAPTCHAs, Stanford University's researchers modified it and turned it against text and, quite recently, video CAPTCHAs with considerable success. Video CAPTCHAs have been touted by their developer, NuCaptcha, as the best and most secure method of spotting bots trying to pass themselves off as human users. Unfortunately for the company, researchers have managed to prove that over 90 percent of the company's video CAPTCHAs can be decoded by using their Decaptcha software in conjunction with optical flow algorithms created by researchers in the computer vision field of study." -
Symantec Tells Customers To Stop Using pcAnywhere
Orome1 writes "In a perhaps not wholly unexpected move, Symantec has advised the customers of its pcAnywhere remote control application to stop using it until patches for a slew of vulnerabilities are issued. If the attackers place a network sniffer on a customer's internal network and have access to the encryption details, the pcAnywhere traffic — including exchanged user login credentials — could be intercepted and decoded. If the attackers get their hands on the cryptographic key they can launch remote control sessions and, thus, access to systems and sensitive data. If the cryptographic key itself is using Active Directory credentials, they can also carry out other malicious activities on the network." -
Mozilla Offers Alternative To OpenID
Orome1 writes "Mozilla has been working for a while now on a new browser-based system for identifying and authenticating users it calls BrowserID, but it's only this month that all of its sites have finally been outfitted with the technology. Mozilla aims for BrowserID to become a more secure alternative to OpenID, the decentralized authentication system offered to users of popular sites such as Google, Yahoo!, PayPal, MySpace and others." -
Mozilla Offers Alternative To OpenID
Orome1 writes "Mozilla has been working for a while now on a new browser-based system for identifying and authenticating users it calls BrowserID, but it's only this month that all of its sites have finally been outfitted with the technology. Mozilla aims for BrowserID to become a more secure alternative to OpenID, the decentralized authentication system offered to users of popular sites such as Google, Yahoo!, PayPal, MySpace and others." -
Symantec Admits Its Networks Were Hacked in 2006
Orome1 writes "After having first claimed that the source code leaked by Indian hacking group Dharmaraja was not stolen through a breach of its networks, but possibly by compromising the networks of a third-party entity, Symantec backpedalled and announced that the code seems to have exfiltrated during a 2006 breach of its systems. Symantec spokesman Cris Paden has confirmed that unknown hackers have managed to get their hands on the source code to the following Symantec solutions: Norton Antivirus Corporate Edition, Norton Internet Security, Norton Utilities, Norton GoBack and pcAnywhere." -
Hackers Steal $6.7M In Bank Cyber Heist
Orome1 writes "A perfectly planned and coordinated bank robbery was executed during the first three days of the new year in Johannesburg, and left the targeted South African Postbank — part of the nation's Post Office service — with a loss of some $6.7 million. The cyber gang behind the heist was obviously very well informed about the post office's IT systems, and began preparing the ground for the heist a few months before, by opening accounts in post offices across the country and compromising an employee computer in the Rustenburg Post Office." -
Securing Android For the Enterprise
Orome1 writes "While many companies use IPsec for secure remote access to their networks, no integrated IPsec VPN client is available on Android. Apple has already fixed this shortcoming in iOS, in part, because it wanted make the iPhone attractive for businesses. The Android operating system doesn't just lack an integrated IPsec VPN client, it also makes installing and configuring third-party VPN software quite complicated. IPsec VPN clients have to be integrated into the kernel of each device, and the client software has to be installed specifically for a memory area. This means that the firmware of each Android smartphone or tablet has to be modified accordingly. Until a 'real' IPsec VPN client is available, Android users can use their devices' integrated VPN clients based on PPTP or L2TP, which is deployed over IPsec. A 'real' IPsec VPN connection, however, is more secure because it encrypts data prior to authentication." -
SCADA Vulnerabilities In Prisons Could Open Cell Doors
Orome1 writes "Many prisons and jails use SCADA systems with PLCs to open and close doors. Using original and publicly available exploits along with evaluating vulnerabilities in electronic and physical security designs, researchers discovered significant vulnerabilities in PLCs used in correctional facilities by being able to remotely flip the switches to 'open' or 'locked closed' on cell doors and gates." -
Challenges of Setting Up a Security Conference
Orome1 writes "The founder of the SecurityByte conference talks about his motivations for organizing such an event in his native country and what he hopes it will achieve. He shares knowledge regarding the differences between the organization processes involved when setting up this type of event in India as opposed to North America, which he says have a lot to do with the fact that there is lack of awareness about security in India, and that the majority of such events held there are mostly vendor-driven and free for visitors." -
Study Shows Many Sites Still Failing Basic Security Measures
Orome1 writes with a summary of a large survey of web applications by Veracode. From the article: "Considered 'low hanging fruit' because of their prevalence in software applications, XSS and SQL Injection are two of the most frequently exploited vulnerabilities, often providing a gateway to customer data and intellectual property. When applying the new analysis criteria, Veracode reports eight out of 10 applications fail to meet acceptable levels of security, marking a significant decline from past reports. Specifically for web applications, the report showed a high concentration of XSS and SQL Injection vulnerabilities, with XSS present in 68 percent of all web applications and SQL Injection present in 32 percent of all web applications." -
IT Pros Can't Resist Peeking At Privileged Info
Orome1 writes "IT security staff will be some of the most informed people at the office Christmas party this year. A full 26 per cent of them admit to using their privileged log in rights to look at confidential information they should not have had access to in the first place. It has proved just too tempting, and maybe just human nature, for them to rifle through redundancy lists, payroll information and other sensitive data including, for example, other people's Christmas bonus details." -
Attackers Leak UN Usernames and Passwords
Orome1 writes "A group of hackers that go by the name of 'Teamp0ison' has apparently compromised one (or more) of UN's servers and dumped over 1000 email addresses, usernames, and passwords of their staff." The BBC has a bit more, including a denial that anything of value was compromised. -
Water Pump Destruction Not Due To SCADA Hack
knifeyspooney writes "According to the Springfield State Journal-Register, the city's recent public water system failure was not caused by malicious activity. One water district trustee spoke this gem: 'First, they tell us that it's the first instance of cyber hacking in the entire world, and everyone goes nuts. Now, all of a sudden, they tell us it's not.'" -
Why Do Companies Backup So Infrequently?
Orome1 writes "Businesses are on average backing up to tape once a month, with one alarming statistic showing 10 percent were only backing up to tape once per year, according to a survey by Vanson Bourne. Although cloud backup solutions are becoming more common, still the majority of companies will do their backups in-house. Sometimes they will have dedicated IT staff to run them, but usually it's done in-house because they have always done it like that, and they have confidence in their own security and safekeeping of data." -
Hiding Messages In VoIP Packets
Orome1 writes "A group of researchers from the Warsaw University of Technology have devised a relatively simple way of hiding information within VoIP packets exchanged during a phone conversation. The called the method TranSteg, and they have proved its effectiveness by creating a proof-of-concept implementation that allowed them to send 2.2MB (in each direction) during a 9-minute call. IP telephony allows users to make phone calls through data networks that use an IP protocol. The actual conversation consists of two audio streams, and the Real-Time Transport Protocol (RTP) is used to transport the voice data required for the communication to succeed. But, RTP can transport different kinds of data, and the TranSteg method takes advantage of this fact." -
How Cell Phone Money Laundering Works
Orome1 writes "In Russia, most cell phone SIM cards are prepaid. One of the major Russian operators offers a legal service that allows anyone to transfer the prepaid amount of money from a SIM card to a bank account, a credit card, another cell phone number (via a text message) or to express money transfer service Unistream. This particular service is heavily misused by cyber crooks who use it to launder money collected through ransomware campaigns, mobile malware and SMS scam campaigns. Kaspersky Lab's Denis Maslennikov takes us though the steps of each of these types of scams and shares insights into the shady economy that has sprung up due to cyber criminals' need to get their hand on the collected money without leaving a direct trail." -
Microsoft, Mozilla and Google Ban Malaysian Intermediate CA
Orome1 writes "Microsoft, Mozilla and Google have announced that they are revoking trust in Malaysia-based DigiCert, an intermediate certificate authority authorized by well-known CA Entrust, following the issuing of 22 certificates with weak keys, lacking in usage extensions and revocation information. 'There is no indication that any certificates were issued fraudulently, however, these weak keys have allowed some of the certificates to be compromised,' wrote Jerry Bryant of Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing." -
Spear Phishing Campaign Hits Dozens of Chemical, Defense Firms
Orome1 writes "Nearly 50 (and quite possibly more) companies in the chemical, defense, and other sectors have been hit with a spear phishing campaign carrying a backdoor Trojan with the ultimate goal of exfiltrating R&D and manufacturing information, revealed Symantec in a newly released report. The attacks against these companies started in late July 2011 and lasted until the middle of September 2011, but the attackers are thought to be the same ones who targeted human rights related NGOs and companies in the motor industry in May." Here's a link to the report itself (PDF). -
Hackers Briefly Controlled US Government Satellites
Orome1 writes "Two U.S. satellites have been tampered with by hackers — possibly Chinese ones — in 2007 and 2008, claims a soon-to-be released report by the the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. The two satellites, Landsat-7 and Terra AM-1, had been interfered with on four separate occasions, allowing the attackers to be in command of the satellites for two to over twelve minutes each time. Luckily, both of the satellites are used only for observing the Earth's climate and terrain, and the hackers never actually misused their control over them in any way." -
Bug Opens Chrome to Easy Remote Code Execution
Orome1 writes "ACROS Security notified Google about a peculiar behavior of the Chrome browser that can be exploited for execution of remote code outside Chrome sandbox under specific conditions. It is another case of file planting, where an application loads a data file (as opposed to binary file, leading to binary planting) from the current working directory. Google decided that this was not a vulnerability, but rather a 'strange behavior that [they] should consider changing.' The reason they provided was that 'the social engineering level involved here is significantly higher than "Your computer is infected with a virus, download this free anti-virus software and run the exe file to fix it."'" -
Analysis of 250,000 Hacker Conversations
Orome1 writes "Imperva released a report (PDF) analyzing the content and activities of an online hacker forum with nearly 220,000 registered members, although many are dormant. The forum is used by hackers for training, communications, collaboration, recruitment, commerce and even social interaction. Commercially, this forum serves as a marketplace for selling of stolen data and attack software. The chat rooms are filled with technical subjects ranging from advice on attack planning to solicitations for help with specific campaigns." -
Analysis of 250,000 Hacker Conversations
Orome1 writes "Imperva released a report (PDF) analyzing the content and activities of an online hacker forum with nearly 220,000 registered members, although many are dormant. The forum is used by hackers for training, communications, collaboration, recruitment, commerce and even social interaction. Commercially, this forum serves as a marketplace for selling of stolen data and attack software. The chat rooms are filled with technical subjects ranging from advice on attack planning to solicitations for help with specific campaigns." -
The State of Hacked Accounts
Orome1 writes "Most users get hacked at high rates even when they do not think they are engaging in risky behavior, with 62% unaware of how their accounts had been compromised, The results of a Commtouch survey presenting statistics on the theft, abuse and eventual recovery of Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and Facebook accounts, shows that less than one-third of users noticed their accounts had been compromised, with over 50% relying on friends to point out their stolen accounts. Also, more than two-thirds of all compromised accounts are used to send spam and scams, which is not surprising, as cybercriminals can improve their email delivery rates by sending from trusted domains such as Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail, and enhance their open and click-through rates by sending from familiar senders." -
How Windows Gets Infected With Malware
Orome1 writes "Since Up to 85 % of all virus infections occur as a result of drive-by attacks automated via commercial exploit kits, CSIS has actively collected real time data from them for a period of three months. The purpose of their study is to reveal precisely how Microsoft Windows machines are infected with malware and which browsers, versions of Windows and third party software that are at risk. They monitored more than 50 different exploit kits on 44 unique servers / IP addresses. The statistical material covers all in all more than half a million user exposures out of which as many as 31.3 % were infected with the virus/malware due to missing security updates." -
Mysql.com Hacked, Made To Serve Malware
Orome1 writes "Mysql.com was compromised today, redirecting visitors to a page serving malware. Security firm Armorize detected the compromise through its website malware monitoring platform HackAlert, and has analyzed how the compromise of the site's visitors unfolded. The mysql.com website was injected with a script that generates an iFrame redirecting the visitors to a page where the BlackHole exploit pack is hosted." According to Brian Krebs, the exploit used to compromise the site was being shopped around last week for $3,000. -
DigiNotar Goes Bankrupt After Hack
twoheadedboy writes "DigiNotar, the Dutch certificate authority which was recently at the centre of a significant hacking case, has been declared bankrupt. The CA discovered it was compromised on 19 July, leading to 531 rogue certificates being issued. It was only in August that the attacks became public knowledge. Now the company has gone bankrupt, parent firm VASCO said today. VASCO admitted the financial losses associated with the demise of DigiNotar would be 'significant.' It all goes to show how quickly a data breach can bring down a company." Adds reader Orome1: "This is unsurprising, since a report issued by security audit firm Fox-IT, who has been hired to investigate the now notorious DigiNotar breach, revealed that things were far worse than we were led to believe."