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The Application Whitelisting and Security Weblog

The Internet’s Top Botnet, Zeus, Can Rob You Blind

The Internet's Top Botnet, Zeus, Can Rob You BlindZeus isn’t just the ruler of Mount Olympia, for now Zeus is also atop the botnet world.

As I mentioned in my previous blog, the Zeus family of malware is currently the number one botnet online. According to a recent article, “Zeus Trojan moving past anti-virus protections”, this particular type of malware, which targets bank-related information, has infected 3.6 million PC’s in the United States alone. What makes this malicious code so successful is its ability to bypass even the latest anti-virus software without even knowing it. ( Read More… )

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Cyber thieves cracking banks’ two-factor authentication systems

According to Gartner’s Avivah Litan, even two-factor authentication systems can’t stop today’s cyber thieves. Over the past few months, banks around the world that rely on one-time-password authentication systems have been compromised by man-in-the-middle attacks, despite having two-factor security in place.

Thomas Claburn of InformationWeek writes in his article, “Strong Authentication Not Strong Enough,” that fraudsters are now using call forwarding to bypass security measures. ( Read More… )

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Web-based malware breaking traditional AV model

Web-based malware breaks traditional AV modelFor years, antivirus engines have been the primary defense against viruses, worms, Trojans, bots, and all other forms of malware designed to gain access to our emails, social networking sites, and corporate networks. While collecting their signatures from honeypots and gathering self-propagating threats has been useful in detecting malicious behavior in the past, things have changed. Today’s threats aren’t propagating. They’re using social engineering to lure their victims instead, thus breaking the traditional AV model. ( Read More… )

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A call for proactive security … I prefer real protection

A call for proactive security ... I prefer protectionWith industrialized hacking on the rise, organizations serious about protecting their data must take proactive measures if they expect to win the war against cybercriminals. That’s Imperva CTO Amichai Shulman’s straight-forward message to applications owners everywhere and lists some real trends that are threatening businesses everywhere. My take, this is a good list, but while proactive is good, protective is better.

In this week’s TechJournal South article, “Industrialized hacking tops five data security trends for 2010″, Mr. Shulman’s data security firm listed its top five security predictions for 2010: ( Read More… )

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Cisco’s 2009 Security Threat Report: We need a patch for the common user!

In its 2009 Annual Security Report, released today, Cisco Systems did an excellent job of explaining the 2009 threat landscape and outlining its expectations for 2010.

While the 40 page report covers many, many topics, there was one overarching theme that continued to bubble to the surface for me: there are no patches for people, and people are the primary vulnerability going forward.

Like it or not, our people (employees, contractors, partners, etc.) will continue accessing social media sites, cloud computing solutions and parts of the web that we know nothing about (the “Dark Web” as Cisco calls it). ( Read More… )

Most recent comment:   The French and German governments agree… And they are both wrong. — CoreTrace WhiteSpace

[...] in December, I wrote about Cisco’s 2009 Security Threat Report and made the comment that application whitelisting ...