For organizations that run the nation’s most critical infrastructures, it’s important to understand that today’s targeted cyber attacks are designed to carry out any number of activities including monitoring network processes to bringing down the grid. Just because hackers haven’t carried out an attack doesn’t mean malware isn’t already resident in a system waiting for the most opportune time to launch.
In the article, “Attackers can take out critical infrastructure, but profit lies elsewhere, researcher says,” Jason Larson, a security researcher at the Idaho National Laboratory, said there’s plenty of evidence that hackers have already infiltrated control systems that run power generation plants, gas and oil refineries, and other chemical factories, but so far their activity is observational. Continue reading this post…
Cyber crime has evolved from mass attacks intended to wreck havoc and steal as much data as possible to highly targeted attacks looking for specific information from an organization. Custom malware, designed to bypass legacy endpoint security, forms the foundation of these attacks. As a result, these calculated attacks are becoming more dangerous for the businesses and government entities hackers are targeting. Continue reading this post…
An RSA study released on Wednesday claims that most major U.S. corporations — including up to 88% of Fortune 500 companies — may be affected by botnet activity from computers compromised by the Zeus Trojan.
In the article, “88 percent of firms show Zeus botnet activity,” RSA’s FraudAction Anti-Trojan services analyzed data stolen by Zeus from infected computers that included IP addresses and emails that belonged to the corporations. Among the stolen data found on the sites where infected computers drop the stolen data was compromised email addresses from about 60% of the firms. Continue reading this post…
Last week, a new exploit technique was disclosed that bypasses a critical Windows security feature, DEP (data execution prevention), as well as an ASLR security enhancement for address space layout randomization.
In the article, “New exploit technique nullifies major Windows defense,” some researchers worry that a proof-of-concept code published by Google security software engineer, Berend-Jan Wever, could actually lead to more successful attacks against Microsoft’s newer operating systems.
While Wever claims the proof-of-concept doesn’t do any harm because it’s wrapped around an exploit of a bug in Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) that was patched years ago, MicroTrend’s Ria Rivera wrote in the company’s malware blog that the exposure could be used to further enhance exploits, and expects to see it used within exploits soon.
“After Wever released his heap-spraying exploit codes in 2005, a lot of new exploits started using that technique. It would thus be not far-fetched that the release of this new proof-of-concept could lead to the same scenario — new exploits could start using ‘return-to-libc’ to achieve DEP bypass.”
With so many data compromises arising from the latest disclosed vulnerability it seems so clear that now is the time to completely re-evaluate the way we approach desktop security. Vulnerabilities lose their power when you address the core issue of controlling what applications are allowed to run on your system in the first place whether these applications were added by a user or by malicious code exploiting a security hole.