On IoT Botnets, StrongPity, and Nuclear Power Plant 'Disruptions'

Mike Mimoso and Chris Brook discuss the news of the week, including the nuclear power plant ‘disruption,’ the StrongPity APT group, and the proliferation of IoT botnets. Download: ThreatpostNewsWrapOctober142016.mp3 Music by Chris Gonsalves...

IoT Botnets Are The New Normal of DDoS Attacks

If you’ve been on the wrong end of what passes for a modern-day DDoS attack, you’re well familiar with the firepower of the almighty DVR. That’s right, the innocuous set-top box responsible for the posterity of your Game of Thrones seasons 1-6 is behind some of the biggest swarming attacks agains...

Source Code Released for Mirai DDoS Malware

The dangers of haphazardly connecting embedded devices to the Internet have manifested themselves in mammoth distributed denial-of-service attacks, in particular one two weeks ago against security journalist Brian Krebs’ website that peaked at better than 620 Gbps. The situation worsened over the...

Number of Devices Sharing Private Crypto Keys Up Sharply

Researchers at SEC Consult say the number of internet gateways, routers, modems and other embedded devices sharing cryptographic keys and certificates is up 40 percent since the Austrian consulting firm first looked at the problem in November. The report, posted Tuesday called “House of Keys,”...

Configurable DNS Proxy: foghorn

Configurable DNS Proxy foghorn is a configurable DNS proxy to allow for black-, white-, and greylisting of DNS resources. DNS is an essential utility for the functioning of internet-connected resources, and one which a careful administrator can control. The foghorn utility provides a means to add...

Locky Variant Zepto Debuts with Big Spam Push

Ransomware called Zepto is raising concerns with security experts because of its close ties to the more mature and prolific Locky ransomware. Zepto was spotted about a month ago but a recent wave of spam containing Zepto-laced attachments detected on June 27 is heightening fears of widespread...

Dept. of Justice Makes Plea for Mass Surveillance, Hacking

The Department of Justice is countering a growing chorus of privacy advocates who are against a rule change that will greatly expand law enforcement’s ability to hack into computers located around the world. In a blog post to the DoJ website late Monday, Assistant Attorney General Leslie Caldwell...

1 Million Computers Hacked for making big Money from Adsense

A group of cyber criminals has infected as much as 1 Million computers around the world over the past two years with a piece of malware that hijacks search results pages using a local proxy. Security researchers from Romania-based security firm Bitdefender revealed the presence of this massive...

Privacy Watchdogs Vow to Fight 'Dystopian' Rule 41

The Supreme Court is moving to expand the FBI’s hacking authority with Criminal Rule 41, an amendment to federal criminal procedures that makes it easier for the FBI to access computers remotely when their locations are unknown. Privacy watchdogs are blasting the proposed change saying it would...

The 7 Most Wanted Iranian Hackers By the FBI

The Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI has lengthened its Most Wanted List by adding seven Iranian hackers who are accused of attacking a range of US banks and a New York dam. On Thursday, the United States Department of Justice DoJ charged seven Iranian hackers with a slew of computer hacking...

Tinba Variant Spotted Targeting Russian, Japanese Banks

Cybercriminals behind the Tinba banking Trojan have been homing in on some of the larger banks in Russia and Japan, experts claim. According to researchers with Dell SecureWorks, who looked at an instance of the malware last month, configuration files in one variant are targeting one of the...

Feds Detail Shutdown of Cybercrime Forum Darkode

Officials worldwide this week culminated an 18-month effort to take down Darkode, a cybercrime forum where hackers fraternized, shared malware, credit card information and more. The campaign, dubbed Operation Shrouded Horizon, resulted in the arrest of 28 hackers and 27 house searches across 18...

Angler Exploit Kit, Bedep Malware Inflating Video Views

A new sort of hacktivism emerged last week when experts from Trustwave published new research revealing that attackers are using the Angler exploit kit and the Bedep Trojan in order to drive artificial views to politically controversial videos. The motivation for the scheme, it appears, is to...

Obama Administration Seeks More Legal Power to Disrupt Botnets

The federal government is seeking more legal power to step in and shut down botnets through an amendment to the existing criminal law, which would allow the Department of Justice to obtain injunctions to disrupt these malicious networks. The Obama administration has proposed an amendment to...

CloudFlare Aims to Defeat Massive DDoS Attacks with Virtual DNS

DDoS attacks have been a persistent problem for the the better part of 20 years, and as ISPs and enterprises have adjusted their defenses, attackers have adapted their tactics. One of the more effective tools in the attackers’ arsenal now is the use of botnets to generate massive numbers of DNS...

DDoS Exploit Targets Open Source Rejetto HFS

Apparently no vulnerability is too small, no application too obscure, to escape a hacker’s notice. A honeypot run by Trustwave’s SpiderLabs research team recently snared an automated attack targeting users of the open source Rejetto HTTP File Server Rejetto HFS. Someone was trying to exploit a...

LOIC 1.0.8 (Low Orbit Ion Cannon) - A network stress testing application

Low Orbit Ion Cannon LOIC is an open source network stress testing and denial-of-service attack application, written in C. LOIC was initially developed by Praetox Technologies, but was later released into the public domain, and now is hosted on several open source platforms. LOIC performs a...

BASHLITE Malware leverages ShellShock Bug to Hijack Devices Running BusyBox

Cyber criminals are using new malware variants by exploiting GNU Bash vulnerability referred to as ShellShock CVE-2014-6271 in order to infect embedded devices running BusyBox software, according to a researcher. A new variant of "Bashlite" malware targeting devices running BusyBox software was...

XP-Heavy Turkey Overrun with GameOver Zeus Infections

Like a predator, criminals who profit online will seek out weak prey. In the context of cybercrime, emerging countries such as Brazil, South Korea and Turkey among many others are in the crosshairs because of a number of factors, including a prevalence of outdated and unpatched computers and lowe...

FBI — Botnets Infecting 18 Computers per Second. But How Many of Them NSA Holds?

Botnets - a secretly compromised networks of ordinary home and office computers with rogue software or "malware" that are controlled by an individual criminal or a group - has dramatically increased over the past several years and are considered to pose the biggest threat to the Internet. Cyber...