Spear Phishing Remains Preferred Point of Entry in Targeted, Persistent Attacks

Persistent targeted attacks against the government, financial services, manufacturing and critical infrastructure take on many characteristics. Attackers can have different backgrounds and motivations, and the tools they use can range from commodity malware to zero-day exploits. One characteristi...

Sophos Products - Multiple Vulnerabilities

Sophos Products - Multiple Vulnerabilities List, I've completed the second paper in my series analyzing Sophos Antivirus internals, titled "Practical Attacks against Sophos Antivirus". As the name suggests, this paper describes realistic attacks against networks using Sophos products. The paper...

South Carolina Data Breach Casts Spotlight on Lack of Encryption, Stolen Credentials

South Carolina governor Nikki Haley said a mouthful this week when she spilled a dirty industry secret that Social Security numbers are generally not encrypted by state agencies. Reeling from a Department of Revenue data breach that leaked 3.6 million Social Security and credit card numbers as we...

Verizon DBIR Analysis: Insiders Often Complicit in Breaches of Intellectual Property

Verizon has further dissected breach data from its annual Data Breach Investigations Report DBIR and built a profile of intellectual property theft that points to a disturbing combination of factors leading to successful infiltrations by cybercriminals, competitors, hacktivists and nation-state...

Google Warning About More State-Sponsored Attacks

When Google told users in June that it was going to start warning them about attacks on Gmail accounts that the company believed were coming from state-sponsored groups, it looked like an announcement that only would affect a tiny percentage of the company’s users. Journalists, activists and...

Google Warning about New State Sponsored Attacks

"Warning: We believe state-sponsored attackers may be attempting to compromise your account or computer." From last 3 months Google users were surprised to see this unusual notification at the top of their Gmail inbox, Google home page or Chrome browser. These warnings are not being shown because...

White House Cyberattack Likely Won't Change Anything

So now it’s the White House’s turn. Having taken a swing at just about every other piece of the U.S. government’s network infrastructure, attackers, reportedly based in China, recently targeted a machine on an unclassified network inside the White House Military Office and were able to compromise...

Huawei Denies Stealing State Secrets or Supporting Cyber Espionage

Huawei, the massive Chinese technology company that has come under criticism for its close ties to China’s government, is defending itself, saying that it has never stolen national intelligence or intellectual property and does not support any groups that do so. The company has been a frequent...

Frankenstein Malware turning legitimate software into invisible malware

Many malware and viruses can be identified by detection software because of known bits of malicious code. But what if there was a virus compiled from little bits of programs you already had installed? That's just what two security researchers are looking into. Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheu...

New Gauss Malware, Descended From Flame and Stuxnet, Found On Thousands of PCs in Middle East

A new piece of malware dubbed Gauss, that experts say is a direct descendant of Flame and also related to Stuxnet and Duqu, has been found on thousands of PCs in the Middle East, mostly in Lebanon. Gauss contains some of the same code as Flame, but is markedly different in a number of respects,...

Threat to U.S. Government and Businesses 'Deep and Broad', Expert Says

LAS VEGAS–It’s not difficult to find people here who are excited about security. There are roughly 10,000 of them in town this week. But there’s a smaller group of people who are on a different level, who are so passionate and amped up about their ideas that they can’t stop themselves from talkin...

AutoCAD Worm Stealing Designs, Blueprints

Security researchers have come across a new worm that is meant specifically to steal blueprints, design documents and other files created with the AutoCAD software. The worm, known as ACAD/Medre.A, is spreading through infected AutoCAD templates and is sending tens of thousands of stolen document...

Hackers Exploit Unpatched Windows XML vulnerability

Hackers Exploit Unpatched Windows XML vulnerability An unpatched vulnerability in the Microsoft XML Core Services MSXML is being exploited in attacks launched from compromised websites to infect computers with malware. This zero-day exploit that potentially affects all supported versions of...

LeBron James, Advanced Attackers and the Best Man Theory

There is a line of thinking that pervades and pollutes the discussions of many sporting events, and it goes something like this: “You can’t let LeBron James/Derek Jeter/Lionel Messi beat you. You have to force someone else to beat you.” It’s a flawed strategy for a number of reasons, but it’s eve...

Former Zero Day Initiative Researchers Form New Firm Exodus Intelligence

In case you thought that the mass exodus of researchers from TippingPoint’s Zero Day Initiative in recent months meant that the demand for third-party vulnerability markets was waning, fear not. Several former members of the ZDI team have come back together to form a new firm called Exodus...

Microsoft Issues FixIt For XML Flaw

With attackers already exploiting the MSXML zero-day vulnerability, which affects a wide range of products, Microsoft has issued a FixIt tool for the bug that it is encouraging users to install as they prepare a full patch for the flaw. The vulnerability is a critical one, and, because it’s prese...

Google Warning Users About State-Sponsored Attacks

Google, whose users have been frequent targets of suspected attacks by foreign governments, is deploying a new warning system for users who may be victims of those kinds of attacks. The new system is in addition to existing warnings that Google will show Gmail users when their accounts may have...

House Hearing to Address Capital Market Threats

The House Committee on Financial Services is hosting a hearing tomorrow in which they will explore the various cyber threats targeting capital markets and government sponsored enterprises. Entitled “Cyber Threats to Capital Markets and Corporate Accounts,” the hearing in front of the Committee on...

What's the Meaning of This: Flame Malware

From all indications, it would appear that attackers are continuing to attack and malware authors are carrying on writing malware. The latest bit of evidence to support these conclusions is the discovery of the Flame malware, which, initial analyses show, is an advanced data-stealing tool that is...

Chinese hacker targeting Indian government and Tibetan activists Sites

Chinese hacker targeting Indian government and Tibetan activists Sites Websites of Indian government and Tibetan activists in the country are under attack in a cyber attack campaign engineered by a Chinese hacker, working with one of the world's largest e-tailers Tencent. The cyber criminal in...