Researchers Dissect Spammers' Economic Ecosystem

A profitable spam campaign has three key elements—a reliable email list, filter-busting content, and a botnet for distribution—and each has been individually dissected and understood. But in order to adequately protect users from spam, which thrives in an established economic ecosystem, researche...

Asprox Malware Borrowing Stealth from APT Campaigns

Cybercriminals and advanced attackers are freely borrowing from one another’s repertoires to great success. The latest example involves spammers firing off up to a half-million email messages during limited campaign segments without triggering any detection alarms. Security company FireEye said t...

SQL Servers Stack Query SQL Injection

SQL injection techniques can allow remote attackers to execute SQL commands on SQL servers. Successful exploitation could allow attacker to disclose confidential information, modify or shut down the database or execute arbitrary code on affected servers...

JavaScript Malicious Obfuscation Techniques - Ver2

Known exploits could potentially bypass security products by using JavaScript obfuscation techniques. Since the exploits are obfuscated they may not be detected by IDS and IPS systems, thus allowing attackers to successfully attack target machines...

April Patch Tuesday Fixes 11 Vulnerabilities, Last Updates for XP

As expected, Microsoft issued its final epitaph for Windows XP today, pushing out four security bulletins for 11 vulnerabilities, including the last updates for the oft-maligned, thirteen-year-old operating system. Despite it being XP’s last gasp from a security standpoint, it’s actually a...

Firefox for Android Profile Directory Derandomization and Data Exfiltration (CVE-2014-1484, CVE-2014-1506, CVE-2014-1515, CVE-2014-1516)

Hi, We have recently discovered a series of vulnerabilities in Firefox for Android that allows a malicious application to successfully derandomize the Firefox profile directory name in a practical amount of time and then leak sensitive data such as cookies and cached information which reside in...

Word Zero Day Attacks Use Complex Chain of Exploits

The exploit that attackers are using to target a zero day vulnerability in Microsoft Word relies on a complex series of pieces, including an ASLR bypass, ROP techniques and shellcode with several layers of tools designed to detect and defeat analysis. Microsoft officials said the exploit is being...

NSA Targets Sys Admins to Access Networks

The latest set of Snowden documents reveal details on perhaps the biggest no-brainer from the National Security Agency’s point of view during these nine months of leaks: the targeting of system administrators. Classified presentations, documents and notes portray the NSA as confident and...

Microsoft charges FBI for your Information; Syrian Electronic Army leaks Invoices

Till now we all were aware about the truth that tech companies gave legal access to user data on the government's request, but we were unaware that well known tech companies also charge the government for providing data. Syrian Electronic Army SEA, the pro-hacker group, who had compromised...

[Havij 1.17] Automated and Advanced SQL Injection

Havij is an automated SQL Injection tool that helps penetration testers to find and exploit SQL Injection vulnerabilities on a web page. It can take advantage of a vulnerable web application. By using this software, user can perform back-end database fingerprinting, retrieve DBMS login names and...

Healthcare IT Security Practices Poor, Systems Compromised

A new report from the SANS Institute warns that the push to digitize all health care records along with the emergence of HealthCare.gov and the general proliferation of electronic protected health information ePHI online will only exacerbate the security problems faced by those that store sensiti...

Microsoft Mitigation Bypass Bug Bounty Winner Yang Yu

Microsoft has paid out another $100,000 bounty as part of its Security Response Center’s bounty program. A researcher from Asia named Yang Yu was awarded the prize today for three mitigation bypass variants, Microsoft announced. “This payout reflects the fact that we learned something new that wi...

Bugging the Bug Market

PUNTA CANA–The Microsoft bug bounty program, started last year as a way to encourage researchers to develop new offensive and defensive techniques, has been a success so far and the company is looking for new ways to expand it in the future. Katie Moussouris, the security strategist at Microsoft...

Software defense: mitigating common exploitation techniques

In our previous posts in this series, we described various mitigation improvements that attempt to prevent the exploitation of specific classes of memory safety vulnerabilities such as those that involve stack corruption, heap corruption, and unsafe list management and reference count...

Stealing PIN Codes With a Wink and a Nod

Security researchers have developed a number of different methods to steal or bypass the passcodes on most of the common mobile phone platforms, some of which rely on software bugs and others that are simple social engineering techniques. Now, a pair of researchers from the University of Cambridg...

CVE-2013-3906 : Zero Day Vulnerability in Microsoft Graphics Component

Microsoft has issued a temporary fix for a 0day vulnerability that can be exploited to install malware via infected Word documents. A Zero-day Remote code execution flaw, which has been dubbed CVE-2013-3906, exploits a vulnerability in a Microsoft graphics component, to target Microsoft Office...

Microsoft Changes Bug Bounty Program to Include Incident Responders, Forensics Specialists

Having found some initial success with its first foray into the bug bounty world, Microsoft is expanding the program to open up payments of up to $100,000 to incident response teams and forensics experts who come across active attacks in the wild that include new techniques that bypass exploit...

Terminator RAT became more sophisticated in recent APT attacks

Advanced Persistent Threat APT is a term referring to targeted attacks on enterprises and other organizations and recently referred to what appeared to be nation-state intelligence agencies using cyber assaults for both conventional espionage and industrial espionage. Advanced threats have target...

ASLR bypass techniques are popular with APT attacks

Address space layout randomization ASLR is a security technique involved in protection from buffer overflow attacks. Many recent APT Advanced Persistent Threat attacks have utilized many different ASLR bypass techniques during the past year, according to Researchers at FireEye. Many exploits and...

Congratulations to James Forshaw Recipient of Our First $100,000 Bounty for New Mitigation Bypass Techniques!

Congratulations to James Forshaw for coming up with a new exploitation technique to get our first ever $100,000 bounty. A security vulnerability researcher with Context Information Security, James already came in hot with design level bugs he found during the IE11 Preview Bug Bounty, and we’re...