Introduction Welcome to F5 Labs’ third annual report on phishing and fraud. Once again, we’re bringing you data from our partner Webroot® as well as the F5 Security Operations Center. Phishing continues to be a major source of profit for cyber-criminals, and a big hassle for cyber-defenders. In the F5 Labs 2019 Application Protection Report,…
Read MoreA vast majority of organisations have no visibility into encrypted traffic, nor do they have protection against automated attackers. In Mary Meeker’s most recent Internet Trends report, the numbers show that in the first quarter of 2019, 87 per cent of global web traffic was encrypted, up from 53 per cent just three years ago.…
Read MoreA vulnerable FortiGate SSL VPN server responds to this request with contents of the sslpvpn_websession file, which contains the username and password of a user. This information can be used or sold to threat actors in order to compile brute force and credential stuffing lists. While reconnaissance campaigns do not actively exploit systems, they enable…
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Apr 23, 2024NewsroomNational Security Agency / Threat Intelligence The Russia-linked nation-state threat actor tracked as APT28 weaponized a security flaw in the Microsoft Windows Print Spooler component to deliver a previously unknown custom malware called GooseEgg. The post-compromise tool, which is said to have been used since at least June 2020 and possibly as early…
Read MoreViewed in this way, our research illuminates some interesting aspects of the current state of security. In 2018, to the extent that new attack techniques and approaches emerged, it was largely in response to changes in how organizations design, create, and manage applications. The context that makes old attack techniques like injection and phishing newly…
Read MoreThe way we build, provision, maintain and secure apps continues to evolve. As agile development practices put pressure on operations, organizations move to DevOps where both functions are synchronized. This in turn puts pressure on the app security organization, and so we see more companies today adopting a DevSecOps model. At the same time, the…
Read MoreIP Addresses Attacking the Middle East Compared to Other Regions We looked at the volume of attack traffic Middle Eastern systems received per IP address and compared that to other regions of the world. Attack traffic destined for Middle Eastern systems had little overlap with the rest of the world except for a handful of…
Read MoreAttacks Types of Top Attacking IP Addresses Of the top 50 IP addresses attacking systems in the U.S., the most IP addresses were assigned in the U.S. (40%). The remainder of the top 50 attacking IP addresses were geographically distributed around the globe with 14% coming from South Korea, 6% each coming from Russia and…
Read MoreLooking at cloud breaches over the last few years, it’s easy to get the impression that most were easily avoidable events that occurred due to silly misconfigurations, ugly failure modes, or borderline negligent architectures. To put it bluntly, these cloud breaches look stupid. But the people and the organizations designing and running these systems—both the…
Read MoreThe script uses random function and variable names to avoid detection by antivirus engines. It also contains another Base64-encoded payload. The threat actor uses .Net APIs to call the Windows API. For example, the script uses the .NET API to find address of VirtualAlloc function exported by kernel32.dll. It then marshals the shellcode by using…
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