Tag: App Infrastructure Attacks

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with two of F5’s top threat researchers, Sara Boddy and Justin Shattuck, to pick their brains about IoT, its current state of “security,” and what we can expect to see in terms of threats, attacks, and mitigations in the future. Justin and Sara are co-authors of three IoT threat research…

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This isn’t your mama’s botnet. This is a proper botnet. If you were the world’s best IoT botnet builder and you wanted to show the world how well-crafted an IoT botnet could be, Reaper is what you’d build. It hasn’t been seen attacking anyone yet, and that is part of its charm. But, what is…

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Figure 1: Demonstration of a split-tunnel attack4 Email Retrieval attacks The two major protocols associated with email retrieval are Post Office Protocol 3 (POP3) and Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP). Both protocols connect to an email server to download new messages over a TCP/IP connection.5POP3 is much simpler and easier to implement, but only allows…

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So, what’s the issue when it comes to encryption and quantum computing? Today’s asymmetric encryption algorithms, which are primarily used for key exchanges and digital signatures, are considered vulnerable to quantum computers. For example, using today’s traditional, digital, transistor-based computers, it’s estimated it would take 6 quadrillion CPU years to crack a 2048-bit RSA decryption key.7 But,…

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  Email Headers An excellent source of internal configuration information can be gleaned from email headers. Attackers can simply fire off a few email inquiries to folks at an organization and see what they can find. Here’s a typical email header using our example company, Boring Aeroplanes, from our phishing example. Note both internal and…

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My favorite color, by the way, is black. Or at least it will be until something darker comes along. While marginally better than asking for personal information that is just as easily discovered on the web —your mother’s maiden name, where you were born (my mother claims it was in a barn based on my…

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  We also analyzed the primary root causes of the breaches, how that varied in breach remediation costs by industry, and the impact of these breaches on each data type breached on the global scale. The purpose of our analysis was to identify where organizations are most likely to be attacked in a way that…

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Eighty-six percent of Internet hosts prefer forward secrecy; all modern browsers do, too. The Bleichenbacher attack only affects RSA sessions not protected with the ephemeral keys offered by forward secrecy. All modern browsers and mobile clients have preferred ephemeral keys for several years. Google has been preferring them with their servers and software since 2012.6…

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Internet of Things (IoT) devices gained infamy almost overnight for their lack of security. This led to their participation in a Thingbot (a botnet built out of IoT devices) named Mirai1 that launched massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against a handful of victims, including Dyn, OVH, KrebsOnSecurity, and Rutgers University2 in late 2016. As a result of…

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Anything we put online must swim in a sea of enemies. The F5 Labs report, Lessons Learned from a Decade of Data Breaches, revealed that an average breach leaked 35 million records. Nearly 90% of the US population’s social security numbers have been breached to cyber criminals. When confronted by staggering statistics like these, it is…

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