Tag: Cybercrime
In just four short years, a healthy dose of paranoia about individual privacy as well as emerging support for encryption by browsers, social media sites, webmail, and SaaS applications have pushed encryption estimates from almost non-existent (in the low single digits before 2013) to just over 50% by the end of 2016. That’s quite a…
Read MoreCyber security has evolved in ways we never could have imagined. We have more specialized and powerful tools and services today than ever before, security budgets are slowly inching upward, and there are even glimmers of support from management. Yet, with the pace of technological change, the growing “professionalization” of cyber crime, and ever…
Read MoreFigure 2: Top domains in a Shodan search for CVE-2014-0160 on January 22, 2017 That’s disconcerting because there is a tendency to “fire and forget” in the public cloud, and concerns over understanding the shared responsibility model of public cloud have been previously voiced. This remains my favorite quote, from AWS head of global…
Read MoreThe essence of this attack is van Beek’s Microsoft Exchange Autodiscover vulnerability. In a September 2016 interview with The Register, van Beek said, “I recently discovered that most, if not all, Microsoft Exchange clients (eg, Outlook, iPhone mail app, Android mail app, Blackberry Mail App) are more than happy to provide a user’s password in plain…
Read MoreMalware that steals banking credentials is still one of today’s most lucrative cybercrime schemes. It’s not unusual for a banking Trojan to evolve over the years, and Ramnit is a perfect example. It was active for several years until it was disrupted in early 2015 by Europol working with several tech companies. It resurfaced in…
Read MoreBut that’s not the worst news coming out of this survey. No, not by any stretch of the imagination is that the bad news. Sit down and strap in, because it gets much worse. In spite of pushing vulnerable applications into production (and into the hands of consumers), a staggering 44% admitted they aren’t doing anything to…
Read More“Managing” vulnerabilities is an endless effort that is only truly noticed when it fails. More often than not, the constant debate over which vulnerabilities get prioritized for remediation is decided based on likelihood of exploit, followed by impact, and level of effort to fix. The typical result is that low- and medium-grade vulnerabilities get de-prioritized—in…
Read MoreNo matter how application-savvy you are, it should be fairly obvious that this is not a typical Content-Type header for an HTTP request. According to the RFC, Content-Type is usually of the form “type/subtype”7. This leviathan contains a valid Content-Type header in the very first line—multipart/form-data—but even a rudimentary BNF parser would flag this as a…
Read MoreA DNS amplification attack floods the victim’s server with a tsunami of fake requests. DNS Hijacking Who owns what domain name and what DNS servers are designated to answer queries are managed by Domain Registrars8. These are commercial services, such as GoDaddy, eNom, and Network Solutions Inc., where there are registered accounts storing this information.…
Read MoreFigure 1: CVE-2017-5638 campaign The exploit triggers the vulnerability via the Content-Type header value, which the attacker customized with shell commands to be executed if the server is vulnerable. In the first days of this campaign, shell commands were observed to infect the machine with the “PowerBot” malware, which is written in PERL, and uses…
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