Tag: Services Tier
The latest evolution of cyber weaponry is brought to you by the default passwords in Internet of Things (IoT) devices. That includes just about every conceivable modern electronic device—from home thermostats, lighting systems, refrigerators, cars, and water meters, to personal fitness devices, toasters, bicycle helmets, toys, and even shoes and clothing. Today, the number…
Read MoreAccording to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), it takes an average of 312 days for security pros to discover software vulnerabilities such as viruses, malware, and other attacks. In hacker time, that’s a virtual eternity in which bad actors can wreak havoc within infected systems and steal information, all without being noticed. DARPA…
Read MoreSo far, we’ve seen IoT Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks on a Death Star scale. Even if your organization wasn’t a direct target of these giant barrages, many others were caught up as collateral damage because they had services adjacent or dependent on the direct target. Because of this, many organizations are preparing or strengthening their…
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 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…
Read MoreThese notifications give defenders a chance to prepare their response. Without them, a hacktivist runs the risk of the affected organization attributing the attack to criminals or equipment outages. For a hacktivist, that’s a fail—the attention is just as important to them as the shutdown. The real problem with hacktivists perpetrating DoS attacks is the…
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