Tag: Threats

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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Figure 2: Alternative C&C server address hosted on Pastebin.com   One of the challenges that adversaries need to deal with is how to maintain a sustainable C&C infrastructure without being quickly denylisted by enterprise security solutions, or being frequently shut down by ISPs and hosting services following law enforcement and security vendors’ abuse reports. Many…

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  Sure, the C&C list is a small sample size, and C&C hosts come and go quickly. This list is in no way exhaustive—it’s just a snapshot in time from last quarter. But for a breakdown of the domain hosting services, see the end of this article. “Yes, I really am a C&C server.” A…

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“The digital economy is firmly entrenched, and has an appearance that promises prosperity; but in this world, nothing can be said to be certain, except death, taxes, and vulnerabilities.” With many apologies to Benjamin Franklin, to whom the original, unaltered quote on which this one relies is typically attributed. Unlike the forecasts for snow in…

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F5 security researchers analyzed the Ramnit banking trojan campaign that was active over the holiday season and discovered it’s not much of a banking trojan anymore. 64% of its targets were retail eCommerce sites, including Amazon.com, Best Buy, Forever 21, Gap, Zara, Carter’s, OshKosh B’gosh, Macy’s, Victoria’s Secret, H&M, Overstock.com, Toys“R”Us, Zappos, and many others.…

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We’re celebrating our one-year anniversary here at F5 Labs, the application threat intelligence division of F5! Although F5 researchers have been providing threat-related, F5-specific guidance to our customers for many years through DevCentral, the time was right a year ago today to launch a dedicated website that provides the general public with vendor-neutral, application-focused, actionable…

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Email attachment containing wire transfer instructions   Many buyers, in their eagerness to follow instructions to the letter so they can get into their new homes quickly, have followed similar wiring instructions and found themselves not only without a new home but stripped of their entire life savings—stolen by scammers. It nearly happened to Brown…

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Every day, your web servers are increasingly being scanned—and likely attacked—by adversaries attempting to gain access to your infrastructure. Between 2015 and 2017, our data partner, Loryka, observed these types of scans grow from 200 per minute to as much as 2,000 per minute. These kinds of attackers are professionals; they do this for a…

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Last week, a malware campaign targeting Jenkins automation servers was reported by CheckPoint researchers.1 The attackers exploited a deserialization vulnerability2 in Jenkin’s bidirectional channel (CVE-2017-1000353)3 to deploy Monero cryptomining malware that generated an estimated profit of $3 million. Following this disclosure, F5 researchers observed what appears to be the same threat actor group, as they…

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One thing to consider about the Q1 2018 data is that it’s only one quarter in comparison to the annual averages of 2016 and 2017, and that Q1 typically receives the least number of attacks of any quarter. If attacks against North America decline in Q2, as they have done the past 2 years, the…

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