Tag: Threats

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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F5 threat researchers detected attackers actively exploiting the rTorrent client through a previously undisclosed misconfiguration vulnerability and deploying a Monero (XMR) crypto-miner operation. The rTorrent client misconfiguration vulnerabilities include: No authentication required for XML-RPC communication Sensitive XML-RPC method is allowed (direct OS command execution) Attackers are actively exploiting this vulnerability in the wild by scanning…

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The security community was just taking a breather because we hadn’t seen a massive DDoS attack since the Mirai thingbot took down Dyn in October 2016 with a 1.2 terabit per second DDoS attack. Yesterday, that world record attack was broken when GitHub was hit with a 1.3 terabit per second DDoS attack.1 This attack…

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Last week, F5 threat researchers spotted a Monero (XMR) crypto-mining campaign that was taking advantage of a user configuration vulnerability in the rTorrent client, specifically misconfigured XML-RPC functionality. This misconfiguration vulnerability in rTorrent allows an unauthenticated user to execute methods in the rTorrent client using HTTP requests. After deeper analysis of the attack logs, F5…

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An advanced thingbot, nicknamed Reaper (or IoTroop), was recently discovered infecting hordes of IoT devices. Reaper ups the ante for IoT security. It has a sophisticated C2 channel system and a Lua code execution environment (to deliver much more complicated attacks), and it comes prepackaged with 100 DNS open resolvers. Researchers are tracking Reaper, even…

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We have already witnessed attackers evolving their methods and markets for making money with compromised IoT devices, just like legitimate businesses and financial markets do, and IoT is a rich, trillion-dollar market based on IDC’s estimations for 2020,* ripe with vulnerable devices waiting to be exploited. Every expectation should be set that attackers will continue…

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Thankfully, this alert was a mistake and there was no real danger, but the incident raises a far broader question: how many of our critical systems are this vulnerable to human error, poor software design, and insufficient security controls, all of which were factors in the HIEMA incident? Many of the real-world systems we depend…

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Figure 2: Latest attack request targeting Windows servers   As shown in Figure 2, the latest attack requests are targeting the same URL, keeping the same HTTP header values and the same exploit structure, however, they are now using Windows shell commands to download and execute a file. Using the Windows certutil Tool While Linux…

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There’s a lot of speculation in cryptocurrency right now. People are mining coins all over the place, and even though it’s getting harder and harder to make money mining coins, interest is still high. All it costs is money for the power bill. So, of course, clever people are figuring out how to use other people’s power…

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Applications are the lifeblood of our enterprises. Not many organizations can survive in a pencil and paper world. They are all dependent on IT with applications doing the heavy lifting of arranging, tracking, processing, communicating, and calculating daily business. But applications are no longer singular programs running on one computer, they are huge collections of…

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