The recently reported malicious software attacks against Israeli and Palestinian targets have expanded to hit other targets, including individuals working within the U.S. Congress, the UK government and government workers in countries ranging from Turkey to Slovenia and New Zealand, according to a report from security firm Trend Micro. In a blog post on Wednesday, Trend Senior Threat Researcher Nart Villenueve wrote on the company’s Security Intelligence blog that those attacks are ongoing and involve a much wider list of targets that initially reported. The attacks first came to light after a Times of Israel report revealed on October 28 that computer systems used by that country’s police departments were taken offline following a virus infection. Subsequent analysis by Trend and others (PDF) revealed that the malware used in the attacks was a variant of the common Xtreme Remote Access Trojan (Xtreme RAT) – an information stealing program that can be […]
Hacks & Hackers
Adobe Acknowledges Hack of User Forum For Connect Service
Software giant Adobe on Wednesday confirmed claims by a self-proclaimed “Egyptian” hacker to have compromised a user support forum frequented by customers of its Connect web conferencing technology, stealing user account information and posting some of it online. Adobe’s Director of Connect, Guillaume Privat, acknowledged in a blog post on Wednesday that the compromise of the Connectusers.com forum by an “unauthorized third-party” was for real and that the company has disabled the forum while it investigates the incident. The breach was first disclosed on Tuesday when a hacker calling himself “ViruS_HimA” posted what appeared to be account e-mail and password information online through web sites like pastebin.com and sendspace.com. The hacker claimed to have compromised a database server used to maintain the Connnectusers.com forum and downloaded information on 150,000 account holders, including the users names, login IDs, hashed password values, employer and e-mail address. The motive for the hack was […]
Are Security Firms Ducking Attribution for VOHO? (Rhymes with ‘Carolina’)
RSA left few stones unturned in its recent report (PDF) on the so-called “VOHO” attacks against pro democracy, military industrial base and high finance firms. But one question that was notably left unanswered was perhaps the most important: “Who, or what, was behind the attacks?” Now the lead RSA security researcher trusted with analyzing the malware used in recent “watering hole” attacks tells Security Ledger that the malware left some clues as to the origins of the attacks, which affected tens of thousands of systems in more than 700 organizations, but not enough to conclusively link VOHO to a specific group, country or actor. “It’s hard to tell,” said Chris Elisan, a Principal Malware Scientist at RSA and the lead investigator into the malware used in the VOHO attacks. “The malware is only part of it,” he said. Other parts of what Elisan called the “attack chain” are needed to identify […]
Microsoft: Freeware, Pirate Software Supply Chain Leads to Infections
The Internet is a dangerous place, in general. And, depending on what you’re looking for online, it might be very dangerous, indeed, according to Microsoft. Writing in the company’s latest Security Intelligence Report, Microsoft said that its Malware Protection Center (MMPC) has observed an increase in malicious code infections that emanate from what it calls the “unsecure supply chain” – the informal network of legitimate and underground web sites that distribute freeware and pirated software. Freeware that promises to generate registration keys for popular products like Adobe’s Photoshop, Microsoft Windows and games such as Call of Duty were among the most commonly associated with malicious programs, Microsoft said. Internet users hoping to unlock pirated software download the key generators believing that they will produce a valid registration key, but often end up infecting their system in the process. But malware authors and cyber criminal groups will also wrap their creations in with […]
After VOHO Attacks, Organizations Face Arduous Clean Up
News about the so-called VOHO “watering hole” attacks have faded from the headlines, but the hard work for hundreds of organizations who were victims of the attacks has just begun. The first step for many firms is figuring out if they were victims.
