anti malware

Dusting For Malware’s Bloody Prints

Malicious software is nothing new. Computer viruses and worms have been around for decades, as have most other families of malware like remote access tools (RATs) and key loggers. But all our experience with malware hasn’t made the job of knowing when our organization has been hit by it any easier. In fact, recent news stories about breaches at Home Depot, Target, Staples and other organizations makes it clear that even sophisticated and wealthy corporations can easily overlook both the initial compromise and endemic malware infections – and at great cost. That may be why phrases like “dwell time” or “time to discovery” seem to pop up again and again in discussions of breach response. There’s no longer any shame in getting “popped.” The shame is in not knowing that it happened. Greg Hoglund says he has a fix for that latter problem. His new company, Outlier Security, isn’t “next generation […]

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Europol Warns of Internet of Things Risk

In a newly released report, Europol’s European Cybercrime Center (EC3) warns that the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) threatens to strengthen the hand of organized cyber criminal groups and make life much more difficult for police and governments that wish to pursue them. EC3’s latest Internet Organized Crime Threat Assessment (iOCTA) says the “Internet of Everything” will greatly complicate the work of law enforcement creating “new opportunities for everything from cyber criminals to state actors to child abusers. The growing numbers of connected devices will greatly expand the “attack surface” available for cyber criminal activity, the EC3 warns. Cyber criminals may co-opt connected devices for use in common criminal activity (like denial of service attacks and spam campaigns). However, advancements like connected (“smart”) vehicles and infrastructure create openings for large scale and disruptive attacks. The report, which was published late last months, is a high level position paper and pulls data mostly […]

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The Key to Security in the Internet of Things – IEEE Spectrum

IEEE Spectrum has an article that provides a nice overview of security and privacy issues on the Internet of Things. The article by Mark Anderson highlights a number of the issues that have cropped up on these pages as well, namely: the rush to market in the consumer IoT space (much of it driven by crowd funding sites like IndieGoGo and Kickstarter) the lack of a strong business case for (consumer) manufacturers to build security into IoT products the tendency of large manufacturers to pursue siloed security standards that thwart efforts to build  devices interconnect with other IoT infrastructure (other devices, routers, etc.) So far efforts to coordinate IoT development around a single platform or set of standards have been reduced to predictable turf battles: Google’s Thread versus multi-vendor efforts like TheAllSeen Alliance,  The Open Interconnect Consortium, The Industrial Internet Consortium versus Apple HomeKit and HealthKit and others. In the […]

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Wateringhole Attack Targets Auto and Aerospace Industries | AlienVault

If you’re in the automotive, manufacturing or aerospace industries: beware. Hackers are targeting you and your colleagues with sophisticated, watering-hole style attacks. That, according to a blog post by Jamie Blasco, a noted security researcher at the firm AlienVault. Blasco has written a blog post describing what he says is a compromise of a website belonging to a publisher of “software used for simulation and system engineering” in the three vertical industries.   According to Blasco, after compromising the web site, the attackers added code that loaded a malicious Javascript program dubbed “Scanbox” that is used for reconnaissance and exploitation of web site visitors. [Read more Security Ledger coverage of watering hole attacks here.] Scanbox installs malicious software on the computers it infects – typically keyloggers that record users’ interactions with the infected site and capture online credentials like usernames and passwords. However, the framework also does extensive reconnoitering of victim computers: compiling an in-depth […]

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Car Internal

Intel Promotes ‘Trustlets’ To Secure Embedded Devices

The integrity of data stored on- and transmitted between Internet-connected embedded devices is one of the biggest technical hurdles standing in the way of widespread adoption of Internet of Things technology. For one thing: embedded devices like wearable technology and “smart” infrastructure are often deployed on simple, inexpensive and resource constrained hardware. Unlike laptops or even smart phones, these are purpose-built devices that, by design, run for long periods in remote deployments, with extremely constrained features and low power consumption that is the result of limited processing power and memory. [Read Security Ledger’s coverage of connected vehicles.] Now Intel is promoting a platform that it says can bridge the gap and provide robust security features even for resource-constrained Internet of Things devices like wearables and connected vehicles. Back in April, the Intel Labs  unveiled the results of joint research with Technische Universität Darmstadt in Germany. The researchers have developed a platform, dubbed TrustLite […]

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