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Senate Report Warns of Attacks on Military Transport Contractors

September 18, 2014 Paul Roberts

A Senate Armed Services Committee investigation has found evidence that hackers associated with the Chinese government compromised the computer systems of U.S. Transportation Command contractors at least 20 times in a single year. The attacks pose a serious risk to the system that moves military troops and equipment. The Committee released the report on Wednesday. (PDF copy here.) It presented the results of a year-long investigation of U.S. Transportation Command, or “TRANSCOM,” found a serious gap in awareness and reporting requirements. TRANSCOM was only aware of two of the 20 intrusions, while U.S. Transportation Command remained mostly unaware of the computer compromises of contractors during and after the attacks. “These peacetime intrusions into the networks of key defense contractors are more evidence of China’s aggressive actions in cyberspace,” said Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., the committee’s chairman in a published statement. “Our findings are a warning that we must do much more to protect strategically significant […]

Cisco Updates ASA Security Appliance To Tackle Zero Day Malware

September 17, 2014 Paul Roberts

We’re used to writing about all the things that are changing in the security field: the onslaught of mobile devices and connected ‘stuff,’ the advent of ‘advanced’ and ‘persistent’ adversaries, the destruction of the network perimeter. But all this talk about change can obscure the fact that so much has not changed. Companies still maintain perimeters, after all, and they rely on nuts-and-bolts technologies to defend them. But these days, those products need to do more – especially in the area of ‘advanced threats’ that are likely to slip past traditional antivirus and IDS products. Enter Cisco Systems, which on Tuesday announced a new version of its ‘next generation firewall‘: the Cisco ASA (Adaptive Security Appliance) with FirePOWER Services. The appliance is the first to make full use of technology from Cisco’s acquisition of Sourcefire last year. Specifically, the latest ASA integrates Sourcefire’s Advanced Malware Protection (or AMP) technology, which gives the […]

Wateringhole Attack Targets Auto and Aerospace Industries | AlienVault

September 3, 2014 Paul Roberts

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 […]

Report: Community Health Hack Linked To Heartbleed OpenSSL Hole

August 20, 2014 Paul Roberts

The security firm TrustedSec said in a blog post on Tuesday that a recent hack of the healthcare network Community Health Services was the result of an attack on the so-called “Heartbleed” vulnerability in OpenSSL. According to TrustedSec, attackers targeted vulnerable VPN (virtual private network) software from Juniper networks in a breach that affected an estimated 4.5 million patients. TrustedSec cited a “trusted and anonymous source close to the CHS investigation” in its blog post. It said attackers were able to glean user credentials from memory on a CHS Juniper device by exploiting the Heartbleed vulnerability. Those credentials were used to login via the VPN to CHS’s network, then move laterally to the servers containing the patient data. [Read more Security Ledger coverage of the Heartbleed vulnerability here.] A separate report by Bloomberg attributed the attack to hackers in China, though it did not provide any evidence linking the attackers to a specific Chinese […]

How The UK’s HACIENDA Program Targeted Entire Countries

August 18, 2014 Paul Roberts

The folks over at Heise/c’t Magazin revealed leaked, classified documents to report on HACIENDA, a GCHQ program to deliver country-wide Internet reconnaissance for so-called “five eyes” nations, including the US (NSA), Canada and Australia. And, as Bruce Schneier points out – its not clear that these documents were from Edward Snowden’s trove of classified NSA materials. HACIENDA involves the large-scale use of TCP “port” scans to profile systems connected to the Internet, in addition to profiling of enabled applications. According to Heise, which published a classified slide deck. GCHQ claimed to have canvassed 27 countries through the program. A list of targeted services includes ubiquitous public services such as HTTP and FTP, SSH (Secure Shell protocol) and SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol). The Heise report, prepared by Julian Kirsch, Christian Grothoff, Monika Ermert, Jacob Appelbaum, Laura Poitras and Henrik Moltke claim that HACIENDA’s goal was to perform active collection and map vulnerable services across […]