China

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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Report: Community Health Hack Linked To Heartbleed OpenSSL Hole

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 […]

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Study Finds Unrelenting Cyber Attacks Against China’s Uyghurs

A group representing the Uyghurs,a  persecuted religious minority in China, faces unrelenting, targeted cyber attacks that appear aimed at stealing sensitive data and otherwise undermining the group’s activity, according to a new study by researchers at Northeastern University in Boston as well as the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems and the National University of Singapore.   A study of more than 1,400 suspicious email messages sent to members of groups representing the Uyghur minority found that more than three quarters of the messages contained malicious attachments. The messages targeted 724 individuals at 108 separate organizations. Moreover, researchers found overlap between the individuals associated with the Uyghur World Contress (UWC) and western targets such as the New York Times and U.S. embassies. The study, “A Look at Targeted Attacks Through the Lense of an NGO” is being presented at the UNENIX Security Conference in San Diego on August 21. (A copy of the full paper is […]

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Dan Geer’s Other Keynote: Embedded Devices Need A Time To Die

With the Black Hat Conference well under way and DEFCON starting later this week, the security world’s attention will turn to Las Vegas, where some of the cyber security industry’s top researchers and thinkers will be holding court. One of the most anticipated talks is the Black Hat Briefings opening keynote. This year, the honor goes to none other than Dr. Dan Geer, the CISO of In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the U.S. intelligence sector. Geer’s talk  on Wednesday, August 6, 2014 is entitled “Cybersecurity as Realpolitik.” In anticipation of Dr. Geer’s Black Hat, we’re releasing another recent talk he gave: this one a keynote speech at our May, 2014 Security of Things Forum in Cambridge, MA. In this talk, Dan focused on the security of embedded devices and the fast-emerging Internet of Things. (A full transcript of the talk is available here.) “The embedded systems space, already bigger than what is normally thought of as […]

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Report: CIA Fears the Internet of Things | Nextgov.com

A story by Patrick Tucker over at Nextgov.com picks up on some comments from Dawn Meyerriecks, the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency’s directorate of science and technology regarding the agency’s thinking about the Internet of Things. Meyerriecks was speaking at The Aspen Institute’s Security Forum on Thursday of last week in a panel on “The Future of Warfare.” Speaking about the topic of cyber warfare, she said that current debates about the shape of cyber war don’t address the “looming geo-security threats posed by the Internet of Things.” Meyerriecks cited the now-debunked Proofpoint report about smart refrigerators being used in spam and distributed denial of service attacks.” She also mentioned “smart fluorescent LEDs [that are] are communicating that they need to be replaced but are also being hijacked for other things.” Those might be some sensational (and dubious) examples, but Meyerriecks main point was more pedestrian: that we’re on the cusp of disruptive […]

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