President Barack Obama issued a long-anticipated Executive Order for improving the nation’s cyber security late Tuesday. The Order, released on the same evening as President Obama addressed both chambers of Congress with his State of the Union Address called cyber attacks “one of the most serious national security challenges we must confront,” and put public and private owners of critical infrastructure in the U.S. on notice that they would need to work closely with the government to reduce the risk of crippling cyber attacks. President Obama issued the Order after Congress failed, in its last session, to agree on comprehensive cyber security legislation. Negotiations over the bill broke down over Republican amendments to a Democratic sponsored bill and concerns from the business community about the cost of complying with some of the more controversial provisions. Among those: a requirement that the Department of Homeland Security be able to audit […]
data loss
New Malware Takes ‘Extended Naps’ To Avoid Detection
It’s a truism that even the bleakest circumstances look a bit brighter after a good nap. Well, that wisdom isn’t lost on malware authors either. A newly discovered Trojan Horse program, dubbed Trojan Nap, is programmed to use extended sleep cycles to fool behavior based anti-malware tools, according to a report from the firm FireEye. In a blog post Tuesday, researchers Abhishek Singh and Ali Islam said the new malware has a function, dubbed SleepEx() that can be used to configure long “naps” that the malware takes after it is installed on a compromised system. The default value, 600,000 milliseconds – or 10 minutes – seems designed to fool automated analysis systems that are programmed to capture a sample of behavior for a set time frame. “By executing a sleep call with a long timeout, Nap can prevent an automated analysis system from capturing its malicious behavior,” FireEye said. Like other […]
You’ve Been Hacked By APT! (The Video)
The whole APT – or “Advanced Persistent Threat” – meme has received a lot of attention in the media. This site and others have written about APT-style hacks, such as the recent compromise at The New York Times. But what does an APT hack look like? And what would it mean if you or your employer were in the crosshairs of an APT-type actor? The SANS Institute’s Securing The Human project has put together a nice training video that helps answer some of these questions, and to explain how APT-style attacks work. This is good stuff – explaining the difference between cyber crime and APT, and generic enough that any organization could use it as a training video. SANS says that it will produce one of these a month, and post them on the first of each month. My only criticism here is that, after they do a solid job describing […]
Friday Night Massacre: Twitter Hacked, Info on 250k Exposed
What better time to drop some really bad and embarrassing news than late on a Friday afternoon, as everyone is heading out the door? So it was with social media giant Twitter, which dropped a bombshell late Friday: revealing that it had been compromised in an “extremely sophisticated” attack that yielded the account credentials for around 250,000 users. A blog post by Twitter Security Team member Bob Lord on Friday said that the company has been investigating the breach all week long, after detecting unusual patterns of account access across its network. After stopping an attack that was in progress, the company’s investigation revealed that the attackers “may have had access to limited user information – usernames, email addresses, session tokens and encrypted/saltedversions of passwords – for approximately 250,000 users,” Lord wrote. Twitter did not discuss the circumstances of the breach, but reiterated guidance from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for users to disable Java […]
Update: Student’s Expulsion Exposes Computer Science Culture Gap
Editor’s Note: Updated to include comment from Dawson CS Professor Simonelis. – PFR 1/22/2013 The expulsion of a 20 year-old computer science major at Dawson College in Quebec, Canada has laid bare what one expert says is a culture gap between academic computer science departments and the ‘real world’ of application development. In the wake of news stories that have drawn attention to the case, Dawson’s faculty and administration have stood by their decision, saying that “hacking” of the type Ahmed Al-Khabaz was engaged in was an example of “unprofessional conduct” by a computer sciences engineer. This, even as private sector firms – including the company whose software Al-Khabaz exposed – have come forward with job offers and scholarships. Al-Khabaz was expelled in November by a school administration that looked askance at his security audits of a student portal web site dubbed “Omnivox,” accusing him of launching “SQL injection” attacks […]
