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History Suggests Heartbleed Will Continue To Beat

The SANS Internet Storm Center dialed down the panic on Monday, resetting the Infocon to “Green” and citing the increased awareness of the critical OpenSSL vulnerability known as Heartbleed as the reason.   Still, the drumbeat of news about a serious vulnerability in the OpenSSL encryption software continued this week. Among the large-font headlines: tens of  millions of Android mobile devices running version 4.1 of that mobile operating system (or “Jelly Bean”) use a vulnerable version of the OpenSSL software. Also: more infrastructure and web application players announced patches to address the Heartbleed vulnerability. They include virtualization software vendor VMWare, as well as cloud-based file sharing service Box. If history is any guide: at some point in the next week or two, the drumbeat will soften and, eventually, go silent or nearly so. But that hardly means the Heartbleed problem has gone away. In fact, if Heartbleed follows the same […]

Veterans Targeted In Attack Using IE 10 Zero Day

Visitors to the web site of the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) are being targeted in an attack that exploits a previously unknown hole in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 10 web browser, according to warnings Thursday by security firms.   Some visitors to the web site of the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), vfw[dot]org, were the victim of a ‘watering hole’ attack that takes advantage of a previously unknown ‘use-after-free’ vulnerability in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 10 web browser. The VFW site was hacked and then altered to redirect users, silently, to a malicious website programmed to exploit vulnerable versions of IE 10 on systems running 32 bit versions of the Windows operating system.  The VFW did not immediately respond to e-mail and phone requests for comment. According to a write-up by the security firm FireEye, the vulnerability allows the attacker to “modify one byte of memory at an arbitrary address” stored […]

Social Engineering Behind Syrian Hack Of NYT, Twitter?

How do you take some of the world’s largest online brands offline in a matter of minutes? If yesterday’s events are any guide, you do it by finding a gullible employee at vulnerable, downstream partner that those companies didn’t even know they had. That’s the lesson that appears to be emerging in the aftermath of yesterday’s chaotic tug of war between hackers who claim affiliation with The Syrian Electronic Army and some of the world’s leading online brands, including The New York Times, Twitter and Huffingtonpost.com. The attacks on Tuesday saw traffic to sites owned by those firms directed to web servers controlled by the attackers which displayed messages in support of the regime of embattled President Bashar al-Assad. According to a story in The New York Times, the attackers were able to compromise systems operated by Melbourne IT, an Australian domain registrar used by many prominent firms. With access to […]