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This Week In Security: Ebay’s School of Hard Knocks

June 1, 2014 Paul Roberts

It’s the end of another busy week in the security world. As we’re wont to do at The Security Ledger, we had DUO Security Evangelist Mark Stanislav in to the deluxe Security Ledger Studios to talk about the events of the week. On the agenda this week: the continued fallout from the hack of online auction giant eBay. The company ran into a thicket of criticism this week for the breach and its botched response. Despite knowing about the security breach for weeks, eBay seemed unprepared for the fallout once the news became public. Beyond its statements to the press, the company hadn’t taken steps to streamline the (inevitable) flood of customers who wanted to update their password. In fact, more than a day after the news broke, eBay still hadn’t made mention of it on their home page. What lessons can we learn from the breach at online auction […]

Podcast: Is Defense-In-Depth The Only Real Heartbleed Fix?

May 30, 2014 Paul Roberts

Like everyone else, we wrote extensively in the last month about the serious security vulnerability in OpenSSL dubbed “Heartbleed,” which affected many of the world’s leading web sites and services, including Facebook and Google. The large-type headlines about Heartbleed have passed. But that doesn’t mean that the danger has. As we have noted, we are entering a phase that might be considered Heartbleed’s ‘long tail.’ Most of the well-trafficked websites that were vulnerable to Heartbleed have gotten around to fixing the vulnerability. But public-facing web servers are only the beginning of the story for OpenSSL. Chasing down the vulnerability’s long tail in third-party applications and on internal web sites and applications is a much larger task. As I’ve noted: open source components make their way into all manner of applications and bespoke products these days, often without any effort to assess the security of the borrowed code. For companies that need to protect critical IT […]

Akamai: New DoS Tool Leads To Resurgence of SNMP Attacks

May 22, 2014 Paul Roberts

The security firm Akamai issued an advisory to customers on Thursday warning that a new software tool for managing distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks was leading to a resurgence in large-scale attacks that use Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) traffic to overwhelm web sites. The Threat Advisory (reg wall) was issued by Akamai’s Prolexic Security Engineering and Response Team (or PLXsert). According to the advisory, Akamai began noticing a resurgence in DDoS attacks using SNMP on April 11. The company said that firms in industry verticals including consumer goods, gaming, online hosting and Software-as-a-Service and non-profits had all been targeted. [Read more Security Ledger coverage of DDoS attacks here.] The company has identified new- and updated tools in the cyber underground, including one dubbed SNMP Reflector – that are enabling the attacks. Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is a protocol that is used for managing devices on a network including […]

Cisco: Microsoft Silverlight Exploits Fueling Drive-By Attacks

May 20, 2014 Paul Roberts

Cisco Systems is warning that Silverlight exploits are being used in a rash of drive-by-download attacks, many tied to malicious advertising (or ‘malvertising’) campaigns. Writing on Cisco’s blog, Levi Gundert of Cisco’s Threat Research Analysis and Communications (TRAC) team said that Silverlight exploits are the “flavor of the month” and have been added to the popular Angler exploit kit since late April. “Since April 23rd we have observed substantial traffic (often from Malvertising) being driven to Angler instances partially using Silverlight exploits,” Gundert wrote. Attacks leveraging vulnerable instances of Silverlight are actually outstripping attacks against Java and Adobe Flash – the two platforms that have long been the preference of cyber criminal groups and exploit kit authors. Silverlight was the subject of a patch in March, MS04-014, to fix a vulnerability that could allow remote attackers to bypass a security feature. The vulnerability would allow an attacker who controls an attack website to launch specially […]

FireEye Report: Iranian Hacker Group Becoming More Sophisticated

May 14, 2014 Paul Roberts

A report from the security firm FireEye claims that hacking crews based in Iran have become more sophisticated in recent years. They are now linked to malicious software campaigns targeting western corporations and domestic actors who attempt to circumvent Internet filters put in place by the ruling regime. The report, dubbed “Operation Saffron Rose,”(PDF) was released on Tuesday. In a blog post accompanying the research, FireEye researchers say that it has identified a group of hackers it is calling the “Ajax Security Team” that appears to have emerged out of Iranian hacker forums such as Ashiyane and Shabgard. Once limited to website defacements, the Ajax team has graduated to malware-based espionage and other techniques associated with “advanced persistent threat” (APT) style actors, FireEye said. The researchers claim that the group has been observed using social engineering techniques to implant custom malware on victims’ computers. The group’s objectives seem to align with those […]