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Malware Supply Chain Links Eleven Attacks

Fresh off their discovery of a previously unknown (‘zero day’) security hole in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser, researchers at the security firm Fireeye say that they have evidence that a string of sophisticated attacks have a common origin. In a report released on Monday (PDF), the firm said that many seemingly unrelated cyber attacks identified in the last year appear to be part of a “broader offensive fueled by a shared development and logistics infrastructure” — what Fireeye terms a ‘supply chain’ for advanced persistent threat (APT) attacks. At least 11 APT campaigns targeting “a wide swath of industries” in recent months were found to be built on a the same infrastructure of malicious applications and services, including shared malware tools and malicious binaries with the same timestamps and digital certificates. “Taken together, these commonalities point to centralized APT planning and development,” Fireeye wrote. The attacks link at least 11 separate […]

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Ephemeral, In-Memory Attack Used With New IE 0Day

It was just last week that we wrote about research from the security firm Triumfant that found evidence for the growing use of ephemeral “diskless” malware. That point was driven home over the weekend, with a report from the firm Fireeye that found a new Internet Explorer zero day vulnerability was being used in conjunction with a disk-less variant of the Hydraq (aka “McRAT”) Trojan horse program.   Fireeye first called attention to the existence of attacks exploiting new, “zero day” (or previously unknown) vulnerabilities in the Internet Explorer web browser on Friday. The company discovered the malicious activity on the web site of a “strategically important website” that was being used as a “watering hole” to attack visitors who were “interested in national and international security policy.” The company described two IE vulnerabilities: an information leakage hole and an IE out-of-bounds memory access vulnerability. The information leak affects Windows XP […]

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Health Exchanges Need A Fail Whale

In a blog post on Veracode’s blog today, I write about the problems encountered at government-run online health exchanges that were intended to connect millions to private insurance plans under the Affordable Care Act. The exchanges opened to the public on Tuesday, and they got off to a rocky start, with reports of web sites paralyzed as millions of uninsured Americans logged on to sign up for subsidized health insurance. In some cases, the problems appear to have been caused by “external factors.” New York State’s online health exchange was felled by the weight of more than 10 million requests of dubious origin, The New York Post reported. But other exchanges, including Healthcare.gov the federal government’s main health insurance storefront, which is used by residents or more than half of the states, were victims of their own success: overwhelmed when the doors swung open and millions of eager customers poured […]

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Experts Crowd Source Bounty To Defeat iPhone 5S TouchID

A group of security enthusiasts, including some leading figures in the IT security industry, have pledged their hard-earned cash toward a bounty for the first hacker who can fool Apple’s new iPhone 5s Touch ID fingerprint scanner using a fingerprint lifted without the owner’s consent. A web site, istouchidhackedyet.com, has been set up to coordinate the campaign, with more than $14,000 in pledges committed (via Twitter posts) from a Who’s Who of  the IT security community. The project was the brainchild of Robert David Graham of Errata Security (@ErrataRob) and Nick De Petrillo (@nickdepetrillo) of Crucial Security, who launched the contest and set up the web site to collect donations.  Security luminaries from across the globe chipped in funds to build a bounty, including Travis Goodspeed ($50) and Nick Percoco (@c7five) of the security firm Trustwave ($250). The largest single donation – $10,000 – came by way of Arturas Rosenbacher (@arturas) […]

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APT-For-Hire: Symantec Outs Hidden Lynx Hacking Crew

This site and others have been writing about the “Advanced Persistent Threat” problem, which has generally been treated as a euphemism for the government and military of The People’s Republic of China or – in some cases – Russia, Iran, North Korea or other un-friendlies. Firms like Mandiant have taken pains to separate the concept of APT from run of the mill cyber criminal hacking groups whose motivation is profit, rather than the acquisition of information that can be used to advance geopolitical or economic goals. Cyber criminal groups may well use “advanced” in their attack methods and “persistent” in their efforts to compromise victim networks, but they weren’t “APT.” Now Symantec Corp. has put a fly into that ointment: publishing a report that pulls the covers off an APT group dubbed “Hidden Lynx” that it claims is responsible for some of the most sophisticated and large scale hacks of […]

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