Search Results for "Target"

How The UK’s HACIENDA Program Targeted Entire Countries

The folks over at Heise/c’t Magazin revealed leaked, classified documents to report on HACIENDA, a GCHQ program to deliver country-wide Internet reconnaissance for so-called “five eyes” nations, including the US (NSA), Canada and Australia. And, as Bruce Schneier points out – its not clear that these documents were from Edward Snowden’s trove of classified NSA materials. HACIENDA involves the large-scale use of TCP “port” scans to profile systems connected to the Internet, in addition to profiling of enabled applications. According to Heise, which published a classified slide deck. GCHQ claimed to have canvassed 27 countries through the program. A list of targeted services includes ubiquitous public services such as HTTP and FTP, SSH (Secure Shell protocol) and SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol). The Heise report, prepared by Julian Kirsch, Christian Grothoff, Monika Ermert, Jacob Appelbaum, Laura Poitras and Henrik Moltke claim that HACIENDA’s goal was to perform active collection and map vulnerable services across […]

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DHS Warns Energy Firms Of Malware Used In Targeted Attacks

The Department of Homeland Security warned firms in the energy sector about new, targeted malware infecting industrial control systems and stealing data. DHS’s ICS CERT, the Industrial Control Systems Computer Emergency Response Team, said it is analyzing malware associated with an ICS-focused malware campaign. The malicious software, dubbed “Havex” that was being spread by way of phishing emails and so-called “watering hole” attacks that involved compromises of ICS vendor web sites. DHS was alerted to the attacks by researchers at the security firms Symantec (which dubbed the malware campaign “Dragonfly”) and F-Secure (“Havex”) -a remote access trojan (or RAT) that also acts as an installer (or “downloader”) – fetching other malicious applications to perform specific tasks on compromised networks. One of those additional payloads is a Trojan Horse program dubbed Karagany (by Symantec) that has been liked to prior attacks on energy firms. According to Symantec, the malware targeted energy grid operators, major electricity generation firms, […]

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Code Spaces Probably A ‘Target of Opportunity’

The spectacular collapse this week of Code Spaces, a cloud-based code repository, may have been the result of a an unspectacular “opportunistic” hack, rather than a targeted operation, according to one cloud security expert. The sudden demise of the online application repository has sent shock waves through the tech industry, laying bare what some say are lax practices among many cloud-based application and infrastructure providers. But the attack itself was almost certainly the result of a larger, indiscriminate cyber criminal campaign, said Jeff Schilling, the Chief Security Officer of Firehost, a Texas-based secure cloud provider. “This is something we pretty frequently: companies get held ransom with a DDoS attack, and if that doesn’t work, (the attackers) will resort to doing other things,” Schilling told The Security Ledger. But Code Spaces almost certainly wasn’t the only company the extortionists worked on, Schilling said. Instead, the company was likely caught up in a wide net […]

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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 […]

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Target Breach Spells End for Magnetic Stripe Cards in 2015

After years spent fighting pushes for more secure standards, the payment card industry and retailers are moving quickly to abandon magnetic stripe cards and embrace so-called ‘chip and pin’ technology. Credit card firms MasterCard and Visa plan to have most customers on the more secure chip and pin cards by October, 2015, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. The move comes in the wake of a massive heist of account information for tens of millions of credit card holders from the systems of U.S. retailers including Target, Neiman Marcus and Michaels Stores. In an interview with MasterCard’s Carolyn Balfany, the Journal notes that company has set October, 2015 as the date for a “liability shift” – a change in policy that will hold the party in a fraudulent transaction liable for losses due to that transaction. The goal, said Balfany, is to try to encourage merchants and […]

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