In-brief: a report from the firm CrowdStrike finds sophisticated nation-backed hacking groups were very active in 2014, with attacks on governments, pro-democracy advocates as well as banks and retailers.
Tag: forensics
Ghost Vulnerability Replays Third Party Code Woes
In-brief: The security firm Qualys is warning of a serious and remotely exploitable vulnerability in a function of the GNU C Library (glibc) known as gethostbyname. The security hole raises more questions about dangers lurking in legacy, open source software.
Wanna-Breach: Counterfeit Data Breaches Are A Thing
Headline grabbing data breaches are such a fixture of our modern business environment that they’ve even spawned a knock-off market: phony data breaches designed to harm a company’s image by making it look as if the firm has lost control of critical data. That’s the conclusion of a research note from Deloitte, which warns that malicious actors are increasingly using false claims about massive data breaches to bedevil established firms – inflicting real economic and reputation damage.
Report: Deep Links Connect Home Depot, Target Hacks
Security reporter Brian Krebs has an intriguing post from Sunday that suggests a link between the massive breach at Target Stores in late 2013 and the recently alleged compromise of systems at home improvement giant Home Depot. Home Depot has yet to acknowledge any theft of customer data from its computer systems. However, according to Krebs, an unnamed “source close to the Home Depot investigation” told him that an analysis of compromised computers at Home Depot revealed that some of the store’s registers were infected with a new variant of BlackPOS, a malicious software program designed to run on Windows-based point of sale (or POS) systems and steal card data when cards are swiped. BlackPOS was found on point-of-sale systems at Target last year. In March, the security firm Arbor Networks issued a report that cited BlackPOS as one of a number of point of sale system malware families that cyber criminal groups were using heavily: generating new […]
Report: Symantec on Threats to Virtual Environments
The folks over at SANS Internet Storm Center are pointing to a new study by Symantec that warns of threats posed by malicious code to virtual environments and warns that threats such as that the network traffic within virtual containers may not be monitored by services such as IDS or DLP. The paper covers how malware behaves in virtual environments. Specifically, the report examines W32.Crisis, a malicious program that is known to target virtual environments. The Crisis malware doesn’t exploit any specific vulnerability, SANS notes. Rather: it takes advantage of how the virtual machines are stored in the host system to manipulate that environment for malicious purposes while escaping detection. via InfoSec Handlers Diary Blog – Threats to virtual environments.
