hacking Archives

Tag: hacking

Essentials for Visibility-Driven Security

October 27, 2014 Scott Harrell

Visibility is surprisingly tricky. The security industry offers many disparate tools to provide customers “visibility” into what is happening on their networks. Among them are tools that track what applications are on the network, tools for enumerating and tracking software vulnerabilities, tools for determining when sensitive data has left a network, tools that indicate when attacks are underway and tools that identify and analyze network data flows – to name just a few. Of course, layered on top of all this “visibility” are further systems that correlate and analyze what the mission-specific tools are seeing. Promises of a “single pane of glass” aside, the result is often a mishmash of data and events that require skilled security practitioners to analyze and interpret. The mishmash, in turn, leads to errors in analysis and prioritization. Albert Einstein famously said “Any fool can know. The point is to understand.” So it is in the information security industry, where a common refrain is “you can’t protect […]

White House Cyber Chief: JP Morgan Underscores Critical Infrastructure Risk

October 9, 2014 Paul Roberts

The White House’s cyber security czar, Michael Daniel, said the Obama Administration is deeply concerned about the reported hack of systems belonging to banking giant JP Morgan Chase & Co. but sees the incident as part of a larger trend of attacks against U.S. critical infrastructure. Asked about the targeted attack against JP Morgan and other banks and financial institutions, Daniel said that the White House was concerned, but not surprised by the incident. “We have watched for several years the trend of malicious actors in cyber try to figure out how to target critical infrastructure,” he said. “Financial services is critical infrastructure.” The White House was concerned that a major U.S. bank would fall victim to hackers, but sees it in the context of a “broad trend,” rather than an isolated incident, he said. Speaking with Michael Farrell, the Cybersecurity Editor at Christian Science Monitor, Daniel hit on many of the now-common talking […]

Supply Chain Risk: Raspberry Pi Device Used for War Shipping

October 7, 2014 Paul Roberts

An interesting post on supply chain security over at Security Affairs. The post looks at a new approach to supply chain surveillance (and, presumably, attacks): ‘war shipping.’ War shipping is, of course, a play on the ‘war driving’ scene from the early days of consumer wifi, in which cars outfitted with antennae would canvas whole cities, documenting open wi-fi hotspots that could be used to grab some free Internet. In this case, Security Affairs notes a shippable board-sized package designed by security expert Larry Pesce of Paul’s Security Weekly (fka Pauldotcom). The device can be contained in a standard UPS shipping box and delivered to a target network to passively surveil or even attack it. The kit is built on a Raspberry Pi b_ with an AWUS051NH wireless card, a cheap battery charger, kismet and custom software. Pesce demonstrated the device at Derbycon, a Louisville, Kentucky based event last month. The device includes both […]

Europol Warns of Internet of Things Risk

October 6, 2014 Paul Roberts

In a newly released report, Europol’s European Cybercrime Center (EC3) warns that the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) threatens to strengthen the hand of organized cyber criminal groups and make life much more difficult for police and governments that wish to pursue them. EC3’s latest Internet Organized Crime Threat Assessment (iOCTA) says the “Internet of Everything” will greatly complicate the work of law enforcement creating “new opportunities for everything from cyber criminals to state actors to child abusers. The growing numbers of connected devices will greatly expand the “attack surface” available for cyber criminal activity, the EC3 warns. Cyber criminals may co-opt connected devices for use in common criminal activity (like denial of service attacks and spam campaigns). However, advancements like connected (“smart”) vehicles and infrastructure create openings for large scale and disruptive attacks. The report, which was published late last months, is a high level position paper and pulls data mostly […]

Report: Hacked Password Behind Compromise of 75m JPMorgan Accounts

October 3, 2014 Paul Roberts

The top news this week is about Wall Street giant JP Morgan Chase, which disclosed on Thursday that a previously disclosed breach was much larger than initially believed, affecting more than 75 million account holders. And once again, reports suggest that a compromised employee account may be at the root of the incident. Bloomberg, which first broke the news of the cyber attack on JPMorgan Chase in August, said on Friday that hackers exploited an employee’s access to a development server as part of an attack on a JPMorgan Chase & Co. server that led to one of the largest cyber-attacks ever and the theft of data on 76 million households and 7 million small businesses. According to the Bloomberg report, which cited “people familiar with the bank’s review,” the breach started in June when an employee’s user name and password for what’s described as “a web-development server” were compromised. From that […]