Tag: Mobile Threats

ThingWorx Says IoT Marketplace Will Speed Adoption

ThingWorx, the ‘platform as a service’ (PaaS) vendor, has made empowering the Internet of Things (or Internet of Everything) its rallying cry. Now the company says it is the first to market with an IoT “marketplace” that it claims will speed development of smart, connected products. The company announced ThingWorx Marketplace at Salesforce.com’s “Dreamforce” event in San Francisco on Monday. The new platform will allow ThingWorx and third party firms to offer “components and services” that are needed to build full-featured IoT applications. Those may be things like new kinds of sensors, widgets, device connectors, protocol adapters, hooks into device clouds or integrations with enterprise management platforms, according to a ThingWorx statement. The platform will be accessible by ThingWorx partners, independent hardware and software vendors, and third party developers, the company said.  Enterprises will be able to deploy private instances of the Marketplace to host internally developed applications, application templates, analytics, […]

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APT or fANTasy: The Strange Story of BadBIOS

Yesterday over on Veracode’s blog I wrote about the ongoing saga of “BadBIOS” – a piece of malicious software that might be the most sophisticated virus ever written, or a figment of the imagination of Dragos Ruiu, the esteemed security researcher who says he discovered it on systems he owned. The story of BadBIOS reads like something out of science fiction. Ruiu has described it in interviews and blog posts as BIOS-based malware that can back door systems running a variety of operating systems – OS X, Windows and even OpenBSD. But it’s also described as an ephemeral kind of ‘we-don’t-know-what,’ that can’t be isolated or analyzed. One Twitter follower of Ruiu’s suggested designating it a “heisenbug” which he defined as “a software bug that seems to disappear or alter its behavior when one attempts to study it.” That would be funny if this weren’t deadly serious. For, really, one […]

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Hack Uses Phone’s Camera and Mic To Best Anti-Keylogger

Smart phones these days are bristling with sensors. Forget about the camera and microphone – there are accelerometers, Global Positioning System components, not to mention Bluetooth and NFC transmitters. All those remote sensors enable all kinds of cool features – from finding the nearest Starbucks to mobile payments. But they also pose a risk to the privacy of the phone’s owner – as malicious actors (and the occasional national government) look for ways to turn cameras and other sensors into powerful, cheap and convenient spying tools. Now researchers at The University of Cambridge have demonstrated one possible, new attack type: harnessing the built-in video camera and microphone on Android devices to spy on an owner’s movements and guess his or her password. The technique could be a way for cyber criminals to defeat anti-keylogging technology like secure “soft” keyboards used to enter banking PINs and other sensitive information. The work […]

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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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