Tag: software

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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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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IT Pros: Internet Of Things Is A Governance Disaster

Not that we needed a survey to tell us this: but IT pros are seriously concerned about the risks posed by all the IP-enabled devices that are starting to connect to their corporate networks. That’s the conclusion of a survey of 2,013 members of ISACA, a worldwide association of information security professionals, which found almost unanimous agreement that the Internet of Things poses a governance problem for their networks, with increased security threats the most oft-cited governance issue raised by IoT adoption. The survey (PDF) also polled 4,000 consumers in the U.S., U.K., India and Mexico, finding that IT professionals were less sanguine than consumers about the transformative potential of the Internet of Things for enterprises. Just four in 10 agreed that the benefits of IoT adoption outweighed the risks, while half of the ISACA members polled felt that the benefits of IoT to consumers outweighed the risks. Around a quarter of […]

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Ephemeral In-Memory Malware Common At High Value Targets

Computer security has always been a game of Spy vs. Spy, with the bad guys trying to stay one step ahead of the latest tactics and tools used to catch them. And that’s still true today, in an age of so-called “advanced persistent threats.” So what’s the next big thing in advanced malware? How about ghostly, ephemeral malware that never exists outside of memory and disappears whenever the infected system is rebooted?   The security firm Triumfant issued a warning on Monday about what it calls “advanced volatile threats” or AVT. The malware is already a common component in attacks against high value targets, including government agencies and intelligence services John Prisco, Triumfant’s CEO and President told The Security Ledger. The terminology here is a bit tricky – as Prisco admits. Technically, almost every online attack begins in memory, where attackers seek to overwrite the memory space used by a […]

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