Google’s announcement that its Google Public DNS resolution service now supports DNSSEC is being applauded, but experts caution that despite Google’s high profile, this only puts a slight dent in a larger issue.
Information security is littered with bad analogies. And none sounds sillier than a watering hole attack, which plays off the tactic that dominant animals use when stalking food by loitering at a watering hole. Rather than chase their prey, a lion will wait for prey to come to it. Hackers are doing the same thing to a great degree of success. Rather than using a spear phishing email campaign to lure prey to them, hackers are infecting vulnerable sites of a common interest to their targets, and then redirecting them to malware and more badness.
A controversial Internet scanning project has come under fire for illegally accessing and running code on remote machines. The Internet Census 2012 project, revealed Sunday in a post to Seclists.org, discovered 420,000 embedded devices accessible using default credentials. The unnamed researcher behind the project then used the devices as a botnet to scan most of the IPv4 address space.
With antiquated gear running the country’s industrial control systems that oversee critical infrastructure, it’s no shock attackers targeting SCADA networks do their fair share of reconnaissance looking for weak spots in that equipment.
Researchers and attackers alike are quickly discovering you don’t need a fancy Java or Flash exploit to beat application sandboxes. Exploiting an unpatched kernel vulnerability in the underlying operating system, one that’s likely to stay unpatched for a long time, will do just fine.
Additional details and code demonstrating a possible security vulnerability in Java were released this morning by a Polish security research company, bringing to a head a three-week long debate between the researcher and Oracle over whether the issue is indeed a vulnerability or an allowed behavior in Java.
The Ramnit malware family has been given a facelift with new anti-detection capabilities, a troubleshooting module, as well as enhanced encryption and malicious payloads.
Attackers with a control infrastructure based in China are leveraging the same vulnerability exploited by Miniduke to attack Uyghur and Tibetan activists with new exploits.
More rhetoric is coming out of Washington regarding the use of malware as an auxiliary weapon to bombs and bullets. National Security Agency leader Gen. Keith Alexander told a House Armed Services Committee yesterday that his new Cyber Command will be ready to retaliate should the United States critical infrastructure come under cyberattack.
A new watering hole attack has been reported, this one targeting two government-related websites based in Israel that have been injected with malware exploiting a six-month-old vulnerability in Internet Explorer.
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