Michael Mimoso

Emergency Adobe Flash Player Patches Fix Pair of Zero Days

Exploits targeting two previously unreported flaws in Flash Player prompted Adobe to release an emergency patch yesterday. One of the attacks is targeting aerospace and other manufacturing companies, and is being delivered via infected Microsoft Office documents. The other is being carried out over the Web targeting Firefox and Safari on Mac OS X.


SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico – Dan Hubbard has lately been a regular face at a lot of big data meet-ups. He’s also often been the lone security face at these meet-ups, which are dominated by analytics, search, social media and advertising professionals. That may change soon for the CTO of DNS and security service provider OpenDNS, who announced today at the Kaspersky Security Analyst Summit that security researchers will have free access to a new tool called Umbrella Security Graph.

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico – The world of SCADA and industrial control system vulnerabilities is starting to mirror that of IT security, not only in the demonstration and exploitation of zero-day vulnerabilities, but in the brokering of flaws and exploits between hackers and organizations interested in buying research.

Banking malware has primarily been just that, an attack tool used against financial institutions to steal money from online bank accounts. But what if cybercrime gangs decided to flip that on its head, and use malware such as the Citadel banking Trojan to steal credentials from not only banks, but government agencies and commercial businesses?

The Chinese group behind the targeted attack on the New York Times was laser focused on accessing the email of a reporter and the newspaper’s former Beijing bureau chief to the point that it used an inordinate number of custom malware samples to get the job done.“In terms of statistics, 45 [custom malware samples] as a ratio to the number of computers involved, 53, is a high ratio,” said Richard Bejtlich, chief security officer of Mandiant, the forensics firm hired by the Times to investigate the targeted attack. “Usually, you’ll see one or two for the relatively small number of systems involved.”

While Android malware continues to grow faster than other malware types, it still accounts for only a minute fraction of all malware on the Web, according to Cisco’s annual security report released this week.Compromised websites hosting malicious Java and iFrame attacks and other malware far and away outpaces all other delivery vectors for malware, Cisco’s report said.