Verizon has further dissected breach data from its annual Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) and built a profile of intellectual property theft that points to a disturbing combination of factors leading to successful infiltrations by cybercriminals, competitors, hacktivists and nation-state sponsored attackers.
Regardless of the market or industry, the majority of attacks are financially motivated. Even in data-rich environments such as health care, attackers are still after profits and exploit the same weaknesses and transaction processing systems that are vulnerable in other industries such as hotels and accommodations, food services and financial services. Verizon’s latest Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) broke out data breach characteristics by those industries, and came to a stunningly simple conclusion: Attackers will seek out the easiest way in, take what they need and get out quickly.
Adobe announced today it has repaired a host of critical buffer overflow vulnerabilities and an array out of bounds vulnerability in Shockwave Player and urges users to update to the latest version of the software, version 11.6.8.638.
A security researcher has submitted to Oracle a patch he said took him 30 minutes to produce that would repair a zero-day vulnerability currently exposed in Java SE. He hopes his actions will spur Oracle to issue an out-of-band patch for the sandbox-escape vulnerability, rather than wait for the February 2013 Critical Patch Update as Oracle earlier said it would.
More than 50 million users of the Steam gaming and media distribution platform are at risk for remote compromise because of weaknesses in the platform’s URL protocol handler, a pair of researchers at ReVuln wrote in a paper released this week.Luigi Auriemma and Donato Ferrante discovered a number of memory corruption issues, including buffer and heap overflows that would allow an attacker to abuse the way the Steam client handles browser requests. Steam runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OSX.
Defense secretary Leon Panetta couldn’t resist, could he? He couldn’t fight the urge to dig deep into the information security cliché handbook and yank out that old chestnut about a Cyber Pearl Harbor.Seriously, is there a more cringe-inducing, FUD-filled phrase than Cyber Pearl Harbor? Never mind that it’s offensive to the families of those who fell on that date, but it raises the questions of whether the leader of the United States Department of Defense is so disengaged from reality that he decides that’s the best crutch to lean on? Or does he just need a new speech writer?
The elusive authors of the Citadel Trojan have released a new version of their banking botnet malware and service. The latest version, the sixth since it debuted in January and dubbed Rain, includes a dynamic configuration mechanism that allows botmasters to inject malicious content to compromised browsers on the fly. This real-time interaction with bots avoids the need to send an updated configuration file to the entire botnet and lessens the risk of detection by security operations.
Microsoft has learned that much of the code used by the Nitol malware family is copied from free malware resources hosted on Chinese websites. Microsoft posted portions of the code online this week where similar lines used for denial of service attack functionality are present in Nitol and on the sites in question.
Oracle will not patch a critical sandbox escape vulnerability in Java SE versions 5, 6 and 7 until its February Critical Patch Update, according to the researcher who discovered the flaw. Adam Gowdiak of Polish security firm Security Explorations told Threatpost via email that Oracle said it was deep into testing of another Java patch for the October CPU released yesterday and that it was too late to include the sandbox fix.
Zero-day vulnerabilities and exploits dominate headlines and most heated information security discussions. In truth, however, there are relatively few of these attacks hitting a small number of hosts, according to new research on the subject.
Infosec Insider content is written by a trusted community of Threatpost cybersecurity subject matter experts. Each contribution has a goal of bringing a unique voice to important cybersecurity topics. Content strives to be of the highest quality, objective and non-commercial.
Sponsored Content is paid for by an advertiser. Sponsored content is written and edited by members of our sponsor community. This content creates an opportunity for a sponsor to provide insight and commentary from their point-of-view directly to the Threatpost audience. The Threatpost editorial team does not participate in the writing or editing of Sponsored Content.
