A slew of major American banks, some already stressed by a stream of DDoS attacks carried out over the past 10 days, may soon have to brace themselves for a large-scale coordinated attack bent on pulling off fraudulent wire transfers.
Is the Java browser plug-in the IT equivalent of the human appendix? Would you miss it if it were gone? Probably not, experts say, especially now that attackers are beating the Java sandbox with a rash of zero-day exploits.
It might sound like a security researcher’s worst nightmare to string together 300,000 virtual instances of the Android OS, but for scientists at Sandia National Laboratories, it’s just another day.The Department of Energy-sponsored national security-focused laboratory released the MegaDroid project on Tuesday, a cluster of 300,000 networked virtual machines running Android on commodity hardware. The project gives scientist a massively scaled platform to test anything that could cause a network disruption, including malware or an attack on critical infrastructure.
Hackers fond of man-in-the-browser (MiTB) attacks have brought efficiency to their work. New strains of MiTB malware have been discovered that are able to parse logs for the sensitive information hackers are targeting, rather than send massive unstructured logs back to the attacker’s command and control server.
Attackers targeting major U.S. banks with distributed denial of service attacks are using a number of toolkits to automate the job. Prolexic Technologies, a security company specializing in DDoS protection services, identified one toolkit called itsoknoproblembro, a kit that attacks multiple ports and network targets.
Mobile malware has largely been limited to Trojans buried inside a malicious app targeting sensitive data stored on the phone such as email, contact information and SMS messages. A new proof-of-concept piece of malicious software, however, expands the scope of mobile malware and essentially turns an Android device into a surveillance tool, bringing a while new range of security and privacy implications into the equation.
Mozilla is trying to deal a two-fisted blow to the continued use of passwords as an online authenticator, as well as the practice using social media username-password combinations as a persistent login on other sites. Its Persona project has moved into its first beta release promising developers and website users a better and more private authentication experience.
Adobe announced today it was the victim of an APT-style attack after two malicious utilities commonly used in targeted attacks for privilege escalation and pivoting within a network were discovered signed by a valid Adobe digital certificate. Adobe said it will revoke the certificate next week.
Adobe products and services senior director of security Brad Arkin said in a statement that a build server with access to the Adobe code signing infrastructure was compromised and is the source of the issue.
PNC Bank appears, as promised, to be the latest victim of hacktivists carrying out denial-of-service attacks against major U.S. financial services institutions. PNC, out of Pittsburgh, joins Wells Fargo, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and Bank of America on a list of banks taken offline reportedly by a group who claimed responsibilities for the attacks as retaliation for the portrayal of Muslims in “Innocence of Muslims,” a series of movie trailers uploaded to YouTube.
Just when you thought it was safe to go back to using Java, security researchers have found another gaping hole that could impact potentially more than 1.1 billion desktops running the Oracle-owned platform.
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