It’s getting difficult these days to keep track of all of the companies, public and otherwise, that are buying and selling vulnerabilities or information on bugs, and now there’s another group on the scene: ReVuln. But, unlike other companies in the industry, ReVuln is mostly focusing its efforts on vulnerabilities in SCADA and ICS software, the applications that run utilities, industrial systems and other sophisticated systems.
Scared is a strong word, but the reality, according to a Websense analysis by Patrik Runald, is that spear-phishers, like the ones that compromised a White House network last week, are implementing new evasion tactics, fundamentally changing their attack strategies, and revolutionizing the targeted threat model, giving business executives plenty of reason to worry.
Hackers interrupted Internet access in various parts of the Islamic Republic of Iran yesterday after attacking a number of the country’s infrastructure and communications companies, a state official told the Reuters news agency.
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.
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.
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.
Telvent, the maker of a SCADA product used in a number of critical industries, said that its corporate network has been compromised by attackers and that some of the files used by customers on their own networks were changed. This attack is the latest in what looks to be a series of incidents of varying severity that have occurred at companies involved in either the production or use of SCADA systems in recent months.
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.
For several years now, Congress has been wandering around the wilderness, trying to figure out why so much of America’s intellectual property is being sucked into a giant vortex somewhere over Asia and whether they should do something to stop it, like maybe pass a cybersecurity law. They’ve taken innumerable swings at it, and struck out every time, with the two parties unable to agree on what needs to be in a cybersecurity bill and what entities should be covered by it. Now Congress is in recess and it looks less and less likely that anything will be passed before the end of the session. And, for once, we all should be thankful for our lawmakers’ inability to act.
A new APT-style espionage campaign launched this summer targeting organizations tied to financial services, government agencies and the defense industry used a technique dubbed water holing to entice victims and silently redirect them to sites hosting zero-day exploits.
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