UPDATE – The missing link connecting the attacks against Apple, Facebook and possibly Twitter is a popular iOS mobile developers’ forum called iPhoneDevSDK which was discovered hosting malware in an apparent watering hole attack that has likely snared victims at hundreds of organizations beyond the big three.
Apple is the latest major American company to enter the security confessional and disclose it has been breached. The company told Reuters today it was attacked by the same crew that hit Facebook, which disclosed its breach last Friday, and that like the social media giant, no data had been stolen.
China has been blamed for cyberattacks on every major industrial base in the United States—and even in some corners for the Super Bowl blackout. But most of it has been rampant speculation coupled with the lacing together of a number of loose ends. Examples of the kind of direct attribution to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) presented in a report today by security company Mandiant have been rare.
Laptops belonging to several Facebook employees were compromised recently and infected with malware that the company said was installed through the use of a Java zero-day exploit that bypassed the software’s sandbox. Facebook claims that no user data was affected by the attack and says that it has been working with law enforcement to investigate the attack, which also affected other unnamed companies.
A ransomware ring was taken down Wednesday in the United Arab Emirates and Spain by Europol and Spanish law enforcement, smashing an operation that netted more than €1 million annually.
For now, the Lucky Thirteen attacks described in a paper last week by researchers at Royal Holloway, University of London, are largely theoretical. But the potential exists to adapt techniques used in the BEAST attacks against TLS/SSL to improve the feasibility of Lucky Thirteen, a researcher said.
Two days after the group Anonymous boasted it had broken into a government Web site and had the data dump to prove it, the U.S. Federal Reserve admitted it was hacked.”The Federal Reserve system is aware that information was obtained by exploiting a temporary vulnerability in a website vendor product,” a spokeswoman told Reuters Tuesday. “Exposure was fixed shortly after discovery and is no longer an issue. This incident did not affect critical operations of the Federal Reserve system.”
Google Chrome users, among others, couldn’t access some of the most popular Web sites Monday after an advertising network’s corporate Web site was injected with malware. But, according to the ad company’s chief executive, those sites were safe.Those who called up sites such as The Huffington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and many other media sites, among others, were greeted with a warning that the sites contained malware.
SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO–The attack that resulted in the compromise of RSA’s SecurID database in 2011 had a lot of ramifications and sent shockwaves through much of the security industry. But it could have had much broader consequences had the security team at Lockheed Martin not discovered the same attack team on its own network and taken actions to shut them down.
Researchers at Australia-based BitDefender say they’ve found how some Yahoo Mail accounts are being hijacked, and it leads back to “buggy” blog software Yahoo’s developers used.
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