Malware

With tens of thousands camped in line today waiting for the Apple iPhone 5, hackers have already had their hands on the core iOS 6 operating system for some time. Two Dutch hackers managed to successfully beat Apple’s sturdy protections in place, and this week at the EUSecWest conference in Amsterdam presented the first successful hack of a patched iPhone 4S with an exploit that will also work against the new device.

With Internet Explorer users still exposed to as many as four active exploits of a zero-day vulnerability in the browser, Microsoft Tuesday night said it will release a FixIt in the next couple of days that will address the issue.

A researcher at AlienVault has discovered three new servers delivering exploits targeting the latest zero-day vulnerability in Internet Explorer. Jamie Blasco, AlienVault Labs manager, said the one of the servers is delivering a new malware payload, and all of them appear to be targeting defense contractors in the United States and India.

The Grum botnet, which Dutch authorities and security researchers knocked offline earlier this summer, made a second, unsuccessful attempt at a comeback over the weekend when the bot herders stood up two new command-and-control servers in Turkey. The revival was short-lived however, and both C&Cs now are offline.

Microsoft issued a security advisory Monday night and recommended several workarounds to mitigate a zero-day vulnerability in Internet Explorer reported over the weekend that is being exploited in the wild. Microsoft said it is still investigating the vulnerability, and may issue an out-of-band security update to patch the problem, or wait until the next Patch Tuesday update Oct. 9.

A new version of the TDSS/TDL-4 botnet is rapidly growing, primarily because it’s having great success using an evasion technique known as a domain generation algorithm (DGA) to avoid detection, researchers at Damballa Security revealed today.The algorithm helps the latest version of the botnet carry out click-fraud campaigns and is used primarily to rapidly move communication between victims and command-and-control servers from domain to domain, a technique known as domain fluxing, similar to fast fluxing.

Forensic analysis of a number of Flame malware toolkit command-and-control servers revealed an additional three unidentified pieces of malicious code are under the control of the attackers, including one in the wild. Researchers at Kaspersky Lab, Symantec, CERT-Bund/BSI, and the International Telecommunication Union’s Impact Alliance said today they also pinpointed the first work done on the Flame espionage campaign was carried out in 2006, much earlier than the 2010 date development was initially thought to have begun.