With the use of social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Google+ becoming more and more prevalent in the enterprise, companies are having to come to grips with additional security concerns that they bring with them. But, according to the results of a new survey of IT and security professionals, that process is still in its early stages in many companies.
Dennis Fisher talks with Kaspersky Lab Researcher Tillmann Werner about the takedown of the Kelihos botnet, the network’s unique multi-tiered architecture, its custom protocol and the ethics and legality of pushing updates to disable bots on users’ machines.
By Tillmann WernerEarlier this week, Microsoft released an announcement about the disruption of a dangerous botnet that was responsible for spam messages, theft of sensitive financial information, pump-and-dump stock scams and distributed denial-of-service attacks.
Hackers from the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) vandalized Harvard University’s website Monday morning, presenting visitors to the Ivy League university’s homepage with an image of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad dressed posed in front of the nation’s flag in full army regalia.
Continuing its legal assault on botnet operators and the hosting companies that the criminals use for their activities, Microsoft has announced new actions against a group of people it contends are responsible for the operation of the Kelihos botnet. The company has also helped to take down the botnet itself and says that Kelihos’s operators were using it not only to send out spam and steal personal information but also for some more nefarious purposes.
The Stuxnet worm may be the most famous piece of malicious software ever written. When it was first detected, a little over a year ago, the worm sounded a warning to nations around the world that critical infrastructure systems were potential targets of attack for foreign governments and cyber criminal organizations alike. But with the anniversary of the Stuxnet worm’s discovery just past, the Department of Homeland Security admits that it is now reevaluating whether it makes sense to warn the public about all of the security failings of industrial control system (ICS) and SCADA software.
The main Web site of MySql.com has been compromised and on Monday afternoon was serving malware to visitors for a short time through the use of JavaScript redirects. The site, which is owned by Oracle, was sending victims off to a remote site that is using the BlackHole exploit kit to install malware on their machines.
Attackers are finding it more lucrative than ever to compromise e-mail marketing firms and exploit their resources to send out spam, often containing malware, according to a new report from Websense.
The Alureon rootkit has become not just a major headache for its victims, with its insidious infection routines and persistence once on a machine. But it also has proved to be a challenge for researchers engaged in trying to identify new versions and unwind its new tactics and techniques. The latest hurdle thrown up by Alureon is the use of steganography to hide configuration files to update infected machines with new instructions.
Microsoft officials are seeking to assuage concerns that its implementation of UEFI in Windows 8 will prevent users from loading non-Microsoft operating systems or applications on their machines. Despite concerns raised by security researchers and open-source advocates about vendor lock-in and other issues arising from the use of a secure boot sequence in the upcoming OS, Microsoft says “the customer is in control of their PC.”
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