By Alex RothackerJanuary 18th marks the 6th anniversary of the Oracle Critical Patch Update (CPU) in its current form as a quarterly patch. For those who remember, before the CPU, Oracle released patches as Security Alerts, the last being Security Alert 68 at the end of August 2004.
Whatever else is said about malware authors, it’s becoming clearer and clearer of late that they are learning from their mistakes and adapting to new defensive tactics at an increasingly rapid rate. The latest example of this is a recently discovered version of the Carberp malware, which now includes a new encryption scheme and improved administrative capabilities.
The Zeus Botnet continues to evolve and shift in focus from
its traditional targets, banks and their customers, to other money-handling
institutions like electronic money and online payment systems, according to a new
report.
The shift has been going on for months and likely follows
policy moves by banks to protect themselves and their customers from the
malicious theft of personal and financial information.
ARLINGTON, VA–Pulling valuable data out of corporate networks is the end goal of many, if not most, attacks these days and the tactics that attackers use to get into their targets are fairly well understood and publicized. But it’s not often that you get a look at the way that the data is actually removed from the victims’ networks.
ARLINGTON, VA–A number of researchers showed off interesting new attack techniques at the Black Hat DC conference this week, including one that enables an attacker to execute malicious code on handsets over the air.
A fast-moving Twitter worm is in circulation, using Google’s goo.gl redirection service to push unsuspecting users to a notorious scareware (fake anti-virus) malware campaign.At 8:45 a.m EST today, this Twitter search shows thousands of Twitter messages continuing to spread the worm.
Data suggests that 2010 was a year of “more of the same” when it comes to computer threats, but 2011 likely won’t be, at least according to networking giant Cisco Systems, which released its Annual Security Report on Wednesday.
CORRECTION: This article originally included the incorrect name for an associate of A.Q. Khan. The correct name of the associate is “Friedrich Tinner,” a Swiss nuclear engineer. The name has been corrected in the article.The author of a new book on the evolution of the world’s first nuclear black market says that Stuxnet is just the latest in a long string of efforts by the U.S. and its allies to slow or stop the creation of nuclear programs by rogue nations.
The recent merger of the Zeus and SpyEye botnets has created a mega-botnet that promises to increase the effectiveness, complexity, and prevalence of malware across the Web, according to a blog post by Francois Paget of McAfee Labs.
ARLINGTON, VA–There is a growing sentiment among security researchers that the programmers behind the Stuxnet attack may not have been the super-elite cadre of developers that they’ve been mythologized to be in the media. In fact, some experts say that Stuxnet could well have been far more effective and difficult to detect had the attackers not made a few elementary mistakes.
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