Dell said human error was to blame for mistakes which led it to ship a
number of replacement server motherboards to customers pre-loaded with
spyware. The company declined to say whether it was running anti-virus
software at its factory but said it had taken 16 steps to improve
processes. Read the full article. [The Register]
As more information continues to come out about the Stuxnet worm and the vulnerabilities that it exploits, it’s becoming increasingly clear that this kind of attack may be a preview of the attacks that are likely to become commonplace in the months and years ahead.
Slovenian police have arrested four suspects over allegations that they developed the Mariposa botnet malware. Read the full article. [The Register]
In the first few months of 2009, security researchers began seeing signs of a new piece of malware that was somewhat baffling to them. It didn’t act like other Trojans or rootkits and try to bury itself on an infected machine and try to do nasty stuff like deleting registry keys or copying the contents of the hard drive. Instead, this malware, which came to be called Gumblar, was about the business of stealing Web site credentials and compromising as many legitimate sites as possible, creating something entirely new: a botnet of infected Web servers that has highlighted the horrific state of Web application security and become the new model for Web-based malware.
Renowned researcher HD Moore next week will
reveal how a misconfiguration by developers using the VxWorks operating
system found in many embedded systems has left a trail of vulnerable
products across various vendors’ products. Read the full article. [Dark Reading]
Dell has confirmed that some of its PowerEdge server motherboards were shipped to customers with malware code on the embedded server management firmware.The infected motherboard was found on replacement Dell PowerEdge R410 rack servers, according to a post on a Dell support forum.
Microsoft has released a FixIt tool for the unpatched LNK Windows shell vulnerability and also has updated its guidance on how to deal with the flaw. The company also said it is continuing to work on developing a patch for the vulnerability.
By Dmitry TarakanovCybercriminals use a variety of bots to conduct DDoS attacks on
Internet servers. One of the most popular tools is called Black Energy.
To date, Kaspersky Lab has identified and implemented detection for over
4,000 modifications of this malicious program. In mid-2008 malware
writers made significant modifications to the original version, creating
Black Energy 2 (which Kaspersky Lab detects as Backdoor.Win32.Blakken).
This malicious program is the subject of this article.
At next week’s Black Hat security conference, researcher Jeremiah Grossman plans to detail
critical weaknesses that are enabled by default in major browsers–IE, Safari, Firefox and Chrome– and include vulnerabilities that have yet to be
purged by the respective browser makers despite months and years of notice. Read the full article. [The Register]
A zero-day flaw being used in targeted attacks
against organizations worldwide has
security experts worried that the threat could spread further. Concerns
about additional attacks using the “LNK” vulnerability in
Windows machines prompted the SANS
Internet Storm Center today to raise its Infocon alert level to
“yellow,” up from “green,” or normal, status.
Read the full article. [Dark Reading]
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