Vulnerabilities


Persistent, Covert Malware Causing Major Damage

LAS VEGAS–Security technology and practice have advanced quite a bit in the past few years, but one thing that has become clear is that whatever gains have been made are just not keeping pace with the innovation of attackers. The advances being made by malware authors and crimeware gangs are keeping them well ahead of the curve and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, researchers say.

Major Check Counterfeiting Ring Uncovered

A researcher has uncovered a sophisticated check counterfeiting ring
that uses compromised computers to steal and print millions of dollars
worth of bogus invoices and then recruit money mules to cash them. Read the full article. [The Register]


Isolated strains of mainstream malware that took advantage of how the
zero-day Windows flaw first exploited by the sophisticated Stuxnet worm
began appearing late last week. The same approach has since been applied
by the dodgy sorts behind Zeus, a family of sophisticated toolkits
frequently used to steal bank login credentials and the like from
compromised systems. Read the full article. [The Register]

By Alex RothackerPrivilege escalation attacks consist of exploiting a bug or design flaw in a software application to gain access to resources which normally are protected from an application or user. The result is that the application allows actions with privileges beyond an acceptable level for the specific user.  

Google has released version 5.0.375.125 of Chrome, a security update that
addresses three “high” risk vulnerabilities in its WebKit-based browser.
According to the developers, two of the high risk issues could lead to
memory corruption while SVG handling or rendering code. Read the full article. [The H Security]

Organizations are getting hit by at least one
successful attack per week, and the annualized cost to their bottom
lines from the attacks ranged from $1 million to $53 million per year,
according to a newly published benchmark study of 45 U.S. organizations
hit by data breaches. Read the full article. [Dark Reading]