Google Sweetens Bug Bounty Pot
Google officials say that they will be handing out bonuses on top of existing rewards to security researchers who report especially troublesome flaws as part of their bug bounty program.
Web Security
Citadel Malware Used to Infiltrate Airport VPN
The Citadel Trojan is really starting to become kind of a pain in the neck. Not content to sit by and watch while its more well-known rivals Zeus and SpyEye get all the attention, the Citadel malware has begun showing up in some interesting places, with the latest example being the discovery of the Trojan being used to steal VPN credentials for internal users at a major airport.
Report: Stealthy New Banking Malware Tilon Emerges
A new type of financial malware has surfaced that’s targeting information submitted through banking forms via the “Man in the Browser” (MITB) technique and proving difficult to detect, according to research published by computer security firm Trusteer today.
A security researchers has discovered a pair of methods that enable him to bypass the protections offered by Microsoft’s EMET anti-exploit technology. The Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit, which Microsoft updated late last month to include one of the three technologies that were finalists in the company’s BlueHat Prize competition, is designed to prevent certain kinds of exploits from hitting software vulnerabilities. But now a researcher has developed two techniques that can bypass the protections.
Do not envy the life of a Web app. It’s a brutal, public existence filled with attacks from all sides. In fact, a new report by Imperva sheds some light on this sad life, showing that a typical Web app is attacked once every three days and some are targeted as many as 2,700 times in a given year.
Dealers–Twitter scammers who create fake profiles on the social media site and sell their sets of followers–are adapting their workflow just enough to stay under the social media site’s radar, according to security firm Barracuda Labs, who recently wrapped up a 75 day study analyzing the buying and selling of Twitter followers.
SQL injection attacks have been going on for years, and the vulnerabilities and exploitation techniques are well-understood and widely discussed. However, they’re still quite prevalent and are used in a variety of scenarios. One recent example is the attack on a Yahoo site that resulted in a breach of 450,000 usernames and passwords. In this video, Ryan O’Boyle of Veracode discusses the nature of SQL injection attacks and how to defend against them.
There are new versions of the Opera browser available, a small update to version 12.01, but they include a number of important security fixes, notably a patch for a vulnerability that could lead to remote code execution.
The number of SQL attacks jumped by nearly two thirds earlier this year according to cloud hosting firm FireHost who recorded over 450,000 blocked SQL injection attacks between the first and second quarter this year.
Black Hat is upon us and, with it, a lot of chatter about the dangers posed by so-called “APT,” or advanced persistent threats. Rather than get trapped in the hype bubble, Threatpost editor Paul Roberts took the opportunity to check back in with a recognized expert on detecting and combating APT-style attacks: Amit Yoran, the former CEO of NetWitness Corp. and now a Senior Vice President at RSA, The Security Division of EMC. Yoran says that the darkest days may yet be ahead in the fight against APT style attacks, with mounting attacks and a critical shortage of security talent. To cope, both private sector firms and the government need to stop fighting the last war and pivot to the kinds of practices and monitoring that can spot sophisticated attackers.
