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Cyber Attacks Increasing In Middle East
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Syria’s civil war and political strife in Egypt have given birth to new battlegrounds on the Web and driven a surge in cyber attacks in the Middle East, according to a leading Internet security company.
More than half of incidents in the Gulf this year were so-called “hacktivist” attacks – which account for only a quarter of cybercrime globally – as politically motivated programmers sabotaged opposing groups or institutions, executives from Intel Corp’s software security division McAfee said on Tuesday.
“It’s mostly bringing down websites and defacing them with political messages – there has been a huge increase in cyber attacks in the Middle East,” Christiaan Beek, McAfee director for incident response forensics in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), told Reuters.
He attributed the attacks to the conflict in Syria, political turmoil in Egypt and the activities of hacking collective Anonymous.
“It’s difficult for people to protest in the street in the Middle East and so defacing websites and denial of service (DOS) attacks are a way to protest instead,” said Beek.
DOS attacks flood an organization’s website causing it to crash, but usually do little lasting damage.
The Syrian Electronic Army (SEA), a hacking group loyal to the government of President Bashar al-Assad, defaced an Internet recruiting site for the U.S. Marine Corps on Monday and recently targeted the New York Times website and Twitter, as well other websites within the Middle East.
Beek described SEA as similar to Anonymous.
“There’s a group leading operations, with a support group of other people that can help,” said Beek.
McAfee opened a centre in Dubai on Monday to deal with the rising threat of Internet sabotage in the region, the most serious of which are attacks to extract proprietary information from companies or governments or those that cause lasting damage to critical infrastructure.
Cyber attacks are mostly focused on Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil exporter, Qatar, the top liquefied natural gas supplier, and Dubai, which is the region’s financial, commercial and aviation hub, said Gert-Jan Schenk, McAfee president for EMEA.
“It’s where the wealth and critical infrastructure is concentrated,” he said.
The “Shamoon” virus last year targeted Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil company, damaging about 30,000 computers in what may have been the most destructive attack against the private sector.
“Ten years ago, it was all about trying to infect as many people as possible,” added Schenk. “Today we see more and more attacks being focused on very small groups of people. Sometimes malware is developed for a specific department in a specific company.”
Java 6 Security Hole Found
Security firms are urging users of Oracle’s Java 6 software to upgrade to Java 7 as soon as possible to avoid becoming the victims of active cyber attacks.
F-secure senior analyst Timo Hirvonen warned about the exploit this weekend over Twitter, advising that he had found an exploit in the wild actively targeting an unpatched vulnerability in Java 6, named CVE-2013-2463.
PoC for CVE-2013-2463 was released last week, now it’s exploited in the wild. No patch for JRE6… Uninstall or upgrade to JRE7 update 25.
— Timo Hirvonen (@TimoHirvonen) August 26, 2013
CVE-2013-2463 was addressed by Oracle in the June 2013 Critical Patch Update for Java 7. Java 6 has the same vulnerability, as Oracle acknowledged in the update, but since Java 6 became unsupported in April 2013, there is no patch for the Java 6 vulnerability.
Cloud security provider Qualys described the bug as an “implicit zero-day vulnerability”. The firm’s CTO Wolfgang Kandek said he had seen it included in the spreading Neutrino exploit kit threat, which “guarantees that it will find widespread adoption”.
“We know about its existence, but do not have a patch at hand,” Kandek said in a blog post. “This happens each time a software package loses support and we track these instances in Qualysguard with our ‘EOL/Obsolete’ detections, in this case.
“In addition, we still see very high rates of Java 6 installed, a bit over 50 percent, which means many organisations are vulnerable.”
Like F-secure, Kandek recommended that any users with Java 6 upgrade to Java 7 as soon as they can.
“Without doubt, organisations should update to Java 7 where possible, meaning that IT administrators need to verify with their vendors if an upgrade path exists,” he added.
Are Russian Hackers Exploiting Android?
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Russian mobile malware factories are working with thousands of affiliates to exploit Android users, a security company has claimed.
According to Lookout Mobile Security the system is so efficient that almost a third of all mobile malware is made by just 10 organisations operating out of Russia. These “malware HQs” are pumping out nasty toll fraud apps, largely aimed at Android users, which force the user to call premium rate numbers the report said.
Thousands of affiliate marketers are also profiting from the scheme and helping spread the malware by setting up websites designed to trick users into downloading seemingly legitimate apps. Affiliates can make up to $12,000 a month and are heavy users of Twitter.
The report’s release at the DEF CON 21 conference in Las Vegas indicated that Lookout Mobile Security are working with the spooks to bring the crooks down. The malware HQs had gone to great lengths to obfuscate and encrypt their code to make detection tricky, but their advertising was pretty brazen.
Collaborating Viruses Showing Up
Two computer viruses are collaborating to defeat clean-up operations. Microsoft researcher Hyun Choi has found that the pair of viruses foil removal by regularly downloading updated versions of their malware partner.
It is the first time that such a defense plan has been noticed before. Choi said that the Vobfus and Beebone viruses, were regularly found together. Vobfus was the first to arrive on a machine, he said, and used different tactics to infect victims. Vobfus could be installed via booby-trapped links on websites, travel via network links to other machines or lurk on USB drives and infect machines they are plugged into.
Once installed, Vobfus downloaded Beebone which enrolled the machine into a botnet. After this the two start to work together to regularly download new versions of each other. If Vobfus was detected and remediated, it could have downloaded an undetected Beebone which can in turn download an undetected variant of Vobfus.
Vobfus become a persistent problem since 2009 when it first appeared.
McAffee See Sure In Spam
The first three months of 2013 have seen a surge in spam volume, as well as a growing number of samples of the Koobface social networking worm and master boot record (MBR) infecting malware, according to antivirus vendor McAfee.
After remaining relatively stable throughout 2012, spam levels rose during the first quarter of 2013, reaching the highest volume seen in the past two years, McAfee said in a report released Monday.
The amount of spam originating from some countries rose dramatically, McAfee said. Spam from Belarus increased by 540% while spam originating in Kazakhstan grew 150%.
Cutwail, also known as Pushdo, was the most prevalent spam-sending botnet during the first quarter, McAfee said.
The increased Pushdo activity has recently been observed by other security companies as well. Last month, researchers from security firm Damballa found a new variant of the Pushdo malware that’s more resilient to coordinated takedown efforts.
On the malware front, McAfee has also seen a surge in the number of Koobface samples, which reached previously unseen levels during the first quarter of 2013. First discovered in 2008, Koobface is a worm that spreads via social networking sites, especially through Facebook, by hijacking user accounts.
The number of malware samples designed to infect a computer’s master boot record (MBR) also reached a record high during the first three months of 2013, after increasing during the last quarter of 2012 as well, McAfee said.
The MBR is a special section on a hard disk drive that contains information about its partitions and is used during the system startup operation. “Compromising the MBR offers an attacker a wide variety of control, persistence, and deep penetration,” the McAfee researchers said in the report.
The MBR attacks seen during the first quarter involved malware like StealthMBR, also known as Mebroot; Tidserv, also known as Alureon, TDSS and TDL; Cidox and Shamoon, they said.
Twitter’s Authentication Has Vulnerabilities
June 6, 2013 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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Twitter’s SMS-based, two-factor authentication feature could be abused to lock users who have not enabled it for their accounts if attackers gain access to their log-in credentials, according to researchers from Finnish antivirus vendor F-Secure.
Twitter introduced two-factor authentication last week as an optional security feature in order to make it harder for attackers to hijack users’ accounts even if they manage to steal their usernames and passwords. If enabled, the feature introduces a second authentication factor in the form of secret codes sent via SMS.
According to Sean Sullivan, a security advisor at F-Secure, attackers could actually abuse this feature in order to prolong their unauthorized access to those accounts that don’t have two-factor authentication enabled. The researcher first described the issue Friday in a blog post.
An attacker who steals someone’s log-in credentials, via phishing or some other method, could associate a prepaid phone number with that person’s account and then turn on two-factor authentication, Sullivan said Monday. If that happens, the real owner won’t be able to recover the account by simply performing a password reset, and will have to contact Twitter support, he said.
This is possible because Twitter doesn’t use any additional method to verify that whoever has access to an account via Twitter’s website is also authorized to enable two-factor authentication.
When the two-factor authentication option called “Account Security” is first enabled on the account settings page, the site asks users if they successfully received a test message sent to their phone. Users can simply click “yes,” even if they didn’t receive the message, Sullivan said.
Instead, Twitter should send a confirmation link to the email address associated with the account for the account owner to click in order to confirm that two-factor authentication should be enabled, Sullivan said.
As it is, the researcher is concerned that this feature could be abused by determined attackers like the Syrian Electronic Army, a hacker group that recently hijacked the Twitter accounts of several news organizations, in order to prolong their unauthorized access to compromised accounts.
Some security researchers already expressed their belief that Twitter’s two-factor authentication feature in its current implementation is impractical for news organizations and companies with geographically dispersed social media teams, where different employees have access to the same Twitter account and cannot share a single phone number for authentication.
Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding the issue described by Sullivan.
Passwords Continue As The Weakest Link
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Passwords aren’t the only failure point in many recent widely publicized intrusions by hackers.
But passwords played a part in the perfect storm of users, service providers and technology failures that can result in epic network disasters. Password-based security mechanisms — which can be cracked, reset and socially engineered — no longer suffice in the era of cloud computing.
The problem is this: The more complex a password is, the harder it is to guess and the more secure it is. But the more complex a password is, the more likely it is to be written down or otherwise stored in an easily accessible location, and therefore the less secure it is. And the killer corollary: If a password is stolen, its relative simplicity or complexity becomes irrelevant.
Password security is the common cold of our technological age, a persistent problem that we can’t seem to solve. The technologies that promised to reduce our dependence on passwords — biometrics, smart cards, key fobs, tokens — have all thus far fallen short in terms of cost, reliability or other attributes. And yet, as ongoing news reports about password breaches show, password management is now more important than ever.
All of which makes password management a nightmare for IT shops. “IT faces competing interests,” says Forrester analyst Eve Maler. “They want to be compliant and secure, but they also want to be fast and expedient when it comes to synchronizing user accounts.”
Kaspersky Finds New Malware
Kaspersky Lab has discovered three Flame spyware related malware threats that it said use “sophisticated encryption methods”.
Kaspersky claims that it uncovered the three new hostile programs while analysing a number of Command and Control (C&C) servers used by Flame’s creators.
“Sophisticated encryption methods were utilised so that no one, but the attackers, could obtain the data uploaded from infected machines,” the firm’s statement read.
“The analysis of the scripts used to handle data transmissions to the victims revealed four communication protocols, and only one of them was compatible with Flame.
“It means that at least three other types of malware used these Command and Control servers. There is enough evidence to prove that at least one Flame-related malware is operating in the wild.”
The discovery of the three programs indicates that Flame’s Command and Control platform was being developed in 2006, four years earlier than first thought.
Flame was originally uncovered in May targeting Iranian computer systems. The malware drew widespread concerns within the security industry regarding its advanced espionage capabilities.
The full scale of Flame and its overarching implications remain unknown, despite the ongoing joint research campaign being mounted by Kaspersky, IMPACT, CERT-Bund/BSI and Symantec.
“It was problematic for us to estimate the amount of data stolen by Flame, even after the analysis of its Command and Control servers,” said Kaspersky’s chief security expert, Alexander Gostev.
Following the discovery of the three new related programs, Kaspersky’s chief malware expert Vitaly Kamluk told The INQUIRER that Flame is not the only one in this big family.
“There are others and they aren’t just other known malwares such as Stuxnet, Gauss or Duqu,” he said. “They stay in the shadows and no one has published anything about them yet. Others were probably used for different campaigns.”
Kamluk added that it is “very possible” there are more than the three listed in Kaspersky’s report.
“They started building RedProtocol, yet another ‘language’ for unknown malware. No known client types are using that one, which means that there is even more malware out there,” he added.
Good Technology Updates Security
July 25, 2012 by admin
Filed under Uncategorized
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Good Technology today announced two updates to its mobile security software products across IOS, Android and Windows Phone devices.
Powering mobile security for major enterprises such as Barclays, Sainsbury’s and LOCOG, Good Technology claims the releases are the first of a kind for the industry and address security threats linked to the bring your own device (BYOD) procedures being used in most big companies.
The first update announced by the firm is the addition of what it calls “Appkinetics” to its Good Dynamics line, which aims to solve the problem of secure private corporate data leakage.
“Good’s patented AppKinetics technology builds on the company’s proven ‘containerization’ security model to enable business apps from Good, its Good Dynamics partner independent software vendors (ISV), and internal enterprise developers,” the firm said in a statement.
“This is to securely exchange information within and between applications and create seamless multi-app workflows without compromising security or employees’ privacy and personal experience.”
The firm’s second update is the addition of eight new partnered apps to its Good Dynamics ecosystem covering the areas of business intelligence, collaboration, document editing, document printing, file storage/content management, remote desktop management and mobile application development platforms (MADPs).
This update allows developers to integrate the Good Dynamics technology into apps so that companies can create secure end-to-end workflows of protected, mobile applications to drive business processes.
Good Technology’s EMEA GM Andy Jacques explained, “If you download the standard consumer document editing application you can copy and paste from that from that app into another app.”
He continued, “If you were to open a piece of corporate mission critical data you can copy and paste that and put it onto Hotmail for example.”
1 In 5 U.S. PCs Have No Antivirus Protection
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Nearly a fifth of Windows PCs in the U.S. lack any active security protection, an antivirus vendor stated on Wednesday, citing numbers from a year-long project.
“The scale of this is unprecedented,” argued Gary Davis, the director of global consumer product marketing for McAfee, talking about the scope of his company’s sampling of PC security.
McAfee took measurements from scans of more than 280 million PCs over the last 12 months, and found that 19.3% of all U.S. Windows computers browsed the Web sans security software. Owners of those systems downloaded and used McAfee’s free Security Scan Plus, a tool that checks for antivirus programs and enabled firewalls.
Globally, the average rate was 17%, putting the U.S. in the top 5 most-unprotected countries of the 24 represented in the scans.
Of the unprotected PCs in the U.S., 63% had no security software at all, while the remaining 37% had an AV program that was no longer active. The latter were likely trial versions of commercial antivirus software that had expired.
Antivirus trials are a fact of life in the Windows world. Most new machines come with security software that runs for a limited time. Some new Dell PCs, for example, come with a 30-day trial of McAfee’s Security Center program.