In case you are wondering what your tax dollars have been doing over at the NSA, there was an interesting release from the Snowden files that appeared in Bruce Schneier’s Crypto-Gram newsletter on July 15th. If you are interested in more information, you can find it on First Look. Just because you have “nothing to hide” doesn’t mean that they can’t find something to hang you with. And here is how they can do it. Just saying…
Here is ...
Continue Reading →The Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) the middle east’s answer to the NSA, recently defaced the website of news agency Reuters. They accomplish this by hacking the advertising servers of third-party advertising provider Taboola. The SEA evidently gained access to Taboola through the use of phishing emails which asked the recipients for their logon credentials. This is a very simple to use attack and almost anyone could use, and re-emphasizes the need for employee security awareness training. This could have been ...
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In June major parts of the GameOver botnet including the command and control servers, were taken down by police. There was a brief respite in the distribution of the CryptoLocker ransomware exploit, but it looks like the cybercriminals are back in action.
As reported by Sophos, the GameOver crew is back in action as of last week, sending out a spam barrage to trick the unwary into downloading the CryptoLocker ransomware. It appears that the email is designed to ...
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“Given the choice between funny kittens and security, users will pick funny kittens every time.”
Thanks to cartoonist John Klossner and Citrix for this but of cyber-security humor.
As reported by Bruce Schneier back in May, one of the outcomes of the Snowden revelations is that some people are abandoning open source encryption tools for things they are brewing up on their own. And while home-brewing may be great for beer, proper cryptography is many orders of magnitude more difficult to make than beer. Al-Qaeda is one of the organizations reputedly creating three new “NSA-proof” encryption schemes.
Continue Reading →Since 2007, Al-Qaeda’s use of encryption technology has been based on ...
Bad news business and vacation travelers, those free computers that are in many hotel business centers have been infected with keylogger malware. This means that whatever you are typing while sitting at one of these publicly accessible computers is being sent to a cyber-criminal somewhere. Hopefully you are savvy enough to NOT be doing online banking or checking your brokerage accounts on these systems, but even just checking your email can open you up to having that account hijacked and ...
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As reported by Symantec on June 30, and covered by the New York Times and SiliconBeat, there is a active exploit running against U.S. and European energy firms using the Dragonfly or Energetic Bear exploit kit. Similar to Stuxnet, this exploit seeks to gain access and control of the industrial control systems that manage the flow of electricity. oil, and gas. The article on Symantec is very through and gives a pretty technical readout, as well ...
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As reported in Naked Security, three Georgia Tech students hacked the mobile app ‘Yo,’and then reported their feat to TechCrunch.
Continue Reading →We can get any Yo user’s phone number (I actually texted the founder, and he called me back). We can spoof Yo’s from any users, and we can spam any user with as many Yo. We could also send any Yo user a push notification with any text we want (though we decided not to do ...
In my last post I covered the nature of the crypto-ransomware exploit. In this article we will discuss things you can do to help defend against this attack.
The best solution for preventing crypto-ransomware exploits is avoidance. For this exploit to work, you have to help it happen. Your risky online behavior makes it possible.
The different variants of crypto-ransomware have become an area of significant concern for information technology professionals. There has been a decline in their confidence in endpoint protection solutions such as typical Internet security software products. This decline, from 96% to 59%, shows how serious the crypto-ransomware threat has become for most network administrators.
The variants of this exploit are known as CryptoLocker, CryptoWall, CryptoDefense, Cryptorbit, HowDecrypt, and similar names. They all work the same way. Usually the exploit starts with a ...
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