One Billion records Leaked due to Cyber Attack

IBM X-Force reported the leak of personally identifiable information (PII) online in 2014.

According to IBM research team, cyber attackers are using sophisticated approaches for online attacks including DDoS and the use of malware. They steal valuable and sensitive information and use it as identity theft to financial account details. Since 2013, there has been a rise of 25 percent in leaked records, reaching a lurch one billion. Most of these records were stolen from USA.

nrf.com

A number of high-profile attacks have been found to take place over the year. JPMorgan, Sony and several companies have been the victim of cyber attacks and consequently sensitive data of customer and employee records, email and communications was leaked.

The trend of digital attacks has increased over the past years and is improbably to setback.

The company mentioned in its quarterly report, published on Monday, that the use of "designer vulns" is also increasing. These designer vulnerabilities are taking tips from branded exploit kits including Sweet Orange and Blackhole, and are now being identified in memorable ways -- such as Heartbleed, Shellshock and FREAK.

Three distinctive themes have been discovered by IBM research team which infuence on the security landscape over 2014. The distributing of private content, such as uploading personal or explicit photos on cloud services was not managed with care which resulted in data theft due to weak passwords and slack policies on brute-force authentication.

The critical vulnerabilities in the foundations of operating systems, open-source libraries and content management software have also been disclosed, which has resulted in the exploitation of websites.  Lenovo's Superfish debacle is the most recent case concerning this trend. The Chinese PC maker bundled Superfish uses advertisement support software on products shipped between September 2014 and February 2015 and the software was able to obstruct SSL and TLS website connections then use a third-party library to modify the Windows networking stack and install a new root Certificate Authority (CA), leaving the door open for exploit.

According to the security team, there is a lack of fundamental security knowledge and care which allows for violation of data privacy. End-user password use, failure to change default passwords and poor verification processes also contribute to weak security.

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by Malik korrich ~ mardi 17 mars 2015 0 commentaires

Google’s VirusTotal puts Linux malware under the spotlight

The rise of malware designed to infect Linux servers has earned it greater attention from VirusTotal, the Google-owned go-to tool for malware hunters.

For security researchers that need to stay on top of emerging malware threats the VirusTotal malware database has become an integral tool. Anyone can upload a suspicious file to the web tool to check whether the dozen or so antivirus engines, such as Kaspersky,McAfee, Symantec, and others, detect it as malware. 

 The tool is meant to be used by the good guys, but as one researcher found last year, black hat hackers were also using the service to test their malware against antivirus products prior to releasing it in the wild — despite the tool's shortcomings for comparative analysis.

While Virus Total maintains detailed information about malicious files affecting Windows, Linux malware has remained something of a blind spot for the tool, in part because such malware is much rarer.
The tool offered basic information about each Linux file sample, but lacked additional information that AV companies and researchers were given for Windows malware.

That situation might have been fine in the past. However, over the past two years, a new breed of Linux malware has emerged whose chief targets are not PCs but vulnerable web servers.

In part due to the lack of information, antivirus vendors were slow to respond to Linux malware samples, often submitted as ELF files — the standard binary file format for executables, object code, shared libraries, and core dumps for Unix and Unix-like systems. As such, detection rates by AV vendors remained low. Now the number of ELF files submitted is rising: in the last week alone, there were over 35,000 suspicious ELF files submitted to VirusTotal, slightly less than the 44,000 suspicious Microsoft Word files uploaded.

VirusTotal announced on Tuesday that it will be addressing the shortcomings with the web tool for Linux malware. "Even though the popularity of the Windows OS among average end-user systems has meant that attackers have mostly focused on developing malware for Windows systems, ELF badness is a growing concern," the Google subsidiary wrote in a post on Tuesday.

Read more about this Linux malware on ZDNET

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by Malik korrich ~ mercredi 12 novembre 2014 0 commentaires