Weekly Infosec News Brief - Oct 12-18

New Flash Zero-Day Vulnerability Being Actively Exploited

Last Tuesday, the same day that Adobe released their regular monthly patches, Trend Micro disclosed their discovery of a new zero-day vulnerability being exploited by the “Pawn Storm” hacking group. The observed activity is directed primarily against various nations’ foreign affairs ministries, but the vulnerability (CVE-2015-7645) is not publicly disclosed and may be subject to further exploitation. Adobe released a new out-of-cycle patch for the issue on Friday evening.
http://www.cnet.com/news/another-security-flaw-affects-all-versions-of-adobe-flash/
http://blog.trendmicro.com/trendlabs-security-intelligence/new-adobe-flash-zero-day-used-in-pawn-storm-campaign/
https://helpx.adobe.com/security/products/flash-player/apsa15-05.html


 Microsoft Releases Six Patches for IE/Edge, Office, Windows

Last Tuesday, Microsoft released six updates that fix about 33 security issues in their browsers, in Windows, and in Office. Three of the patches are rated as “critical,” and there are indications that these may fix issues that have been publicly disclosed previously. Thus these vulnerabilities are more likely to be exploited in the near term and these patches should be installed as quickly as possible. The most critical is MS15-106, which affects all supported versions of Internet Explorer.
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/security/ms15-oct.aspx
http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/microsoft-patch-tuesday-october-2015


Adobe Releases Security Updates for Acrobat, Reader, and Flash

Last Tuesday, Adobe released new versions of its Acrobat, Reader, and Flash software. The Acrobat/Reader update fixed 56 different security vulnerabilities, and the Flash update addressed 13. Both are critical updates and should be installed as soon as possible. Note that an newer version of Flash was released Friday to fix a vulnerability discovered after Tuesday’s update was released (see story below).
https://helpx.adobe.com/security/products/acrobat/apsb15-24.html
http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/10/adobe-microsoft-push-critical-security-fixes-8/


Weak SSL Certificate Validation Exploited to Create Hundreds of Fraudulent Sites

Netcraft warned last week that criminals had been using free or low-cost secure web services provided with minimal validation by some providers to create fraudulent sites to fool users into providing their passwords, credit card numbers, and other personal information. The existence of a valid security certificate and “padlock” on a website is definitely NOT enough to make it trustworthy, and that is more true than ever.
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2015/10/12/certificate-authorities-issue-hundreds-of-deceptive-ssl-certificates-to-fraudsters.html
http://www.scmagazine.com/fraudsters-exploit-weak-ssl-certificate-security-to-set-up-hundreds-of-phishing-sites/article/444711/


Version 6.0 of Critical Security Controls Released by CIS

Last week the Center for Internet Security (CIS) released the latest version of the “Critical Security Controls,” a list of twenty key steps that organizations should take to get and keep their networks and systems secure. The Critical Security Controls project grew out of the “Consensus Audit Guidelines” and then was taken on by SANS and later transferred to CIS.
http://www.cisecurity.org/critical-controls.cfm

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