Weekly Infosec News Brief: 18-24 April

"RansomWhere?" Tool Released to Detect and Halt Ransomware on Mac Computers

Patrick Wardle, a leading researcher in Apple Mac vulnerabilities and security measures, released a tool called "RansomWhere?" last week to halt ransomware infections on Mac computers. Though ransomware has not been a widespread issue on Macs to this point, the tool's operational concept is interesting. It watches users' home folders (and their sub-folders), where the vast majority of documents are stored locally, for rapid write operations being performed on many files and suspends the responsible process. To avoid false positives, RansomWhere? catalogs all the programs running at the time it is installed, and it will never alert on actions taken by those programs; for this reason it is not effective if installed on a computer with ransomware already present. The technique is not insurmountable, but a similar tool on Windows PCs would likely stop the majority of existing ransomware families.
http://www.csoonline.com/article/3060056/data-breach/this-tool-can-block-ransomware-on-mac-os-x-for-now.html


 New Powershell-Based Malware Discovered in the Wild

A new malware strain known as "FAREIT" leverages Windows PowerShell to steal usernames and passwords and other information from victims' computers. PowerShell is an enhanced command line and scripting environment that became standard with Windows 7 and newer. PowerShell is a great tool for admins, but has increasingly been abused by intruders and malware. Sean Metcalf gave a great talk this weekend at the BSides conference in Baltimore on steps to securing PowerShell.
http://blog.trendmicro.com/trendlabs-security-intelligence/new-fareit-strain-delivered-abusing-powershell/


"Panama Papers" Breach Against Mossack Fonseca Firm Holds Valuable Lessons

The "Panama Papers" made big news a couple of weeks ago, but for IT leaders the real news is the way in which the data was obtained. It appears that attackers exported a well-known vulnerability in a plugin on a WordPress-based website hosted on the firm's network. The vulnerability was disclosed 18 months ago, and a patch has been available since that time, but Mossack Fonseca's site was not patched. Furthermore, the web server was not isolated from other systems, making it very easy for attackers to move from that server to other internal systems.
http://inhomelandsecurity.com/cybersecurity-lessons-learned-from-panama-papers-breach/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Weekly Infosec News Brief: 14-20 March

Image
Major Media Websites Caught up inNew Malicious Advertising Attacks Last week multiple major advertising networks, including Google's DoubleClick, AppNexus, Rubicon, and AOL were abused by attackers to serve up malicious advertisements on major media sites. These malicious advertisements were redirecting to the "Angler" exploit kit, which uses multiple means to attempt to compromise a browser and install malware. While such malicious ads are common on smaller websites, they are not unheard-of on major media sites. This outbreak, however, was unusually large and long-lived, lasting at least the better part of two days. Given how common malicious web ads are, some security experts are recommending the use of ad blocking technology in web browsers. http://www.computerworld.com/article/3044565/security/advertising-based-cyberattacks-hit-bbc-new-york-times-msn.html Malicious Macros in Word Documents Used to Install Malware with No Files Needed Everything old is new a
Read more

Weekly Infosec News Brief 20-26 July

Image
FBI Sees Massive Increase in Espionage, Including Industrial Espionage, Against the US The FBI on Thursday issued a press release discussing what they believe is an increasing threat of economic espionage against US companies. They estimate that such espionage may cost the US as much as "hundreds of billions" of dollars a year. This espionage is not just directed against large industrial companies, but any place where trade secrets and innovations might be found, including third-party organizations (e.g. business partners, vendors, consultants, lawyers, etc.) affiliated with targeted companies. A key take-away is that the threat is more widespread than most people think, and that few organizations are immune. https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi-announces-economic-espionage-awareness-campaign http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/24/politics/fbi-economic-espionage/ Microsoft Releases Out-of-Cycle Patch for Critical Font Driver Bug A flaw uncovered in connecti
Read more

Weekly Infosec News Brief: 22-28 February

Image
Ransomware Observed to Jump from One Device to Another via the Cloud Researchers described last week an incident where they observed malicious "ransomware" propagating from one device to another via cloud-based file synchronization. When the ransomware encrypted files on one machine that synchronized files to a specific folder, it spread to other PCs that synchronized to that same folder. This type of phenomenon is simply another reason for organizations to serious consider limiting or eliminating the use of such file-synchronizing software within their networks. http://www.scmagazine.com/researchers-confirm-cases-of-ransomware-encryption-jumping-devices-via-cloud-apps/article/479572/ New OpenSSL Patches Soon to Come The OpenSSL project team announced last Thursday that they are working on patches to fix at least two "high" severity vulnerabilities in OpenSSL. This is the software that powers the cryptographic security layer of many web servers, browser
Read more