Articles
Razzle Dazzle v2.0
During World War I, British artist and navy officer Norman Wilkinson proposed the use of “Dazzle Camouflage” on ships. The concept behind Dazzle Camouflage, as Wilkinson explained, was to “paint a ship with large patches of strong colour in a carefully thought out pattern and colour sche…
High Stakes Gambling with Apple Stock
Miscreants are always trying to put new twists on age-old schemes. However, I must admit that this latest twist has me slightly puzzled. Today, Cisco TRAC encountered a piece of stock related spam touting Apple’s stock, AAPL.…
The Phishing Grounds
On August 15, 2013, Brian Krebs featured a screen shot of a fake Outlook webmail login page used by the Syrian Electronic Army in a phishing attack against the Washington Post. If you look carefully at the location bar, you will note that the domain used in the phishing attack is ‘webmail.wash…
Syrian Electronic Army Continues Spree: Cracks New York Times, Twitter and Huffington Post
The Syrian Electronic Army continues to hammer away at media organizations. This afternoon the Syrian Electronic Army appears to have compromised the registrar Melbourne IT which hosts the domains of notable media organizations like Twitter, The New York Times, and The Huffington Post.…
Syrian Electronic Army Cracks ShareThis.com GoDaddy Account
ShareThis provides a mechanism for web surfers to share content online through a customizable widget. According to the information on their website, ShareThis interacts with “more than 94% of U.S. Internet users across more than 2 million publisher sites and 120+ social media channels.”…
DEFCON 21 Wrapup
My first DEFCON was DEFCON Three, held at the Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas. The computer security conference scene was much, much smaller back then, but DEFCON had already become THE security conference of the year. Since that time I’ve continued to regularly attend DEFCON, and over the years…
Error Correction Using Response Policy Zones: Eliminating the Problem of Bitsquatting
A memory error is a condition that occurs any time one or more bits being read from memory have changed state from what was previously written. By even the most conservative of estimates Internet devices experience more than 600,000 memory errors per day. Cosmic radiation, operating a device outsi…
‘Hijacking’ of DNS Records from Network Solutions
UPDATE: This blog post is related to the redirection of domain name servers that occurred back in June 2013. This post is NOT related to the ongoing activity occuring July 16, 2013. Cisco TRAC is currently analyzing the ongoing issues with Network Solutions’ hosted domain names and has more…
Scope of ‘KeyBoy’ Targeted Malware Attacks
On June 6, 2013, malwaretracker.com released an analysis of Microsoft Office-based malware that was exploiting a previously unknown vulnerability that was patched by MS12-060. The samples provided were alleged to be targeting Tibetan and Chinese Pro-Democracy Activists. On June 7, 2013, Rapid7 relea…