Security

Cisco’s Advanced Services has been performing penetration tests for our customers since the acquisition of the Wheel Group in 1998. We call them Security Posture Assessments, or SPA for short, and I’ve been pen testing for just about as long. I’ll let you in on a little secret abou…

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.…

It’s that time of year again—consider this post your friendly T-7 notice to start preparing for the final Cisco IOS Software Security Advisory Bundled Publication of 2013! As a reminder, the Cisco Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) releases bundles of Cisco IOS Software Security Advisor…

Beginning in early May, Cisco TRAC has observed a number of malicious redirects that appear to be part of a watering-hole style attack targeting the Energy & Oil sector. The structure consists of several compromised domains, of which some play the role of redirector and others the role of malwar…

Following my previous blog post about identity and device aware IT platforms making IT operations easier and more effective, I wanted to delve a little deeper into a specific element of the IT infrastructure: Security Event & Information Management (SIEM) and Threat Defense (TD) systems.…

Detours is a library offered by Microsoft Research for interception of functions on x86 and x64 platforms. It is sold for commercial use to various vendors that build products ranging from security to gaming applications. Detours is often injected into most or all of the processes, either system-wid…

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…

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.…

Recently we have seen a spate of government websites hosting malicious Cookiebomb JavaScript. We have observed URLs with the top level domains such as ‘.gov.uk’, ‘.gov.tr’, ‘.gov.pl’ and the website of a middle eastern embassy in the US become compromised and expose visitors to malware infection. Fo…