Cisco Security

Welcome to the Cisco Sizzle! Each month, we’re rounding up the best of the best from across our social media channels for your reading pleasure. From the most read blog posts to the top engaging content on Facebook or LinkedIn, catch up on things you might have missed, or on the articles you just wa…

In the days leading up to #OpUSA, security professionals were busy making preparations for the supposed flood of new attacks coming on 7 May 2013. As we mentioned on 1 May 2013, publicly announced attacks of this nature can have highly volatile credibility. In some cases, the announcements exist onl…

“Watering Hole” attacks, as evidenced by the recent attack involving the U.S. Department of Labor, are becoming increasingly popular as alternatives to attacks such as Spear Phishing. In a “Watering Hole” attack, the attacker compromises a site likely to be visited by a particular target…

Update 2 5/9/2013: Microsoft has released a “Microsoft fix it” as a temporary mitigation for this issue on systems which require IE8. At this time, multiple sites have been observed hosting pages which exploit this vulnerability. Users of IE8 who cannot update to IE9+ are urged to apply…

Back in March, Seth Hanford wrote about a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack aimed at the SpamHaus organization. Since then, there have been some new developments in the aftermath of the DDoS attack, most notably the arrest of the attackers’ spokesperson, Sven Olaf Kamphuis. Update On…

Prologue On April 10, 2013, a collective of politically motivated hacktivists announced a round of planned attacks called #OPUSA. These attacks, slated to begin May 7, 2013, are to be launched against U.S.-based targets. #OPUSA is a follow-up to #OPISRAEL, which were a series of attacks carried out…

Last Friday (April 26), ESET and Sucuri simultaneously blogged about the discovery of Linux/CDorked, a backdoor impacting Apache servers running cPanel. Since that announcement, there has been some confusion surrounding the exact nature of these attacks. Rather than reinvent the analysis that has al…

Often it is quite surprising how long old, well-known vulnerabilities continue to be exploited. Recently, a friend sent me an example of a malicious script used in an attempted attack against their server: The script attempted to exploit the Horde/IMP Plesk Webmail Exploit in vulnerable versions of…

Java exploits account for 87% of total web exploits – Cisco 2013 Annual Security Report This month’s release of the Oracle Java SE Critical Patch Update includes patches for 42 vulnerabilities. Vulnerabilities in the Oracle Java SE Java Runtime Environment (JRE) component have received widespr…