malware

October 18, 2013

SECURITY

DNS Knows. So Why Not Ask?

DNS is like the town gossip of the network infrastructure. Computers and apps ask DNS questions and you can ask DNS who has been asking to resolve malware domains. When internal trusted systems are using DNS to resolve the names of known malware sites, this can be an Indicator of Compromise and a wa…

October 15, 2013

SECURITY

Mobility: No Longer a Risky Business?

Risk. It’s not just a strategic board game; in business it’s the analysis that determines the potential for loss. In today’s organization, the consumerization of IT has led to groundbreaking developments in the mobility space. The broad deployment of BYOD, coupled with the availability of corporate…

October 2, 2013

SECURITY

Using DNS RPZ to Block Malicious DNS Requests

After delivering several presentations at Cisco Live and Cisco Connect this year, I received a few questions regarding DNS Response Policy Zones (RPZ) and how can they be used to block DNS resolution to known malicious hosts and sites. I decided to write this short post to explain what it is and pro…

August 23, 2013

SECURITY

Crumbling to the Cookiebomb

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…

August 8, 2013

SECURITY

DNS Compromise Distributing Malware

DNS records are an attractive target for distributors of malware. By compromising the DNS servers for legitimate domains, attackers are able to redirect visitors to trusted domains to malicious servers under attacker control. DNS requests are served from dedicated servers that may service many thous…

July 19, 2013

SECURITY

Zeus Botnet Impersonating Trusteer Rapport Update

Starting Friday, July 19, 2013 at 14:45 GMT, Cisco TRAC spotted a new spam campaign likely propagated by the Zeus botnet. The initial burst of spam was very short in duration and it’s possible this was intended to help hide the campaign, since it appears to be targeted towards users of a Trusteer pr…

July 17, 2013

SECURITY

Network Solutions Customer Site Compromises and DDoS

Network Solutions is a domain name registrar that manages over 6.6 million domains. As of July 16, 2013, the Network Solutions website is under a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. Recently, Network Solutions has been a target for attackers; in a previous outage, domain name servers were r…

June 24, 2013

SECURITY

BYOD: Many Call It Bring Your Own Malware (BYOM)

It is not new that people are referring to Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) as Bring Your Own Malware (BYOM). In 2012 alone, Android malware encounters grew 2,577 percent (for details, see Cisco’s Annual Security Report). Many organizations are struggling to keep up with the BYOD trend by allowing…

June 5, 2013

SECURITY

Plesk 0-Day Targets Web Servers

Update 6/6/2013: We’re seeing reports of exploitation of this vulnerability. We can confirm Global Correlation – Network Participation telemetry is seeing multiple exploitation attempts across many customers. Customers who participate in Global Correlation – Inspection have a higher chan…