TRAC

Who are you? Removing the obvious existential questions for a minute, your identity is often represented as a bundle of personally identifiable information (PII). In the United States PII begins at birth with a name, date of birth, and social security number (SSN). This morning’s KrebsOnSecurity pos…

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.…

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…

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…

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.”…

The Internet remains an environment where it is important to keep your wits. The recent indictment of nine individuals on stock fraud charges reminds us that the pump and dump scam continues to be perpetrated [1][2]. Stock spam emails were particularly prevalent during the mid-2000’s, with these mes…

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…