TRAC

May 1, 2013

SECURITY

STOPhausDDoS: Suspect in Custody

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…

May 1, 2013

SECURITY

Coordinated Attacks Against the U.S. Government and Banking Infrastructure

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…

May 1, 2013

SECURITY

Linux/CDorked FAQs

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…

April 24, 2013

SECURITY

Possible Exploit Vector for DarkLeech Compromises

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…

April 22, 2013

SECURITY

Customized WordPress, Joomla Brute Force Login Attempts

In recent weeks, the occurrence of brute force login attempts targeting WordPress and Joomla installations have significantly increased in volume, with some entities reporting triple the attempts seen in the past. The attack volume has been so severe that it has led some hosting providers to block a…

April 18, 2013

SECURITY

Yesterday Boston, Today Waco, Tomorrow Malware

At 10:30 UTC one of the botnet spam campaigns we discussed yesterday took a shift to focus on the recent explosion in Texas. The miscreants responded to the tragic events in Texas almost immediately. The volume of the attack is similar to what we witnessed yesterday with the maximum volume peaking a…

April 17, 2013

SECURITY

Massive Spam and Malware Campaign Following the Boston Tragedy

Summary On April 16th at 11:00pm GMT, the first of two botnets began a massive spam campaign to take advantage of the recent Boston tragedy. The spam messages claim to contain news concerning the Boston Marathon bombing. The spam messages contain a link to a site that claims to have videos of explos…

April 2, 2013

SECURITY

Apache Darkleech Compromises

Dan Goodin, editor at Ars Technica, has been tracking and compiling info on an elusive series of website compromises that could be impacting tens of thousands of otherwise perfectly legitimate sites. While various researchers have reported various segments of the attacks, until Dan’s article, …

March 28, 2013

SECURITY

Chronology of a DDoS: SpamHaus

Around 12:00 GMT March 16, 2013, a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack took offline both the spamhaus.org website and a portion of its e-mail services. SpamHaus was able to restore connectivity by March 18; however, SpamHaus is still weathering a massive, ongoing DDoS attack. The DDoS attack…