VRT

July 28, 2014

SECURITY

Far East Targeted by Drive by Download Attack

This blog was co-authored by Kevin Brooks, Alex Chiu, Joel Esler, Martin Lee, Emmanuel Tacheau, Andrew Tsonchev, and Craig Williams.   On the 21st of July, 2014, Cisco TRAC became aware that the website dwnews.com was serving malicious Adobe Flash content. This site is a Chinese language news websit…

July 8, 2014

SECURITY

Threat Spotlight: “A String of Paerls”, Part 2, Deep Dive

This post has been coauthored by Joel Esler, Craig Williams, Richard Harman, Jaeson Schultz, and Douglas Goddard  In part one of our two part blog series on the “String of Paerls” threat, we showed an attack involving a spearphish message containing an attached malicious Word doc. We also described…

June 30, 2014

SECURITY

Threat Spotlight: A String of ‘Paerls’, Part One

This post was co-authored by Jaeson Schultz, Joel Esler, and Richard Harman.  Update 7-8-14: Part 2 can be found here This is part one in a two-part series due to the sheer amount of data we found on this threat and threat actor. This particular attack was a combined spearphishing and exploit attem…

May 19, 2014

SECURITY

Angling for Silverlight Exploits

This post is co-authored by Andrew Tsonchev, Jaeson Schultz, Alex Chiu, Seth Hanford, Craig Williams, Steven Poulson, and Joel Esler. Special thanks to co-author Brandon Stultz for the exploit reverse engineering.  Silverlight exploits are the drive-by flavor of the month. Exploit Kit (EK) owners a…

May 5, 2014

SECURITY

IE Zero Day – Managed Services Protection

As of May 1, 2014, we can confirm Cisco customers have been targets of this attack. For the latest coverage information and additional details see our new post on the VRT blog. Protecting company critical assets is a continuing challenge under normal threat conditions. The disclosure of zero-day exp…

January 23, 2014

SECURITY

Fiesta Exploit Pack is No Party for Drive-By Victims

This post was also authored by Andrew Tsonchev and Steven Poulson. Update 2014-05-26: Thank you to Fox-IT for providing the Fiesta logo image. We updated the caption to accurately reflect image attribution. Cisco’s Cloud Web Security (CWS) service provides TRAC researchers with a constant fire hose…