Security News Curated from across the world
The region’s healthy economic growth has attracted players from other regions to expand their businesses in Latin America, further enhancing the scope of the MSS market. This affects firms’ decision to hire or continue security services and often companies, which have not yet been victims of attacks, fail to recognize the need for security services.
Link: http://news.yahoo.com/frost-sullivan-increasing-number-complexity-194500406.html
The majority of exploits detected were related to four vulnerabilities (two Windows and two Java), most likely a result of the fact that today’s popular exploit kits, BlackHole and Cool Exploit, include exploits for these vulnerabilities. All of these vulnerabilities were reported in the last two years and have already had security patches released by their vendors – a reminder of the importance of keeping software updated.
“Criminals in the malware system each handle their own little niches, their own little links in the chain,” says Sean Sullivan, Security Advisor at F-Secure.
Android malware accounted for 79 percent (238) of all new, unique mobile malware variants in 2012, a number that speaks to the platform’s domination of the mobile market.
“On the inside it’s still the same malware family, but there can be a myriad of different ways to dress it up to try to disguise it…. At F-Secure, we have a more holistic understanding of the security landscape, that it cannot be dependent on merely one data point,” says Sullivan.
New business models like “rent-a-botnet” schemes are flourishing, where cybercriminals rent a whole network of infected computers and use it to perform their attacks.
Link: http://www.net-security.org/virus_news.php?id=2399
DDoS: Attack sizes plateau; complex multi-vector attacks on the rise – The largest attack reported was 60 Gbps, same as 2011; and 46 percent reported multi-vector attacks.
This year’s results confirm that application-layer and multi-vector attacks are continuing to evolve while volumetric attacks are starting to plateau in terms of size. … Attackers have now turned to sophisticated, long-lived, multi-vector attacks – combinations of attack vectors designed to cut through the defenses an organization has in place – to achieve their goals. … This year’s report includes a case study on the ongoing attacks against U.S. financial services organizations, a great example of a multi-vector attack.
Data centers and cloud services are increasingly victimized – 94 percent of data center operators reported attacks, and 90 percent of those reported operational expenses as a business impact.
As more companies move their services to the cloud, they now have to be wary of the shared risks and the potential for collateral damage. DNS infrastructure remains vulnerable – 27 percent experienced customer-impacting DDoS attacks on their DNS infrastructure—a significant increase over the 12 percent of respondents from last year’s survey. 71 percent of respondents reported good visibility at Layers 3 and 4 but only 27 percent reported Layer 7 visibility.
Link: http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=14323
In fact, more Generation Y workers globally said they feel more comfortable sharing personal information with retail sites than with their own employers’ IT departments – departments that are paid to protect employee identities and devices. As Generation Y graduates from college and enters the workforce in greater numbers, they test corporate cultures and policies with expectations of social media freedom, device choice, and mobile lifestyles that the generations before them never demanded. As the first chapter of the Connected World Technology Report indicated in December, Gen Y is constantly checking social media, email and text updates, whether it’s in bed (3 of 4 surveyed globally), at the dinner table (almost half), in the bathroom (1 of 3), or driving (1 of 5).
Nine of 10 (90 percent) IT professionals surveyed said they have a policy governing the use of certain devices at work, yet only two of five Gen Y respondents said they were aware of such a policy. IT professionals know that many employees don’t follow the rules, but they don’t understand how prevalent it is: More than half (52 percent) of IT professionals globally believe their employees obey IT policies, but nearly 3 out of 4 (71 percent) of the Gen Y workforce say that they don’t obey policies. In other words, Gen Y is less averse to complete strangers at retail sites monitoring their activity than their own employers’ IT teams – teams that are there to protect them and their companies’ information.
Link: http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=14334
DDoS first reared its ugly head in the late 1990s and early 2000s as simple, financially-motivated, brute force attacks in which hackers would attempt to overwhelm network and data center operators with external communication requests, causing system overloads and crashes. Over the years, DDoS attacks have grown in sophistication and efficiency, moving from heavy-handed hardware overloads to application-layer attacks that could look like legitimate network traffic, making it much more difficult to detect and defeat the threat.
“What we’ve seen with the most recent attacks is that it isn’t about how big the attack is – because they weren’t the biggest attacks – it’s about how smart they are,” Moynahan said.
Adding to the challenge is the proliferation of “bring-your-own-device” (BYOD) business models in which companies encourage their employees to use their own smart phones, tablets, and other devices for work, giving hackers more entry points into networks.
To meet the new threats head on, Arbor is going beyond the conventional and increasingly outmoded method of using firewalls and other basic network protection methods that can eventually require too much bandwidth and infrastructure, compromising network availability. To provide its clients with end-to-end traffic visibility to monitor the DDoS threat landscape and minimize risk, Arbor employs a number of solutions, including a new cloud-based active threat level analysis system called ATLAS — a collaborative project in which Arbor clients share anonymous traffic data totaling almost 40 terabytes per second to spot malware and botnet threats across the Internet.
Link: http://www.bizjournals.com/boston/blog/techflash/2013/01/report-ddos-attacks-harder-to-detect.html?ana=RSS&s=article_search&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+bizj_boston+%28Boston+Business+Journal%29&page=all
Hackers will rapidly go after these high value targets with attacks that are highly automated and, if they are not yielding useful payloads, the attackers are equipped to quickly try a different type of attack. This is why it is important to have an understanding of the kind of traffic that is accessing your hosted infrastructure, so that you can make sure that malicious traffic is diverted and that there is less risk to sensitive data,” he added.
Throughout the whole year, FireHost has blocked over 64 million malicious cyberattacks of all types, with Cross-Site Scripting being the most prolific Superfecta attack type overall, clocking in at 5.4 million blocked attacks.
As in Q3 2012, Europe is still the second most likely origin point for malicious traffic blocked by FireHost after North America, being the source of 13 percent of attacks.
The risks to businesses from the Superfecta varies and depends upon the kind of data that could be stolen in the event of a successful attack, according to Todd Gleason, Director of Technology at FireHost, “Itʼs fairly obvious that, if you are retailer or service provider dealing with private customer data or payment card details, your business will present an attractive target for hackers.
Link: http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=14320