[From the desk of Paul Davis – his opinions and no-one else’s]
Apart from the reporter’s opinions š
So onto the news:
Online Dating Site Ashley Madison Hacked
Large dumps of stolen customer data have been posted online by an individual or a group claiming to have entirely compromised the dating website Ashley Madisonās user database. The stolen data includes financial records, membership details, and other information which could potentially put 37 million usersā information at risk.
Details are scarce at the moment, but the breach is likely to be embarrassing for the company which has nearly 37 million users and their records in their compromised databases.
The Impact Team posted a manifesto along with the stolen ALM data, claiming that it published the information to expose the alleged lies ALM told its customers about a āfull deleteā service which completely erases usersā profile information for a one-time fee of $19. The hacking group claims that this is not true, claiming userās details including their real name and physical addresses arenāt completely removed without any trace.
The hackers also demand that ALM completely shut down Ashley Madison and Established Men.
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Plexxi aims low-latency switch at emerging workloads
Plexxi launched a low-latency switch that’s suitable for high-frequency financial trading. The Switch 2 Series is also aimed at analytics applications and cloud data centers.
Plexxi’s Switch 2 Series lowers latency to an acceptable level for high-frequency financial trading. Other networking applications include the infrastructure for Hadoop server clusters, which is designed for storing and analyzing huge amounts of unstructured data. The switch could also be useful in speeding up the data flow between the data centers of enterprises or cloud service providers.
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Microsoft releases emergency patch for all versions of Windows
Microsoft has released an emergency out-of-band patch for a critical flaw, affecting all supported versions of Windows.
The software giant said in an advisory Monday that the vulnerability, if exploited, could “allow remote code execution if a user opens a specially crafted document or visits an untrusted webpage that contains embedded OpenType fonts.ā
Users running Windows Vista, Windows 7, 8, 8.1 and Windows RT are all affected, including those running Windows Server 2008 and later. A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed in an emailed statement that Windows 10 Insider Preview is also affected.
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Free Tool Looks for HackingTeam Malware
Security have released a new tool that looks for HackingTeam malware on target systems, and also have published a set of indicators of compromise to help organizations look for signs of an infection from the intrusion software.
The HackingTeam Remote Control System is the companyās flagship surveillance and intrusion platform. It sold the system to government agencies and law enforcement customers, but part of the fallout from the breach earlier this month was the exposure of HackingTeamās customersā names, some of which are associated with oppressive regimes. In the weeks since the attack on HackingTeam, experts have set about looking for ways to find the companyās malware tools on potentially compromised systems.
The tool that the researchers from Rook, a security company based in Indianapolis, is called Milano and is designed to automate the process of finding the HackingTeam malware. Milano is a free tool and has two separate modes: quick scan and deep scan. The tool looks for hashes of known HackingTeam files and Rook officials said a quick scan can run in a few seconds, while a deep scan can take up to an hour depending upon the system.
Meanwhile, Facebook has released an update for its Oquery tool that, among other things, can find the OS X backdoor used by the HackingTeam software.
āAttackers continue to develop and deploy Mac OS X backdoors. Weāve seen this with Flashback, IceFog, Careto, Adwind/Unrecom, and most recently, HackingTeam. The OS X-attacks pack has queries that identify known variants of malware, ranging from advanced persistent threats (APT) to adware and spyware. If a query in this pack produces results, it means a host in your Mac fleet is compromised with malware. This pack is high signal and should result in close to zero false positives,ā Javier Marcos de Prado of Facebook said in a blog post.
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Spam Email Levels Have Reached Their Lowest Point In 12-Years
This momentous news comes courtesy of security firm Symantec which publishes a global report on the status of spam emails each month.
Well for the first time since 2003, spam emails now count for less than 50 per cent of all the emails sent around the globe.
In June 49.7 per cent of the billions of emails that were sent and scanned by Symantec were spam. There’s even more good news which is that the figure is continuing to drop, and fast.
In July the numbers have already dropped to 46 per cent. It’s believed that the reason for this sudden decline is the work by various government organisations to crack down on botnets stationed around the world.
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Leaking bugs : Wikileaks dumps contain malware
Josh Wieder, a researcher was browsing through the Wikileaks dump of the Stratfor leak found that the documents were laced with malware.
According to Wieder, lot of the malware is smuggled in as VBScript macros, or OLE and PE files. Itās possible there are more infected files lurking in WikiLeaksā databases of unfiltered data.
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Google Inc. Is Setting Up Extra Security on Chrome to Protect Users from Malware
Instead of the page you wanted, Google Chrome instead will bring you to a red, angry page that warns about the harmful programs that are living off of the website you are about to visit. From there on, you, as the user, has the option to decide whether to continue or go back to your homepage.
The same, more simple measure has been installed in August last year, but this time, Google is adopting a stricter outlook. Instead of warning users about suspicious websites or downloads from interested brands, Chrome will be more efficient in catching malware, phishing scams, and other threats found online.
Particularly affected by this change are the torrent-hosting websites like KickAss Torrents and ExtraTorrent. Trying to access these types of websites to download “Game of Thrones” or any movie and television series on Chrome will instead bring you to the red “Safe Browsing” page which warns about malware.
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New Survey Reveals Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity Challenges
Information technology (IT) executives within critical infrastructure organizations see a need for public-private threat intelligence sharing partnerships (86% of respondents) to keep pace with escalating cybersecurity threats, according to a survey released today by The Aspen Institute and Intel Security. A majority (76%) of survey respondents also indicated they believe a national defense force should respond when a cyber attack damages a critical infrastructure company within national borders. Additionally, although most respondents agree that threats to their organizations are on the rise, they maintain a high degree of confidence in existing security.
The survey, Holding the Line Against Cyber Threats: Critical Infrastructure Readiness Survey, reveals that the critical infrastructure providers surveyed are pleased with the results of their efforts to improve cybersecurity over the last three years, but at the same time many (72%) said that the threat level of attacks was escalating. Almost half of all respondents (48%) believe it is likely that a cyberattack on critical infrastructure, with the potential to result in the loss of human life, could happen within the next three years.
Survey results suggest there may be a disconnect between critical infrastructure providers and the current threat landscapeā¦
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FERC moves to combat emerging cybersecurity vulnerabilities
Federal regulators have begun a push for new cybersecurity defenses to prevent sophisticated attackers from penetrating utility control rooms and other industrial control system centers by infiltrating malware on third-party vendors’ products.
A proposed rulemaking announced Thursday by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission would require utility industry representatives to develop a new security strategy and standard for supply chain management processes.
FERC is also seeking comment on a second proposed order to the industry’s standards group, the North American Electric Reliability Corp., which would require additional security controls to safeguard communications between grid control centers when vital controls data is traveling on unprotected third-party communications channels.
Recognizing the difficulty, FERC’s notice last week said the vendor standard should not attempt to impose rules directly on suppliers nor attempt to rewrite existing contracts between suppliers and utilities, just future ones. The rule should set a goal and give utilities and suppliers flexibility in achieving it, FERC said. But the plan must spell out specific controls that utilities will have in place to manage what they buy, the commission added.
FERC gave industry representatives 60 days to comment following publication of the draft notice of the rulemaking in the Federal Register.
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Analysis: InfoSec Workforce Growth Stalls
After jumping by 33 percent in 2014, the number of Americans who consider themselves IT security professionals has remained flat for the first half of 2015, according to an examination of federal government employment data. That’s bad news for employers seeking IT security pros to hire.
An Information Security Media Group analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics employment data – culled from the same household surveys the government uses to determine the monthly unemployment rate – shows that 73,800 people identified themselves as information security analysts during the second quarter of 2015. That’s basically unchanged from the first quarter of the year. During 2014, the number of information security professionals rose by one-third to 74,000 from 55,300.
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