“As I type these words, there is an on-going and highly-distributed, global attack on WordPress installations across virtually every web host in existence,” HostGator said in a post. “This attack is well organized and again very, very distributed; we have seen over 90,000 IP addresses involved in this attack,” it said.
Small Banks: Prepping for DDoS Attacks
Small banking institutions have to depend on third parties to keep them abreast of emerging fraud schemes and attack trends, such as DDoS. First Landmark, however, knew from its founding in 2008 that it had to outsource most of its information technology and security management, says Leigh Pharr, the bank’s senior vice president.
“We are very fortunate in that senior management here and our president are very in-tune with DDoS attacks, and we keep all of our employees well-educated on what might happen, what can happen,” Pharr says. “While we do rely on our core processor to provide us with all of the technical, online banking products, we are not satisfied that is all we need to ensure we are secure and that our accounts are protected,” Pharr says. “That’s why we have hired other third party providers [such as CSI] to come in and test our systems – try to break us. “
As the managers of online-banking platforms for the majority of small and mid-tier banking institutions throughout the U.S., core processors have a responsibility to ensure their institution customers are protected and are investing in up-to-date solutions.
Detection, response key to effective security
With corporate security measures becoming increasingly more effective, often the only point of entry to a company’s network for a cyber criminal is via an employee.
“Research found that the negative impact of mobile devices on security was not only the result of the mobility of devices, but because of a number of assumptions IT departments make around the data they carry. In today’s mobile business environment, securing mobile devices has become a priority, but many IT departments neglect to think about the fact that the data carried on these devices isn’t contained as it would be in a centralised office environment. By working with the assumption that this is the same situation as when the data is in the data centre, IT becomes an unwitting accomplice of cyber criminals, according to Kaspersky’s research,” Myburgh points out.
“IDC data also shows that mobility is the number one factor driving new security spending, suggesting that more organisations are taking heed and beefing up security measures beyond their data centre perimeters.”
Link: http://www.itweb.co.za/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=63127
Security updates likely to keep admins busy in April
According to the Security Bulletin Advance Notification for April 2013, the first critical update is for all versions of Internet Explorer (IE), including the newest IE 10, on Windows 8 and RT. This vulnerability should be at the top of patching priority lists as it allows remote code execution through users visiting a compromised website, which is of the most popular attack methods, said Wolfgang Kandek, chief technology officer at security firm Qualys.
Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle, said it is almost certain that this month’s IE patch fixes the Pwn2Own bug from CanSec West.
The second Microsoft security update is aimed at a “critical” vulnerability that affects the Windows Operating System, except the newest versions – Windows 8, Server 2012 and Windows RT for tablets. “The vulnerabilities addressed in these bulletins typically allow the attacker an escalation of privilege from a normal user to an admin-level user once they are already on the machine or can trick the user to open a specifically crafted file,” said Kandek.
Ziv Mador, director of security research at Trustwave, said it would be interesting to find out how the vulnerability in Windows Defender was discovered and disclosed.
There is also an out-of-cycle update for Java from Oracle this month.
Google Uses Reputation To Detect Malicious Downloads
“CAMP bridges the gap between blacklists and whitelists by augmenting both approaches with a reputation system that is applied to unknown content,” the researchers wrote in the paper, adding: “One of CAMP’s important properties is to minimize the impact on user privacy while still providing protection.”
Google’s own real-world test–deploying the system to 200 million Chrome users over six months–found that CAMP could detect 98.6 percent of malware flagged by a virtual-machine-based analysis platform.
In many ways, CAMP is an answer to Microsoft’s SmartScreen, a technology that Microsoft built into its Internet Explorer and the latest version of its operating system, Windows 8.
The CAMP service renders a reputation–benign, malicious or unknown–for a file based on the information provided by the client and reputation data measure during certain time windows, including daily, weekly and quarterly measurements. Information about the download URL, the Internet address of the download server, any referrer information, the size and hash value of the download and any certificates used to sign the file are sent to Google to calculate a reputation score.
URL classification services–such as McAfee’s SiteAdvisor, Symantec’s Safe Web, and Google’s own Safe Browsing–fared eve
n worse, only detecting at most 11 percent of the URLs from which malicious files were downloaded.
The Google researchers who authored the paper–including Moheeb Abu Rajab and Niels Provos–decided to focus on executables downloaded by the user, not on malicious files that attempted to exploit a user’s system.
Mobile users in Middle East victims of cyber crime: Study
“People are relying more and more on their mobile phones and tablets to navigate, share, socialize and shop in today’s constantly-connected world,” said Tamim Taufiq, head of consumer sales MENA for Symantec.
“What many consumers may not realise is exactly how much of their personal and private information is up for grabs should these devices be compromised, lost or stolen.”
Yet as people expand their online lives through mobile devices, many are not taking steps to secure their device and the content it contains.
Nearly one in four mobile device users in the MENA admit to not always downloading applications from trustworthy sources – Close to three in 10 (29 percent) indicated that they do not use secure payment methods when making purchases from their mobile device, leaving their sensitive information such as credit card details vulnerable.