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Security researchers revealed that series of " Watering Hole " has been conducted exploiting a IE8 zero-day vulnerability to target U.S. Government experts working on nuclear weapons research. The news is not surprising but it is very concerning, the principal targets of the attacks are various groups of research such as the components of U.S. Department of Labor and the U.S. Department of Energy, the news has been confirmed by principal security firms and by Microsoft corporate. The flaw has been used in a series of "watering hole" attacks, let's remind that "Watering Hole" is a technique of attack realized compromising legitimate websites using a " drive-by " exploit. The attackers restrict their audience to a individuals interested to specific content proposed by targeted website, in this way when the victim visits the page a backdoor Trojan is installed on his computer. The website compromised to exploit the IE8 zero-day is the Dep

Distributed Denial of Service attacks have increased in scale, intensity and frequency. The wide range of motives for these attacks political , criminal, or social makes every merchant or organization with an online presence a potential target. Over the weekend Incapsula mitigated a unique DDoS attack against a large gaming website, in which they have discovered a DDoS attack using thousands of legitimate WordPress blogs without the need for them to be compromised. Incapsula released the list of approximately 2,500 WordPress sites from where the attack was originated, including some very large sites like Trendmicro.com, Gizmodo.it and Zendesk.com . In a recent report , we posted about another method for DDoS attacks using DNS amplification , where a DNS request is made to an open DNS resolver with the source IP address forged so that it is the IP address of the targeted site to which the response is thus sent, but this new method uses HTTP rather than DNS. The

The  ransomware industry surged in 2023  as it saw an alarming 55.5% increase in victims worldwide, reaching a staggering 5,070.  But 2024 is starting off showing a very different picture.  While the numbers skyrocketed in Q4 2023 with 1309 cases, in Q1 2024, the ransomware industry was down to 1,048 cases. This is a 22% decrease in ransomware attacks compared to Q4 2023. Figure 1: Victims per quarter There could be several reasons for this significant drop.  Reason 1: The Law Enforcement Intervention Firstly, law enforcement has upped the ante in 2024 with actions against both LockBit and ALPHV. The LockBit Arrests In February, an international operation named "Operation Cronos" culminated in the arrest of at least three associates of the infamous LockBit ransomware syndicate in Poland and Ukraine.  Law enforcement from multiple countries collaborated to take down LockBit's infrastructure. This included seizing their dark web domains and gaining access to their backend sys

Google has fixed a series of serious vulnerabilities in its Chrome OS , including three high-risk bugs that could be used for code execution on vulnerable machines. Bug bounties is the cash prizes offered by open source communities to anyone who finds key software bugs have been steadily on the rise for several years now. As part of its reward program, Google paid out $31,336 to a researcher who found three of the vulnerabilities . Google's post notes : " We're pleased to reward Ralf-Philipp Weinmann $31,336 under the Chromium Vulnerability Rewards Program for a chain of three bugs, including demo exploit code and very detailed write-up. We are grateful to Ralf for his work to help keep our users safe. " The three-bug chain credited to Weinmann exploited O3D, a JavaScript API (application programming interface) designed for crafting interactive 3-D graphics-based Web applications. The API and supporting browser plug-in were created by Google, with a preliminary ve

Security Researcher from Group-IB ( Group-IB is one of the leading companies in global cybercrime prevention and hi-tech crime investigations )   has found a new kind of malware   that targets the Russian stock-trading platform QUIK. It was detected during several targeted attacks starting in November 2012 where  Cyber criminals have traditionally targeted private and corporate banking accounts, using malware (such as variants of the ZeuS  cyber-crime  toolkit ) to log key-strokes and extract account information. In the last year, Group-IB has received several incoming incident fraud requests on some famous online trading and stock brokerages where systems were possibly hacked and recently trading fraudsters have diversified tactics and begun to use malware. Group-IB has detected the first professional malware, targeted at a specialized trading software named QUIK (Quik Broker, Quik Dealer) from Russian software developers ARQA Technologies and FOCUS IVonline from

Exploit kits are one of the dangerous cyber crime tool, where The Phoenix Exploit Kit is a good example of exploit packs used to exploit vulnerable software on the computers of unsuspecting Internet users. The Phoenix Exploit Kit is available for a base price of $2,200 in underground market by its malware author or developer.  Like other exploit kits , Phoenix also developed to exploit browser-based  vulnerabilities in outdated and insecure versions of browser plugins like Java, and Adobe Flash and Reader. Developer of Phoenix is known by nickname AlexUdakov on several forums. According to new investigation report published by  krebsonsecurity , AlexUdakov was also member of a forum called Darkode , whose administrator accounts were compromised few weeks before and that the intruders were able to gain access to private communications of the administrators.  Intruders was able to view full profiles and database of Darkode members, as well as the private email addres

Cybercriminals, underground hacking communities, hacker's market and Exploit packs.... Russian  cyberspace is well known for such crazy hacking stuff. Recently, the original Carberp botnet developer   ring that stole millions from bank accounts worldwide has been arrested. According to a report from Russian newspaper, a group of 20 people who served as its malware development team, were arrested by the Sluzhba Bezpeky Ukrayiny and the Federalnaya sluzhba bezopasnosti Rossiyskoy Federatsii (federal security service of Russia, FSB) in cities around Ukraine. Over $250 million has been stolen by the members of the botnet ring, which had roughly 20 members aged between 25 and 30. " Our experts did an enormous amount of work, which resulted in identifying the head of this criminal group, the owner and operator of a specialized banking botnet, identifying the control servers, and identifying the directing of traffic from popular websites in order to spread malware infectio

During the first day of Pwn2Own competition at the CanSecWest conference in Vancouver , latest versions of all major browsers were exploited by hackers.  Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8 were successfully pwned by various competitors, bringing them tens of thousands of dollars in prizes.  French vulnerability research and bug selling firm ' Vupen ' brought down IE10 running on a Windows 8 powered Surface Pro tablet by exploiting a pair of flaws. Researchers Jon Butler and Nils from MWR Labs managed to exploit Google Chrome on Windows 7 and also used a kernel bug to bypass the sandbox. " By visiting a malicious webpage, it was possible to exploit a vulnerability which allowed us to gain code execution in the context of the sandboxed renderer process. We also used a kernel vulnerability in the underlying operating system in order to gain elevated privileges and to execute arbitrary commands outside of the sandbox with system privi

Do you still have Java installed? There is a bad news for you ! FireEye has detected yet another Java zero-day vulnerability being exploited in attacks in the wild. The vulnerability targets browsers that have the latest version of the Java plugin installed Java v1.6 Update 41 and Java v1.7 Update 15 and  FireEye warned that the   vulnerability is being exploited to install a remote-access trojan dubbed McRat , researchers from security firm. " Not like other popular Java vulnerabilities in which security manager can be disabled easily, this vulnerability leads to arbitrary memory read and write in JVM process," "After triggering the vulnerability, exploit is looking for the memory which holds JVM internal data structure like if security manager is enabled or not, and then overwrites the chunk of memory as zero. " The exploit is reportedly different from the one used to attack Facebook, Twitter, Apple, and several other companies last mont

After a series of security issues, it appears that Apple still has not been able to resolve all the issue in iOS . Last week, Apple rolled out its iOS 6.1.2 update to owners of the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch in an effort to fixing the 3G connectivity and an Exchange calendar bugs. Hackers found an iOS 6 bug two weeks ago that allowed thieves into your phone, but only the Phone app and the features contained within could be accessed. Just after that, recently another screen lock bypass vulnerability  reported  in iOS 6.1 by Vulnerability Lab . This vulnerability allows users to bypass the lock screen pass code and access the phones photos and contacts. Researchers say the vulnerable device can be plugged into a computer via USB and access data like voice mails, pictures, contacts, etc.  This particular vulnerability was shared in detail over in a YouTube video for the masses, you can see the video tutorial as shown below: Steps to Follow: Connect your device

A Polish security firm ' Security Explorations' reported two new Java zero-day vulnerabilities , as " issue 54 " and "issue 55 ," with proof of concept code to Oracle. Oracle's security team is currently investigating the issue, but the status flaws not yet confirmed by Oracle. Less than a week after Oracle released its latest Java critical patch update, Researcher and Security Explorations's CEO Adam Gowdiak  have found two previously unknown security issues affecting Java 7. Security experts generally advise users to disable the Java browser plugin, which was exploited in recent targeted attacks on developers at Facebook , Apple and Microsoft. Java has faced an increasing number of zero-day vulnerabilities, bugs that are exploited by criminals before those flaws are patched, or even known by the vendor. Gowdiak confirmed that these newest vulnerabilities can be combined to circumvent Java's anti-exploit sandbox technology and used to attack

If you are a BlackBerry Enterprise Network user, here is something you need to be careful about. BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) users have been warned that an image-based exploit could allow hackers to access and execute code on the servers used to support corporate users of BlackBerry smartphones.  The flaw that been rated as high severity and actual vulnerability in BlackBerry Enterprise Servers resulted from how the server processes image files. Scenario to Exploit Vulnerability :  A malicious person writes a special code and then embeds it in a TIFF image file. The person then convinces a Blackberry smart phone user (whose phone is connected to a corporate BES) to view the TIFF file. As soon as the image file loads on the phone, the code runs on the Blackberry Enterprise server and either opens up a back door in the network or causes the network to crash altogether as instructed in the basic code. " RIM is not aware of any attacks on or specifically target

What if you could easily host malicious websites, send phishing emails, and manage compromised hosts across diverse internet addresses? This week's Cobalt Strike adds the ability to manage multiple attack servers at once. Here's how it works: When you connect to two or more servers, Cobalt Strike will show a switch bar with buttons for each server at the bottom of your window. Click a button to make that server active. It's a lot like using tabs to switch between pages in a web browser. To make use of multiple servers, designate a role for each one. Assign names to each server's button to easily remember its role. Dumbly connecting to multiple servers isn't very exciting. The fun comes when you seamlessly use Cobalt Strike features between servers. For example: Designate one server for phishing and another for reconnaissance. Go to the reconnaissance server, setup the system profiler website. Use the phishing tool to deliver the reconnaissance website through

DefenseCode researchers have discovered a critical security vulnerability that allows remote unauthenticated attacker to remotely execute arbitrary code under root privileges in the UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) implementation developed by Broadcom and used by many routers with Broadcom chipsets. Routers with vulnerable Broadcom UPnP stack are mostly based on Broadcom chipset. " We have found that, in fact, same vulnerable firmware component is also used in at least two other Cisco Linksys models - WRT54G3G and probably WRT310N. Could be others. " researchers said . The vulnerability is located within the wanipc and wanppp modules of the Broadcom UPnP stack, which is used by manufacturers that deliver routers based on the Broadcom chipset. The UPnP service is intended to be used on local networks, but Rapid7 found that there are over 80 million devices on the Internet that respond to UPnP discovery requests, making them vulnerable to remote attacks. The vul

Yesterday we have reported that How Bug Bounty programs can play unfair with hackers and researchers, where hackers are submitting their legitimate findings to companies and no surprise if they are getting replies that " Someone else already reported this, you are not eligible for Bounty ". But the main issue is, if companies are really aware about the issue , then why they have not fixed it yet ?  Today we are going to Talk about Google, that How a ignored vulnerability can be brilliantly crafted and exploited by Hackers for phishing users. On 11th September this year, I have reported a persistent XSS vulnerability in Google and reply from Google Security Team was," It seems the XSS you reported actually executes on one of our sandboxed domains (googleusercontent.com). The sandboxed domain does not contain any session cookies for google services, nor does it have access to any Google.com data " I said its okay if they are sure about it that it

Group-IB , a Russian cybercrime investigation company has discovered a zero-day vulnerability, affects Adobe Reader X and Adobe Reader XI. The vulnerability is also included in new modified version of Blackhole Exploit-Kit , which is used for the distributing the banking Trojans (Zeus, Spyeye, Carberp, Citadel) with the help of exploitation different vulnerabilities in client-side software. The particular exploit is available in underground forums for as much as $50,000 and bug is dangerous because it permits cybercriminals to run arbitrary shellcode by bypassing the sandbox feature integrated into the more recent versions of Adobe Reader. For now this flaw is distributed only in only small circles of the underground but it has the potential for much larger post-exploitation methods. The exploit is limited to  Microsoft Windows installations of Adobe Reader and it can't be fully executed until the user closes his Web browser (or Reader). Adobe representatives said that

5th November 2012 was the most exciting day in Cyberspace, yesterday we have report about few major hacks and leaks including Hacking of ImageShack Server , thousands of researchers database leak from Symantec portal, then  NBC Sports Rotoworld forums and NBC Mobile site was defaced by pyknic hacker and a claim that user names and passwords for the site had been compromised, Anonymous leaks the VMware ESX Server Kernel source code online , numerous Australian sites, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. The Guy Fawkes Day start with the hack of  28,000 Paypal Accounts. AnonymousPress tweeted , " Paypal hacked by Anonymous as part of our November 5th protest privatepaste.com/e8d3b2b2b1 #5Nov " (File Removed now) Private Paste documents contained 27,935 entries from Paypal database table " mc_customers " including emails, names, passwords (encrypted) and corresponding telephone numbers. However according to PayPal's head of PR, they claim to be i

French security researcher firm and famous bug hunters at Vupen announced that it had already developed an exploit that could take over a Window 8 machine running Internet Explorer 10, in spite of the many significant security upgrades Microsoft built into the latest version of its operating system. Windows 8 operating system released last week, and now Microsoft itself has not been aware of security vulnerabilities available in release. " We welcome #Windows 8 with various 0Ds combined to pwn all new Win8/IE10 exploit mitigations, " Vupen posted on Twitter . Bekrar's claim follows up on his promise earlier in the month that Vupen would be ready to compromise Windows 8 immediately upon its launch: " Windows 8 will be officially released by MS on Oct 26th, we'll release to customers the 1st exploit for Win8 the same day #CoordinatedPwnage " "T he in-depth technical details of the flaws will be shared with our customers and they can use them to protect their critical infrastruc

Reid Wightman from security firm ioActive reported that there is an undocumented backdoor available in   CoDeSys  software that actually used to manage equipment in power plants, military environments, and nautical ships. The bug allow malicious hackers to access sensitive systems without authorization, Ars said. The CoDeSys tool will grant a command shell to anyone who knows the proper command syntax and inner workings, leaving systems that are connected to the public Internet open to malicious tampering and There is absolutely no authentication needed to perform this privileged command,  Reid mention. This software has been used in industrial control systems sold by 261 different manufacturers. 3S-Smart Software Solutions designs CoDeSys and recently issued an advisory that recommends users set a password, but  he is able to develop two exploit shells , one is  codesys-shell.py (to get the CoDeSys command shell without authentication) and other , codesys-transfer.py (read or w

Rapid7 researcher Juan Vazquez recently uncovered a zero-day security flaw in Novell ZENworks Asset Management 7.5. This Vulnerability ( CVE-2012-4933 ) gives access to any files with system privileges and could also allow an attacker to grab configuration parameters, including the backend credentials in clear text. ZENworks Asset Management provides a Web Console, where the user can access the data collected about network devices and edit some information. This web interface provides some maintenance calls, two of them accessible with hardcoded credentials, allowing a remote attacker to retrieve any file from the remote file system with SYSTEM privileges and to get configuration parameters from the ZENworks Asset Management including the backend credentials in clear text. The vulnerability currently remains unpatched and US CERT recommends that users implement firewall rules that will restrict access to the web interface by unauthorised users. Read here , more about e

The new zero day exploit has been discovered and being exploited in the wild. This can be used to load malicious application on victim machines running fully patched Windows XP SP3 along with the latest editions of the IE 7 and IE 8 browser and Adobe's Flash software. Eric Romang  was  examining one of the servers used to launch attacks on vulnerable Java installations in past, and he says that he has found a new zero day exploit for Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser. He said, " I can confirm, the zero-day season is really not over yet ." AlienVault Labs researcher Jaime Blasco reported that, " the gang behind the Java attacks in August and September may be moving on: with domains used in that attack located at new IP addresses and serving up the new and more potent attacks ." As shown in above image example, the file exploit.html creates the initial vector to exploit the vulnerability and loads the flash file Moh2010.swf, which