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Mumblehard Malware Targets Linux and FreeBSD Servers

Mumblehard Malware Targets Linux and FreeBSD Servers
May 02, 2015
Thousands of computers and web servers running Linux and FreeBSD operating systems have been infected over past five years with sophisticated malware that turn the machines into spambots. The new Linux malware, discovered by the security researchers from the antivirus provider Eset, has been dubbed " Mumblehard " because it is Muttering spam from your servers , says Eset 23-page long report (PDF) titled "Unboxing Linux/Mumblehard." Researchers have logged more than 8,500 unique IP addresses during the seven months period of research that were hit by Mumblehard Linux malware and found over 3,000 machines joined them in the past three weeks. Mumblehard features two basic components: Backdoor  Spamming daemon  Both written in the Perl programming language and "feature the same custom packer written in assembly language." The backdoor allows hackers to infiltrate into the system and control the command and control servers, and t

BMC Vulnerability Exposes Admin Password of 32,000 Servers in Plaintext on the Internet

BMC Vulnerability Exposes Admin Password of 32,000 Servers in Plaintext on the Internet
Jun 20, 2014
A Flaw has been discovered in the motherboards manufactured by the server manufacturer Supermicro, has left more than 30,000 servers vulnerable to hackers that could allow them to remotely compromise the management interface of unpatched servers. The vulnerability actually resides in the Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) in the WPCM450 line of chips incorporated into the motherboards. Security Researcher at CARInet Security Incident Response Team, discovered that Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) of Supermicro motherboards contain a binary file that stores remote login passwords in clear text and the file is available for download simply by connecting to the specific port, 49152. Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) is the central part of the microcontroller that resides on server motherboard or in the chassis of a blade server or telecom platform. The BMC links to a main processor and other onboard elements via a simple serial bus. Baseboard management contr

Making Sense of Operational Technology Attacks: The Past, Present, and Future

Making Sense of Operational Technology Attacks: The Past, Present, and Future
Mar 21, 2024Operational Technology / SCADA Security
When you read reports about cyber-attacks affecting operational technology (OT), it's easy to get caught up in the hype and assume every single one is sophisticated. But are OT environments all over the world really besieged by a constant barrage of complex cyber-attacks? Answering that would require breaking down the different types of OT cyber-attacks and then looking back on all the historical attacks to see how those types compare.  The Types of OT Cyber-Attacks Over the past few decades, there has been a growing awareness of the need for improved cybersecurity practices in IT's lesser-known counterpart, OT. In fact, the lines of what constitutes a cyber-attack on OT have never been well defined, and if anything, they have further blurred over time. Therefore, we'd like to begin this post with a discussion around the ways in which cyber-attacks can either target or just simply impact OT, and why it might be important for us to make the distinction going forward. Figure 1 The Pu

Worst Day for eBAY, Multiple Flaws leave Millions of Users vulnerable to Hackers

Worst Day for eBAY, Multiple Flaws leave Millions of Users vulnerable to Hackers
May 23, 2014
It's not been more than 36 hours since eBay revealed it was hacked and we just come to know about three more critical vulnerabilities in eBay website that could allow an attacker to compromise users' account once again, even if you have already reset your account password after the last announcement. Yesterday eBay admitted to the massive data breach that affected 145 million registered users worldwide after its database was compromised. eBay urged its 145 million users to change their passwords after the cyber attack, but are passwords enough? eBay Data breach happened mainly because of their vulnerable infrastructure, not weak passwords. I think eBay's morning just going to be bad to worse as today, three Security researchers came forward with three more different types of critical flaws in eBay website that leave its 145 million users vulnerable to hackers. HACKER UPLOADED SHELL ON eBAY SERVER (UNPATCHED) A critical security flaw in the eBay website for i

Automated remediation solutions are crucial for security

cyber security
websiteWing SecurityShadow IT / SaaS Security
Especially when it comes to securing employees' SaaS usage, don't settle for a longer to-do list. Auto-remediation is key to achieving SaaS security.

SNMP Reflection DDoS Attacks on the Rise

SNMP Reflection DDoS Attacks on the Rise
May 23, 2014
The DDoS techniques have massively increased with the attackers becoming more skillful at working around the network security. A massive 300Gbps DDoS attack launched against Spamhaus website almost broke the Internet a year ago and also earlier this year, hackers have succeeded in reaching new heights of the massive DDoS attack targeting content-delivery and anti-DDoS protection firm CloudFlare, reaching more than 400Gbps at its peak of traffic. Akamai's Prolexic Security Engineering and Response Team (PLXsert) issued a threat advisory on Thursday reporting a significant surge in DDoS attacks last month abusing the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) interface in network devices. Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is a UDP-based protocol which is commonly known and often used to manage network devices. SNMP is typically used in devices such as printers, routers and firewalls that can be found in the home and enterprise environments as well. Just as D

Operation Windigo: Linux malware campaign that infected 500,000 Computers Worldwide

Operation Windigo: Linux malware campaign that infected 500,000 Computers Worldwide
Mar 18, 2014
In late 2013, Security Researchers identified thousands of Linux systems around the world infected with the OpenSSH b ackdoor trojan and  credential stealer  named Linux/Ebury ,  that allows  unauthorized access of an affected computer to the remote attackers. Antivirus Firm ESET's Reseacher team has been tracking and  investigating the operation behind Linux/Ebury and today team  uncovers the details [ Report PDF ] of a massive,  sophisticated and organized  malware campaign called ' Operation Windigo ', infected more than 500,000 computers and 25,000 dedicated servers. ' We discovered an infrastructure used for malicious activities that is all hosted on compromised servers. We were also able to find a link between different malware components such as Linux/Cdorked, Perl/Calfbot and Win32/Glupteba.M and realized they are all operated by the same group. '  ESET reported. Malware used in Operation Windigo: Linux/Ebury –  an OpenSSH backdoor use

NSA allegedly hacked Belgian Cryptography Expert with spoofed LinkedIn Profile

NSA allegedly hacked Belgian Cryptography Expert with spoofed LinkedIn Profile
Feb 03, 2014
Cryptographer Professor Jean-Jacques Quisquater has become the part of a targeted attack by the US National Security Agency (NSA) and its British counterpart GCHQ, first reported on Saturday morning by De Standaard . A few months back in September 2013 it was revealed that, Belgacom , the largest telecommunications company in Belgium was hacked and number of employees on Belgacom's network, including their servers were compromised. Later in November 2013 , it was revealed that the NSA and GCHQ were behind the infiltration of the company's computers, according to the document provided by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden . The document detailed that the British intelligence agency GCHQ created fake ' LinkedIn ' and ' Slashdot ' pages to spy on computers of Belgacom network engineers. They used a method called " quantum insert ", to redirect employees to fake websites that contained malware using Man in the middle attack to a spoofed server ( codenamed "

Facebook Hacker received $33,500 reward for Remote code execution vulnerability

Facebook Hacker received $33,500 reward for Remote code execution vulnerability
Jan 23, 2014
Facebook has paid out its largest Bug Bounty ever of $33,500 to a Brazilian security researcher for discovering and reporting a critical Remote code execution vulnerability, which potentially allows the full control of a server. In September, ' Reginaldo Silva' found an XML External Entity Expansion vulnerability affecting the part of Drupal that handled OpenID, which allows attacker to read any files on the webserver. As a feature, Facebook allows users to access their accounts using OpenID in which it receives an XML document from 3rd service and parse it to verify that it is indeed the correct provider or not i.e. Receives at https://www.facebook.com/openid/receiver.php  In November 2013, while testing Facebook's ' Forgot your password ' functionality, he found that the OpenID process could be manipulated to execute any command on the Facebook server remotely and also allows to read arbitrary files on the webserver. In a Proof-of-Concept ,

Abusing Network Time Protocol (NTP) to perform massive Reflection DDoS attack

Abusing Network Time Protocol (NTP) to perform massive Reflection DDoS attack
Jan 03, 2014
In 2013, we have seen a significant increase in the use of a specific distributed denial of service (DDoS) methodology known as Distributed Reflection Denial of Service attacks (DrDoS). Open and misconfigured DNS (Domain Name System) can be used by anyone to resolve domain names to IP addresses are increasingly abused to launch powerful DDoS attacks. But not only the DNS servers, Security Researchers at Symantec  have spotted Network Time Protocol (NTP) reflection DDoS attacks being launched by cyber criminals during the Christmas Holidays. ' Network Time Protocol (NTP) ' is a distributed network clock time synchronization protocol that is used to synchronize computer clock times in a network of computers and runs over port 123 UDP. NTP is one of those set-it-and-forget-it protocols that is configured once and most network administrators don't worry about it after that. Unfortunately, that means it is also not a service that is upgraded often, leaving it vulnerable to th

Security Risks of FTP and Benefits of Managed File Transfer

Security Risks of FTP and Benefits of Managed File Transfer
Dec 10, 2013
File transfer services such as FTP or HTTP has been the most common way of file transfer for business requirements. Typically what a file transfer means is that a file transfer protocol such as FTP or HTTP is used to send the stream of bits stored as a single unit in a file system including file name, file size, timestamp and other metadata from one host to another host over a TCP-based network such as the Internet. But this process is not foolproof. FTP, by itself, is not a secure file transfer protocol and it has a lot of security vulnerabilities. It's a known fact that FTP doesn't provide any encryption for data transfer. Most of the times, the requirement in any business is pretty simple: to transfer files between two endpoints in different locations, and the parties involved do not think much about how secure the file transfer process is going to be. Using FTP for official file transfer can leave your data transmission exposed to many security attacks: FTP Bounce Attack Gener

Java based Cross platform malware targeting Apache Tomcat servers in the wild

Java based Cross platform malware targeting Apache Tomcat servers in the wild
Nov 21, 2013
Takashi Katsuki, a researcher at Antivirus firm Symantec has discovered a new cyber attack ongoing in the wild, targeting an open-source Web server application server Apache Tomcat with a cross platform Java based backdoor that can be used to attack other machines. The malware, dubbed as " Java.Tomdep " differs from other server malware and is not written in the PHP scripting language. It is basically a Java based backdoor act as Java Servlet that gives Apache Tomcat platforms malicious capabilities. Because Java is a cross platform language, the affected platforms include Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, and most supported versions of Windows. The malware was detected less than a month ago and so far the number of infected machines appears to be low. You may think that this type of attack only targets personal computers, such as desktops and laptops, but unfortunately that isn't true. Servers can also be attacked. They are quite valuable targets, since they are usu

Two-year-old vulnerability in JBoss Application Servers enables Remote Shell for Hackers

Two-year-old vulnerability in JBoss Application Servers enables Remote Shell for Hackers
Nov 21, 2013
Cyber security of many organizations being attacked at an extremely high rate this month, well another alarming cyber crime report become public today. A widely unpatched and two years old critical vulnerability in JBoss Application Server (AS) that enable an attacker to remotely get a shell on a vulnerable web server. JBoss Application Server is an open-source Java EE-based application server very popular, it was designed by JBoss, now a division of Red Hat. In late 2012, JBoss AS was named as " wildFly ", since disclosure of the exploit code many products running the affected JBoss Application Server have been impacted, including some security software. Tens of thousands of enterprise data center servers are vulnerable to this attack, with at least 500 actively compromised, according to the Imperva report. Many systems administrators have yet to properly configure their servers to mitigate the threat, and the number of potential targets has increased over

DDoS Attacks : A Serious unstoppable menace for IT security communities

DDoS Attacks : A Serious unstoppable menace for IT security communities
Oct 18, 2013
It should be the busiest day of the year for your business, but your website has just disappeared off the Internet and orders have dried up. If this happens to you, then you likely just become yet another victim of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack . By now, everyone who uses the Internet has come across DDoS attacks . It is one of the oldest attack technologies on the web, and a popular way of paralyzing the huge data centers. Just yesterday we have reported about a massive 100Gbps DDoS attack that hit World's 3rd Largest Chinese Bitcoin exchange for 9 hours. Arbor Networks, a leading provider of DDoS and advanced threat protection solutions, today released data on global distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack trends for the first three quarters of 2013, revealed that this kind of attack still represents a serious menace for IT security communities.  The document provides an interesting overview into Internet traffic patterns and threat evolutio

World's Largest Web Hosting company 'LeaseWeb' Hacked by KDMS Team

World's Largest Web Hosting company 'LeaseWeb' Hacked by KDMS Team
Oct 05, 2013
LeaseWeb , one of the World's largest hosting provider has been defaced by Palestinian hackers, named as KDMS Team . LeaseWeb was also hosting provider for one of the biggest file-sharing website Megaupload in the past. Later Megaupload Founder, Kim Dotcom claimed that  Leaseweb had deleted all Megaupload user data from 690 servers without warning. The hacker group replaced the Homepage of the website for just a few hours with an Anonymous Palestine , homepage titled " You Got Pwned " and the defacement message says: Hello Lease Web Who Are You ? Who is but the form following the function of what and what are you is a hosting company with no security KDMS Team : Well ,, We Can See That :P We noticed that Attacker has just changed the DNS server to point the Domain to another server at 67.23.254.6, owned by the attacker. At the time of writing, Leaseweb team resolved the issue and get their Domain back to the original server . But because the hac

CISCO vulnerability allows remote attacker to take control of Windows system

CISCO vulnerability allows remote attacker to take control of Windows system
Aug 30, 2013
Cisco has fixed a critical vulnerability in Secure Access Control Server for Windows that could allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary commands and take control of the underlying operating system. Cisco Secure ACS is an application that allows companies to centrally manage access to network resources for various types of devices and users.  The reported flaw affects Cisco Secure ACS for Windows versions 4.0 through 4.2.1.15. Successful exploitation requires that Cisco Secure Access Control Server is configured as a RADIUS server EAP-FAST authentication. The Cisco Security advisory said: " The vulnerability is due to improper parsing of user identities used for EAP-FAST authentication. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending crafted EAP-FAST packets to an affected device. An exploit could allow the attacker to execute arbitrary commands on the Cisco Secure ACS server and take full control of the affected server ," The newly patched vulnerabili

OpenX Advertising Network hacked and backdoor Injected

OpenX Advertising Network hacked and backdoor Injected
Aug 07, 2013
OpenX, a leading provider of digital and mobile advertising technology has accordingly served backdoors that are injected into the Code and allows hackers to control over your Web server. German tech site the Heise notified Germany's computer emergency response team (CERT) this week about the OpenX Ad Server (2.8.10) backdoor, allowing an attacker to execute any PHP code via the "eval" function  and could have provided attackers full access to their web sites. The OpenX team has confirmed the breach  and OpenX senior application security engineer Nick Soracco said that two files in the binary distribution of 2.8.10 had been replaced with modified files that contained a remote code execution vulnerability . The attack code is written in PHP but is hidden in a JavaScript file that is part of a video player plugin ( vastServeVideoPlayer ) in the OpenX distribution. This vulnerability only applies to the free downloadable open source product, OpenX Source.

Russian Cyber Criminals selling hacked websites access in Underground stores

Russian Cyber Criminals selling hacked websites access in Underground stores
Aug 03, 2013
Underground sites more commonly offer access to networks of compromised machines or stolen credit card information. Webroot has uncovered a criminal underground store dedicated to selling access to more than tens of thousands of hacked legitimate websites. Their customers can buy an administrator account or shell access in a hacked website, at cheap price i.e. $0.5 to $10 and then allows to perpetrate criminal activities from it, distribute malware, install a botnet  command & control infrastructure, upload illegal content, send spam, and so on. In Screenshots Researchers shows an underground market proposition, whose inventory is currently listing over 6000 compromised/hacked shells internationally. Sites are listed based on the price, page rank, age of the domain, Alexa ranking, language, and number of pages indexed by Google. The site promised access to any number of the compromised websites and the store seems to be quite profitable. The website found to be
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