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Botnets, DDoS attacks as weapon against financial sector DDOS attacks against the financial sector almost tripled during the first quarter of this year, according to DDoS mitigation specialist Prolexic. The firm also reported a 3,000 per cent quarter-on-quarter increase in malicious packet traffic targeted at the financial services sector, compared with the final quarter of 2011. China leads the way as the country from where DDoS attacks originate, followed by the U.S., Russia, then India. Prolexic says " more than 10 of the worlds largest banks due to market capitalization ," and " an almost threefold increase in the number of attacks against its financial services ". A distributed denial-of-service attack is one in which several compromised systems attack a single target, causing denial of service for legitimate users. The flood of incoming messages to the target system essentially forces it to shut down, thereby denying service. The average attack bandwidth...

Ransomware replaces Windows MBR and asking users for Money Security researchers from TrendMicro, F-Secure and Dr. Web have intercepted two new ransomware variants currently circulating in the wild. This new ransomware variant prevents infected computers from loading Windows by replacing their master boot record (MBR) and displays a message asking users for money. Cris Pantanilla, a threat response engineer at Trend Micro said, " Based on our analysis, this malware copies the original MBR and overwrites it with its own malicious code ," " Right after performing this routine, it automatically restarts the system for the infection take effect ." The MBR is a piece of code that resides in the first sectors of the hard drive and starts the boot loader. The boot loader then loads the OS. Instead of starting the Windows boot loader, the rogue MBR installed by the new ransomware displays a message that asks users to deposit a sum of money into a particular account via...

This month Microsoft released a total of six new security bulletins, but one in particular deals with a zero-day vulnerability impacting virtually every Microsoft user, which is already being exploited in the wild. Four of the six security bulletins are rated as Critical by Microsoft, with the remaining two ranked as Important. The Critical security bulletins include a fix for Windows and the .NET framework, as well as the perennial favorite the cumulative update for Internet Explorer. The biggest deal, though, is MS12-027, which addresses a critical flaw in Windows Common Controls. One of the fixes is gaining the most attention though, even from Microsoft. " We list MS12-027 as our highest priority security update to deploy this month because we are aware of very limited, targeted attacks taking advantage of the CVE-2012-0158 vulnerability using specially crafted Office documents as an exploit vector ," said the firm in an apparently hastily written blog post. ...

Two from Team Poison arrested in MI6 hotline phone hack Police in the UK have arrested two teens as part of an investigation into illegal recordings of conversations on Scotland Yard’s anti-terror hotline, which were later posted on Youtube . Two teenage boys aged 16 and 17 years have been arrested in the West Midlands in connection with an investigation into reports that hackers accessed Scotland Yard's anti-terror hotline. The hackers claimed to have carried out the cyber-attack in response to the alleged detention of innocent people on terrorism charges and the recent ruling to deport a number of terror suspects to the United States.  In the recording of the conversation, two people are heard discussing an earlier alleged attack in which a group calling themselves TeamPoison ( TeaMp0isoN ) apparently jammed the hotline by bombarding it with calls from computers . " We are confident the communication systems have not been breached and remain, as they always have been, s...

Samba remote code execution vulnerability, Patch Released ! Samba is an award-winning free software file, print and authentication server suite for Windows clients. The project was begun by Australian Andrew Tridgell. There is a serious remotely exploitable vulnerability in the Samba open-source software that could enable an attacker to gain root privileges without any authentication. The bug is in all versions of Samba from 3.0.x to 3.6.3, but has been fixed in Samba 3.6.4, which is the current stable release. The vulnerability was discovered by security researcher Brian Gorenc and an unnamed colleague, working for the Zero Day Initiative. The flaw, which is located in the code generator for Samba's remote procedure call (RPC) interface, makes it possible for clients on the network to force the Samba server to execute arbitrary code. Three new security releases (Samba 3.4.16, Samba 3.5.14, Samba 3.6.4) for currently supported versions have been issued over at samba.org/samb...