Cisco Security

May 7, 2013

SECURITY

The Effects of #OpUSA

2 min read

In the days leading up to #OpUSA, security professionals were busy making preparations for the supposed flood of new attacks coming on 7 May 2013. As we mentioned on 1 May 2013, publicly announced attacks of this nature can have highly volatile credibility. In some cases, the announcements exist only for the purpose of gaining notoriety. In […]

May 6, 2013

SECURITY

Watering Hole Attacks an Attractive Alternative to Spear Phishing

2 min read

“Watering Hole” attacks, as evidenced by the recent attack involving the U.S. Department of Labor, are becoming increasingly popular as alternatives to attacks such as Spear Phishing. In a “Watering Hole” attack, the attacker compromises a site likely to be visited by a particular target group, rather than attacking the target group directly. Eventually, someone from […]

May 4, 2013

SECURITY

Department of Labor Watering Hole Attack Confirmed to be 0-Day with Possible Advanced Reconnaissance Capabilities

2 min read

Update 2 5/9/2013: Microsoft has released a “Microsoft fix it” as a temporary mitigation for this issue on systems which require IE8. At this time, multiple sites have been observed hosting pages which exploit this vulnerability. Users of IE8 who cannot update to IE9+ are urged to apply the Fix It immediately. Update 5/6/2013: An […]

May 1, 2013

SECURITY

STOPhausDDoS: Suspect in Custody

1 min read

Back in March, Seth Hanford wrote about a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack aimed at the SpamHaus organization. Since then, there have been some new developments in the aftermath of the DDoS attack, most notably the arrest of the attackers’ spokesperson, Sven Olaf Kamphuis. Update On April 26, Kamphuis, STOPhaus activist and possibly the person […]

May 1, 2013

SECURITY

Coordinated Attacks Against the U.S. Government and Banking Infrastructure

8 min read

Prologue On April 10, 2013, a collective of politically motivated hacktivists announced a round of planned attacks called #OPUSA. These attacks, slated to begin May 7, 2013, are to be launched against U.S.-based targets. #OPUSA is a follow-up to #OPISRAEL, which were a series of attacks carried out on April 7 against Israeli-based targets. Our goal here is to […]

May 1, 2013

SECURITY

Linux/CDorked FAQs

2 min read

Last Friday (April 26), ESET and Sucuri simultaneously blogged about the discovery of Linux/CDorked, a backdoor impacting Apache servers running cPanel. Since that announcement, there has been some confusion surrounding the exact nature of these attacks. Rather than reinvent the analysis that has already been done, this blog post is intended to clear up some of the confusion. When did Linux/CDorked […]

April 24, 2013

SECURITY

Possible Exploit Vector for DarkLeech Compromises

1 min read

Often it is quite surprising how long old, well-known vulnerabilities continue to be exploited. Recently, a friend sent me an example of a malicious script used in an attempted attack against their server: The script attempted to exploit the Horde/IMP Plesk Webmail Exploit in vulnerable versions of the Plesk control panel. By injecting malicious PHP code in the username […]

April 23, 2013

SECURITY

Latest Oracle Java Patches and Security Best Practices

1 min read

Java exploits account for 87% of total web exploits – Cisco 2013 Annual Security Report This month’s release of the Oracle Java SE Critical Patch Update includes patches for 42 vulnerabilities. Vulnerabilities in the Oracle Java SE Java Runtime Environment (JRE) component have received widespread attention as of late because of the potential for an attacker to bypass […]

April 22, 2013

SECURITY

Customized WordPress, Joomla Brute Force Login Attempts

3 min read

In recent weeks, the occurrence of brute force login attempts targeting WordPress and Joomla installations have significantly increased in volume, with some entities reporting triple the attempts seen in the past. The attack volume has been so severe that it has led some hosting providers to block all attempts to access wp-login.php, even for site […]