On April 16th at 11:00pm GMT, the first of two botnets began a massive spam campaign to take advantage of the recent Boston tragedy. The spam messages claim to contain news concerning the Boston Marathon bombing. The spam messages contain a link to a site that claims to have videos of explosions from the attack. Simultaneously, links to these sites were posted as comments to various blogs.
The link directs users to a webpage that includes iframes that load content from several YouTube videos plus content from an attacker-controlled site. Reports indicate the attacker-controlled sites host malicious .jar files that can compromise vulnerable machines.
On April 17th, a second botnet began using a similar spam campaign. Instead of simply providing a link, the spam messages contained graphical HTML content claiming to be breaking news alerts from CNN.
Cisco Intrusion Prevention System devices, Cloud Web Security, Email Security Appliances, and Web Security Appliances have blocked this campaign from the start.
“Change is inevitable—except from a vending machine.”
In the spirit of Robert C. Gallagher’s famous quote—and in our quest to never be a vending machine—we’ve rolled out several updates to Cisco’s Security Intelligence Operations (SIO) Portal which I trust you will find useful. Thanks to your feedback, we continue to evolve the Portal to ensure that relevant security content is where you need it, when you need it. Providing timely information to our customers requires not only a global team of Cisco security experts to pipeline the latest information, but a complementary team who ensures that the most significant issues are also the most visible. In fact, that’s the most exciting change we made: a new ‘Security Highlights’ tab which allows a cross-functional group, led by our content managers, to call out the most important issues to our customers. That way, instead of looking at IntelliShield alerts, Cisco Security Notices, or Event Responses individually when time is scarce, this new tab gives you an at-a-glance view of Cisco security content our experts feel is most pressing given all of the events into which we have a view.
The Cisco Security Intelligence Operations (SIO) Portal is the primary outlet for Cisco’s security intelligence and the public home to all of our security-related content. This content ranges from Event Responses () to IntelliShield Alerts () to Cisco product Security Advisories (). The SIO Portal is intended to be the first place you visit when looking for security information from Cisco.
Customer input is very important to us. With this in mind, we’ve launched two new customer listening tools on the SIO Portal: an enhanced feedback mechanism and a short six-question survey.
The past few weeks have had many on heightened alert from the initial threats to the ongoing attacks surrounding U.S.-based financial institutions; to say folks have been busy would be quite the understatement.
These events spawned a collaborative effort throughout the Cisco Security Intelligence Operations (Cisco SIO) organization, as depicted in the diagram below.
* Note: As Cisco products have not been found to be vulnerable to these attacks the Cisco PSIRT (Product Security Incident Response Team) provides feedback and peer-review, hence the reason that no Cisco Security Advisory (SA) is present for this activity.
Our second story in security is easily one of my favorites and not just because it involves a lot of friend from Austin. Cisco’s Security Intelligence Operations…
) to IntelliShield Alerts (
) to Cisco product Security Advisories (
). The SIO Portal is intended to be the first place you visit when looking for security information from Cisco.
