TRAC

July 28, 2014

SECURITY

Far East Targeted by Drive by Download Attack

4 min read

This blog was co-authored by Kevin Brooks, Alex Chiu, Joel Esler, Martin Lee, Emmanuel Tacheau, Andrew Tsonchev, and Craig Williams.   On the 21st of July, 2014, Cisco TRAC became aware that the website dwnews.com was serving malicious Adobe Flash content. This site is a Chinese language news website covering events in East Asia from a […]

July 21, 2014

SECURITY

Old and Persistent Malware

2 min read

Malware can find its way into the most unexpected of places. Certainly, no website can be assumed to be always completely free of malware. Typically, there are many ways that websites can be compromised to serve malware:

July 14, 2014

SECURITY

Big Data: Observing a Phishing Attack Over Years

4 min read

Overview Phishing attacks use social engineering in an attempt to lure victims to fake websites. The websites could allow the attacker to retrieve sensitive or private information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details. Attacks of this kind have been around since 1995, evolving in sophistication in order to increase their success rate. Up until now, […]

July 8, 2014

SECURITY

Threat Spotlight: “A String of Paerls”, Part 2, Deep Dive

1 min read

This post has been coauthored by Joel Esler, Craig Williams, Richard Harman, Jaeson Schultz, and Douglas Goddard  In part one of our two part blog series on the “String of Paerls” threat, we showed an attack involving a spearphish message containing an attached malicious Word doc. We also described our methodology in grouping similar samples based on Indicators of Compromise: static and […]

July 3, 2014

SECURITY

The Art of Escape

3 min read

Craig Williams and Jaeson Schultz have contributed to this post. We blogged in September of 2013 about variants of Havex. A month ago on June 2, 2014, I had the chance to give a presentation at AREA41.  In my presentation “The Art of Escape,” I talked about targeted attacks involving watering holes. If we look at the timeline of the attacks we see […]

June 30, 2014

SECURITY

Threat Spotlight: A String of ‘Paerls’, Part One

5 min read

This post was co-authored by Jaeson Schultz, Joel Esler, and Richard Harman.  Update 7-8-14: Part 2 can be found here This is part one in a two-part series due to the sheer amount of data we found on this threat and threat actor. This particular attack was a combined spearphishing and exploit attempt. As we’ve seen in the past, this […]

June 6, 2014

SECURITY

A Collection of Cryptographic Vulnerabilities.

2 min read

The rustic origins of the English language are evident in the words left to us by our agricultural ancestors. Many words developed to distinguish groups of different animals, presumably to indicate their relevant importance. A ‘flock’ of sheep was more valuable than a single sheep, a ‘pack’ of wolves posed more danger than a single […]

June 5, 2014

SECURITY

RIG Exploit Kit Strikes Oil

8 min read

This post was co-authored by Levi Gundert with contributions from Emmanuel Tacheau and Joel Esler. In the last month we have observed high levels of traffic consistent with the new “RIG” exploit kit (EK), as identified by Kahu Security. This new EK reportedly began being advertised on criminal forums in April, which coincides with when […]

June 2, 2014

SECURITY

Attack Analysis with a Fast Graph

3 min read

This post is co-authored by Martin Lee, Armin Pelkmann, and Preetham Raghunanda. Cyber security analysts tend to redundantly perform the same attack queries with different input data. Unfortunately, the search for useful meta-data correlation across proprietary and open source data sets may be laborious and time consuming with relational databases as multiple tables are joined, […]