TRAC

September 25, 2013

SECURITY

LexisNexis Breach Highlights Identity Theft Risks

6 min read

Who are you? Removing the obvious existential questions for a minute, your identity is often represented as a bundle of personally identifiable information (PII). In the United States PII begins at birth with a name, date of birth, and social security number (SSN). This morning’s KrebsOnSecurity post details the unauthorized access of computer systems (via malicious code) at Lexis Nexis and Dun […]

September 19, 2013

SECURITY

High Stakes Gambling with Apple Stock

1 min read

Miscreants are always trying to put new twists on age-old schemes. However, I must admit that this latest twist has me slightly puzzled. Today, Cisco TRAC encountered a piece of stock related spam touting Apple’s stock, AAPL.

September 18, 2013

SECURITY

Watering-Hole Attacks Target Energy Sector

2 min read

Beginning in early May, Cisco TRAC has observed a number of malicious redirects that appear to be part of a watering-hole style attack targeting the Energy & Oil sector. The structure consists of several compromised domains, of which some play the role of redirector and others the role of malware host. Observed watering-hole style domains […]

September 9, 2013

SECURITY

The Phishing Grounds

1 min read

On August 15, 2013, Brian Krebs featured a screen shot of a fake Outlook webmail login page used by the Syrian Electronic Army in a phishing attack against the Washington Post. If you look carefully at the location bar, you will note that the domain used in the phishing attack is ‘webmail.washpost.site88.net’.

August 27, 2013

SECURITY

Syrian Electronic Army Continues Spree: Cracks New York Times, Twitter and Huffington Post

1 min read

The Syrian Electronic Army continues to hammer away at media organizations.  This afternoon the Syrian Electronic Army appears to have compromised the registrar Melbourne IT which hosts the domains of notable media organizations like Twitter, The New York Times, and The Huffington Post.

August 23, 2013

SECURITY

Crumbling to the Cookiebomb

2 min read

Recently we have seen a spate of government websites hosting malicious Cookiebomb JavaScript. We have observed URLs with the top level domains such as ‘.gov.uk’, ‘.gov.tr’, ‘.gov.pl’ and the website of a middle eastern embassy in the US become compromised and expose visitors to malware infection. For malicious actors, highly reputable websites are a valuable […]

August 22, 2013

SECURITY

Syrian Electronic Army Cracks ShareThis.com GoDaddy Account

1 min read

ShareThis provides a mechanism for web surfers to share content online through a customizable widget.  According to the information on their website, ShareThis interacts with “more than 94% of U.S. Internet users across more than 2 million publisher sites and 120+ social media channels.” On the evening of August 21, 2013, ShareThis reported that their […]

August 15, 2013

SECURITY

The Highs and Lows of the Pump and Dump Scam

3 min read

The Internet remains an environment where it is important to keep your wits. The recent indictment of nine individuals on stock fraud charges reminds us that the pump and dump scam continues to be perpetrated [1][2]. Stock spam emails were particularly prevalent during the mid-2000’s, with these messages reportedly comprising 15% of all spam in […]

August 9, 2013

SECURITY

DEFCON 21 Wrapup

2 min read

My first DEFCON was DEFCON Three, held at the Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas.  The computer security conference scene was much, much smaller back then, but DEFCON had already become THE security conference of the year. Since that time I’ve continued to regularly attend DEFCON, and over the years I have collected some very fond memories […]