TRAC

June 5, 2013

SECURITY

Plesk 0-Day Targets Web Servers

2 min read

Update 6/6/2013: We’re seeing reports of exploitation of this vulnerability. We can confirm Global Correlation – Network Participation telemetry is seeing multiple exploitation attempts across many customers. Customers who participate in Global Correlation – Inspection have a higher chance of this signature blocking in the default configuration since the sensor will take the reputation of an attacker into account […]

May 29, 2013

SECURITY

Botnets Riding Rails to your Data Center

3 min read

Cisco Security Intelligence Operations is tracking reports of ongoing exploitation of a vulnerability in the popular web application framework Ruby on Rails that creates a Linux-based botnet. The vulnerability dates back to January 2013 and affects Ruby on Rails versions prior to 3.2.11, 3.1.10, 3.0.19, and 2.3.15.  Cisco Security Intelligence Operations’ has previously published an […]

May 28, 2013

SECURITY

Massive Canadian Pharmacy Spam Campaign

1 min read

On Tuesday May 28, 2013 at 17:30 UTC a massive pharmaceutical-based spam campaign began, using the Subject: header “Only 24 Hours Left to Shop!”. Cisco witnessed volume rates peaking as high as 8 out of every 10 spam messages being sent. The indiscriminate nature of the attack’s recipients suggests that most anti-spam vendors, including Cisco, will have blocked […]

Cisco Sizzle – April Edition

1 min read

Welcome to the Cisco Sizzle! Each month, we’re rounding up the best of the best from across our social media channels for your reading pleasure. From the most read blog posts to the top engaging content on Facebook or LinkedIn, catch up on things you might have missed, or on the articles you just want […]

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 6, 2013

SECURITY

Security Logging in an Enterprise, Part 2 of 2

5 min read

We first logged IDS, some syslog from some UNIX hosts, and firewall logs (circa 1999). We went from there to dropping firewall logging as it introduced some overhead and we didn’t have any really good uses for it. (We still don’t.) Where did we go next?

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 3, 2013

SECURITY

Security Logging in an Enterprise, Part 1 of 2

3 min read

Logging is probably both one of the most useful and least used of all security forensic capabilities. In large enterprises many security teams rely on their IT counterparts to do the logging and then turn to the IT logging infra when they need log information. That in itself isn’t bad; however, the needs/requirements for IT may not be a 100% fit for a CIRT. Read on to find out how we handled it.