VRT

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 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 […]

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 […]

May 19, 2014

SECURITY

Angling for Silverlight Exploits

6 min read

This post is co-authored by Andrew Tsonchev, Jaeson Schultz, Alex Chiu, Seth Hanford, Craig Williams, Steven Poulson, and Joel Esler. Special thanks to co-author Brandon Stultz for the exploit reverse engineering.  Silverlight exploits are the drive-by flavor of the month. Exploit Kit (EK) owners are adding Silverlight to their update releases, and since April 23rd we have […]

May 5, 2014

SECURITY

IE Zero Day – Managed Services Protection

1 min read

As of May 1, 2014, we can confirm Cisco customers have been targets of this attack. For the latest coverage information and additional details see our new post on the VRT blog. Protecting company critical assets is a continuing challenge under normal threat conditions. The disclosure of zero-day exploits only makes the job of IT […]

January 23, 2014

SECURITY

Fiesta Exploit Pack is No Party for Drive-By Victims

5 min read

This post was also authored by Andrew Tsonchev and Steven Poulson. Update 2014-05-26: Thank you to Fox-IT for providing the Fiesta logo image. We updated the caption to accurately reflect image attribution. Cisco’s Cloud Web Security (CWS) service provides TRAC researchers with a constant fire hose of malicious insight and now that we are collaborating with Sourcefire’s Vulnerability Research […]