Welcome to the Threat down for the week ending on July 15, 2012. Here is a recap of noteworthy news items from throughout the week.
Top Security News
I’m not sure how “crazy” these IT “tricks” are but this is a good collection of tips especially for those that are new to the field. For those of you in the DoD, you’ll recognize many of these tips from STIGs. There are a couple gems in this though.
There were so many articles this week on the Yahoo Voice (Associated Content) data breach, it was really hard to choose one (You’ll find another in the honorable mentions). Yahoo was subject to a basic SQL injection attack that lead to a dump of over 450,000 email addresses and passwords. In an effort to make this as easy as possible for the attackers, Yahoo graciously left passwords in clear text. Email and password combinations were posted publically. Good news is someone should be able to make a decent dictionary out of this.
Warp Trojan infects machines via the normal java/adobe exploits, but once a machine is compromised Warp shows why it is unique. Warp will send ARP requests to the local networking devices in an attempt to falsely display itself as a router. Once a networking device is fooled, subnet traffic is routed through the infected machine for man in the middle fun.
Not much to say on this one except be prepared. These 88 patches will most likely not address the zero day for 11g that we spoke to previously.
As if the Yahoo breach wasn’t enough, last week we also received news of passwords being dumped from NVIDIAs forums. At least they didn’t store the passwords in clear text.
Botnet infections in the enterprise have experts advocating less automation
This article brings up a subject that is near and dear to my heart. Many organizations believe they can throw money at the Cyber problem to make it go away. While funding is helpful, organizations need to learn that spending all their money on expensive silver bullet appliances is not nearly as valuable as hiring experienced security personnel.
Honorable Mentions
Multi-platform Backdoor with Intel OS X Binary
Phishers use less strident subject lines to deliver new cunning attacks
Google Releases Google Chrome 20.0.1132.57
Yahoo security breach shocks experts
The worst security snafus of 2012 - so far
Cyber Armament
Sunday, July 15, 2012 at 11:24PM
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