Earlier this week I wrote about the Styx Pack, an extremely sophisticated and increasingly popular crimeware kit that is being sold to help miscreants booby-trap compromised Web sites with malware. Today, I’ll be following a trail of breadcrumbs that leads back to central Ukraine and to a trio of friends who appear to be responsible for marketing (if not also making) this crimeware-as-a-service.
Patch Tuesday is upon us once again. Adobe today pushed out security fixes for its Flash and Shockwave media players. Separately, Microsoft released seven patch bundles addressing at least 34 vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows and other software.
Not long ago, miscreants who wanted to buy an exploit kit — automated software that helps booby-trap hacked sites to deploy malicious code — had to be fairly well-connected, or at least have access to semi-private underground forums. These days, some exploit kit makers are brazenly advertising and offering their services out in the open, marketing their wares as browser vulnerability “stress-test platforms.”
The source code for “Carberp” — a botnet creation kit coded by a team of at least two dozen hackers who used it to relieve banks of an estimated $250 million — has been posted online for anyone to download. The code leak offers security experts a fascinating and somewhat rare glimpse into the malcoding economy, but many also worry that its publication will spawn new hybrid strains of sophisticated banking malware.
If you use Gmail and have ever wondered how much your account might be worth to cyber thieves, have a look at Cloudsweeper, a new service launching this week that tries to price the value of your Gmail address based on the number of retail accounts you have tied to it and the current resale value of those accounts in the underground.
If your strategy for remaining safe and secure online is mainly to avoid visiting dodgy Web sites, it’s time to consider a new approach. Data released today by Google serves as a welcome reminder that drive-by malware attacks are far more likely to come from hacked, legitimate Web sites than from sites set up by attackers to intentionally host and distribute malicious software.
Microsoft said today it will pay up to $100,000 to security researchers who find and report novel methods for bypassing the security built into the latest version of the company’s flagship operating system. Researchers who go the extra mile and can also demonstrate a way to block the new attack method they’ve reported can earn an extra $50,000.
Oracle today released a critical patch update for its Java software that fixes at least 40 security vulnerabilities in this widely deployed program and browser plugin. Updates are available for Java 7 on both Mac and Windows.
Several years ago, Microsoft released the Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET), a free tool that can help Windows users beef up the security of third-party applications. This week, Microsoft debuted EMET 4.0, which includes some important new security protections and compatibility fixes for this unobtrusive but effective security tool.
The case of a Kentucky man arrested this month for using mobile banking to steal thousands of dollars from a local supermarket chain highlights the security loopholes that thieves can exploit in mobile check deposit schemes being deployed by financial institutions across the country.
