Critical Java Update Fixes 50 Security Holes
Oracle Corp. has issued an update for its Java SE software that plugs at least 50 security holes in the software, including one the company said was actively being exploited in the wild.
Author Archives: BrianKrebs
Source: Washington Post Also Broadly Infiltrated By Chinese Hackers in 2012
The Washington Post was among several major U.S. newspapers that spent much of 2012 trying to untangle its newsroom computer networks from a Web of malicious software thought to have been planted by Chinese cyberspies, according to a former information technology employee at the paper.
Pro-Grade Point-of-Sale Skimmer
Every so often, the sophistication of the technology being built into credit card skimmers amazes even the experts who are accustomed to studying such crimeware. This post focuses on one such example — images from one of several compromised point-of-sale devices that used Bluetooth technology to send the stolen data to the fraudsters wirelessly.
Big Bank Mules Target Small Bank Businesses
A $170,000 cyberheist last month against an Illinois nursing home provider starkly illustrates how large financial institutions are being leveraged to target security weaknesses at small to regional banks and credit unions.
Inside the Gozi Bulletproof Hosting Facility
Nate Anderson at Ars Technica has a good story about how investigators tracked down “Virus,” the nickname allegedly used by a Romanian man accused by the U.S. Justice Department of running the Web hosting operations for a group that created and marketed the Gozi banking Trojan. Turns out, I’ve been sitting on some fascinating details about this hosting provider for many months without fully realizing what I had.
Backdoors Found in Barracuda Networks Gear
A broad variety of the latest firewall, spam filter and VPN appliances sold by Campbell, Calif. based Barracuda Networks Inc. contain undocumented backdoor accounts, the company disclosed today. Worse still, while the backdoor accounts are apparently set up so that they would only be accessible from Internet addresses assigned to Barracuda, they are in fact accessible to potentially hundreds of other companies and network owners.
Three Charged in Connection with ‘Gozi’ Trojan
Federal prosecutors are expected to announce today criminal charges against three men alleged to be responsible for creating and distributing the Gozi Trojan, an extremely sophisticated strain of malicious software that was sold to cyber crooks and was tailor-made to attack specific financial institutions targeted by each buyer.
Polish Takedown Targets ‘Virut’ Botnet
Security experts in Poland on Thursday quietly seized domains used to control the “Virut” botnet, a huge army of hacked PCs that is custom-built to be rented out to cybercriminals.
New Java Exploit Fetches $5,000 Per Buyer
Less than 24 hours after Oracle patched a dangerous security hole in its Java software that was being used to seize control over Windows PCs, miscreants in the Underweb were already selling an exploit for a different and apparently still-unpatched zero-day vulnerability in Java, KrebsOnSecurity has learned.
Spam Volumes: Past & Present, Global & Local
Last week, National Public Radio aired a story on my Pharma Wars series, which chronicles an epic battle between men who ran two competing cybercrime empires that used spam to pimp online pharmacy sites. As I was working with the NPR reporter on the story, I was struck by how much spam has decreased over the past couple of years. Below is a graphic that’s based on spam data collected by Symantec’s MessageLabs. It shows that global spam volumes fell and spiked fairly regularly, from highs of 6 trillion messages sent per month to just below 1 trillion. I produced this graph based on Symantec’s raw spam data.
