Bit9, a company that provides software and network security services to the U.S. government and at least 30 Fortune 100 firms, has suffered an electronic compromise that cuts to the core of its business: helping clients distinguish known “safe” files from computer viruses and other malicious software.
Organized cyber criminals stole almost $11 million in two highly coordinated ATM heists in the final days of 2012, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. The events prompted Visa to warn U.S. payment card issuers to be on high-alert for additional ATM cash-out fraud schemes in the New Year.
The Common Vulnerability & Exposures (CVE) index, the industry standard for cataloging software security flaws, is growing so rapidly that it will soon be adding a few more notches to its belt: The CVE said it plans to allow for up to 100 times more individual vulnerabilities to be indexed each year to accommodate an increasing number of software flaw reports.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The hackers who maintain Blackhole and Nuclear Pack – competing crimeware products that are made to be stitched into hacked sites and use browser flaws to foist malware — say they’ve added a brand new exploit that attacks a previously unknown and currently unpatched security hole in Java.
“Project Blitzkrieg,” a brazen Underweb plan for hiring 100 botmasters to fuel a blaze of ebanking heists against 30 U.S. financial institutions in the Spring of 2013, was met with skepticism from some in the security community after news of the scheme came to light in October. Many assumed it was a law enforcement sting, or merely the ramblings of a wannabe criminal mastermind. But new research suggests the crooks who hatched the plan were serious and have painstakingly built up a formidable crime machine in preparation for the project.
Hardly a week goes by without news of a cyber espionage attack emanating from China that is focused on extracting sensitive data from corporations and research centers in the United States. But analysis of a recent malware campaign suggests that cyberspies in that region may be just as interested in siphoning secrets from Russian targets.
