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Yearly Archives: 2013

Thursday, November 21st, 2013 | Mark Bedford | Comments Off on

Well it is hard to believe that we are well into November and what a month it has been. With the recent Adobe password debacle where 150 million email addresses, their password hashes and the hints were exposed on the internet. Then there was Kiwicon, the New Zealand hacker conference in Wellington, where “AmmonRa” took us for a ride.

With the Christmas shopping season just around the corner many will be purchasing online and there are the usual reminders. Things to watch out for are nicely organised in this SANS article by Lenny Zeltser.

While you are shopping, perhaps this Microsoft blog article from Holly Stewart will encourage you to finally ditch your old XP computer. A couple of noteworthy points in the article are that XP is six times more likely to get infected than Windows 8, and when XP service pack 2 went out of support there was a huge disparity of infections as much as 66% higher than the supported XP service pack 3. So plan now to buy your Windows 8 replacement computer before it gets infected.

 

Fake Dropbox password reset

Wednesday, October 23rd, 2013 | Mark Bedford | Comments Off on Fake Dropbox password reset

There are reports of a recent spam campaign that tries to deceive Dropbox users in to resetting their passwords but instead leads to malware. Dropbox, which is a popular cloud storage service who sometimes do in fact reset users’ passwords when they haven’t been changed for a while. They DON’T send an advisory email though, instead at their website they require a password reset before linking a new computer, phone, tablet, or API app on their web site.

The spam has quite a convincing message along the lines of

Hello <user>
We have a warning in our system that you recently tried to login in to Dropbox with a password that you haven;t changed long time already. Your old password has expired and you’ll need to create a new one to log in.

Please visit the page to update your password

Clicking on the link takes the user to a suspicious looking page hosted in the .ru (Russian domain) that tries to pass itself off as a Microsoft site with several downloads for non Microsoft browsers. All very suspicious.

So if you had followed our tips on how to detect phishing emails you would have caught on to their ruse and saved yourself some grief.

Patching Java

Monday, October 21st, 2013 | Mark Bedford | Comments Off on Patching Java

Oracle have settled on a quarterly patch period for not only their database products but also Java. I have yet to decide if this is good or bad as I really would like to see a shorter update period to reduce to time that the unpatched vulnerability exists in the wild. The release notes are here for 7u45

The schedule is
14 January 2014
15 April 2014
15 July 2014
14 October 2014

Cyber Attackers Access 72,000 Confidential Employee Details

Thursday, August 1st, 2013 | Mark Bedford | Comments Off on Cyber Attackers Access 72,000 Confidential Employee Details

The University of Delaware was on the 22nd July the recipient of a criminal attack on one of its systems. The criminals were able to steal files that contained 72,000 names, addresses and other personally identifiable information for past, present and student employees. The University is working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Mandiant to determine the scope of the attack after having taken immediate corrective action. The University has indicated that the attackers used a vulnerability in software acquired from an unnamed vendor.

Oracle releases Java updates

Wednesday, June 26th, 2013 | Mark Bedford | Comments Off on Oracle releases Java updates

Oracle Fixes 40 Vulnerabilities in Java.
On Tuesday, June 18, Oracle issued a Critical Patch Update for Java 7 for Mac and for Windows. There are 40 security issues fixed as well as enabling online certificate revocation checking by default. On the same day, Apple issued an updated version of Java 6 for OS X Snow Leopard, Lion, and Mountain Lion. Snow Leopard users cannot upgrade to Java 7.

http://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/06/critical-update-plugs-40-security-holes-in-java/
http://www.scmagazine.com//oracle-releases-java-update-to-close-37-high-risk-vulnerabilities/article/299264/
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9240173/Java_7_Update_fixes_40_security_issues_turns_on_certificate_revocation_check?taxonomyId=17
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9240171/Apple_pours_OS_X_Snow_Leopard_another_Java_fix?taxonomyId=17

Content Management System Plugin Patching

Tuesday, April 30th, 2013 | Mark Bedford | Comments Off on Content Management System Plugin Patching

Over the past several months there has been an uptick in the number of web sites running Content Management Systems that have been compromised. Systems like WordPress, Joomla or Drupal have all been targeted. Site administrators struggle to keep their CMS’s patched and almost never remember to include all the plugins that are used. In many cases the plugin vulnerabilities can do just as much evil as the core CMS vulnerabilities. Due to the breadth and quality of maintenance and support for plugins vulnerabilities and updates are often not monitored or reported.

A couple of very popular plugins announced serious vulnerabilities recently that allow them to execute arbitary PHP on the server, WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache. So take care of the plugins that you deploy and if you no longer need them then uninstall them.

A primer on phishing emails

Thursday, January 31st, 2013 | Gene Teo | Comments Off on A primer on phishing emails

I’ve put up some basic information about detecting phishing emails. The outlook is not bleak, as some would expect. Based on internal data, over 98% of recipients do not respond to phishing emails.

In a few days I’ll put up some examples of actual phishing emails, and point how the features that betray their malicious intent. There will also be an article on more technical methods of analyzing suspicious emails.