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By Nancy Rand, Posted in Security

October 20, Securityweek – (International) Vulnerabilities found in HP ArcSight products. HP began releasing security updates addressing vulnerabilities in HP’s ArcSight products, including an authentication bypass flaw in the ArcSight Logger interface in which a remote authenticated user without permissions could conduct searches through the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) interface, improper restriction of excessive authentication attempts which could allow brute force attacks on the SOAP interface,... read more.

• October 21, 2015

By Nancy Rand, Posted in Security

October 19, Securityweek – (International) Adobe patches Flash zero-day exploited by Pawn Storm. Adobe released Flash Player updates addressing a zero-day type confusion vulnerability discovered by security researchers from Trend Micro, which the Pawn Storm threat group was exploiting in attacks targeting Foreign Affairs Ministries worldwide via spear-phishing emails leading to a variant of the Sednit malware. Source October 16, CNN – (National) ISIS is attacking the U.S. energy grid (and failing). U.S.... read more.

• October 20, 2015

By Nancy Rand, Posted in Security

October 16, Securityweek – (International) Critical flaw patched in Akismet plugin for WordPress. Automattic released an update for the Akismet WordPress plugin versions 3.1.4 and earlier after security researchers from Sucuri discovered a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in the plugin that could allow an unauthenticated attacker to insert malicious code into the WordPress administration panel’s comments area by using emoticons. Source October 16, Securityweek – (International) Nuclear EK generat... read more.

• October 19, 2015

By Nancy Rand, Posted in Security

October 15, Help Net Security – (International) Attackers can use Siri, Google Now to secretly take over smartphones. Security researchers from the French Network and Information Security Agency discovered that attackers could use a laptop running GNU Radio, an amplifier, a universal software radio peripheral (USRP) software-defined radio, and antenna to take over smartphones with headphones plugged in via the Google Now and Siri personal assistants. The attack utilizes the device’s headphone cord as an ant... read more.

• October 16, 2015

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Uncategorized

One of the things I like really like about my job is that I spend a lot of time out of my office, visiting clients. Conference calls and web meetings are fine, but nothing communicates like a face-to-face interaction. When you go to someone’s office you simply understand the situation better. One of the telling things I often run into in this physical inspection is something I call Cap-X bloat. Many organizations are fine when it comes to buying things, but they often don’t have the time to implement the... read more.

• October 15, 2015

By Nancy Rand, Posted in Security

October 14, Securityweek – (International) Authorities seize servers to disrupt Dridex botnet. U.S. and European authorities worked with private cybersecurity organizations to disrupt the activities of the Dridex information-stealing botnet by poisoning the peer-to-peer (P2P) network of each sub-botnet, redirecting infected systems’ communications from the botnet to a sinkhole. The botnet resulted in estimated losses of $10 million in the U.S., and authorities are seeking to extradite one of its administrat... read more.

• October 15, 2015

By Nancy Rand, Posted in Security

October 13, Securityweek – (International) Cisco IOS rootkits can be created with limited resources: Researchers. Security researchers from Grid32 released research revealing that cybercriminals could easily create a basic Cisco IOS rootkit within a month or less which could rival the effectiveness of the SYNful Knock malware designed to replace router firmware. Cisco has implemented several new security technologies in current devices to help mitigate threats. Source October 12, Securityweek – (Internat... read more.

• October 14, 2015

By Nancy Rand, Posted in Security

October 9, Help Net Security – (International) Attackers compromise Cisco Web VPNs to steal login credentials, backdoor target networks. Security researchers from Volexity discovered that attackers are continuing to leverage unpatched vulnerabilities or finding ways to gain administrator access to networks via Cisco Clientless secure sockets layer (SSL) virtual private network (VPN) portals in order to harvest employee credentials by injecting malicious JavaScript code on login pages to the VPN. The attacke... read more.

• October 13, 2015

By Nancy Rand, Posted in Security

October 8, Securityweek – (International) New collision attack lowers cost of breaking SHA1. A team of experts from Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica in Europe, Inria in France, and Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University discovered that hackers could execute a “freestart collision” attack to break the full secure hash algorithm 1 (SHA1) cryptographic hash function within 10 days for a cost of $75,000 - $120,000 using graphics cards and computing power from Amazon’s EC2 cloud. Previous research estima... read more.

• October 09, 2015

By Nancy Rand, Posted in Security

October 7, Securityweek – (International) Malicious Android adware infects devices in 20 countries. Security researchers from FireEye were monitoring a new malicious adware campaign dubbed Kemoge that has affected Android devices in 20 countries, in which the malware serves ads to an infected device, extracts exploits to root phones, and employs multiple persistence mechanisms. The malware is packaged with popular Android apps uploaded to third-party stores. Source October 7, Softpedia – (International)... read more.

• October 08, 2015