Botnet owners took a page out of Chef Emeril Legasse’s cookbook and ‘kicked it up a notch’ last week when they launched a massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on Internet spam fighter Spamhaus, content delivery provider CloudFlare and other Internet infrastructure providers. The Spamhaus Project provides blacklisting services to many ISPs and email servers around the world with the intent of stopping the billions of spam emails sent daily
DDoS: A Brief History, Part II
In our last blog, we discussed DDoS, detailing the chronology of the DDoS attack from an early attack used by hackers to gain notoriety and wreak havoc to a sophisticated cybercrime tool used for monetary gain. In this Part II, gathered from information provided by FortiGuard AV analyst Karine de Ponteves, we discuss the latest iteration of DDoS – specifically, how the attack is leveraged to disrupt government and corporate systems to make a political statement and mobilize users to action –…
Sandboxing Technologies, Techniques Get Another Look
Neil MacDonald, a vice president at Gartner, wrote in a blog last week the idea of sandboxing potentially malicious content and applications isn’t new, but interest in this type of approach – particularly on Windows desktops – is on the rise. A growing number of virtualization and abstraction techniques available on Windows, he wrote, create isolation to provide security separation. FortiGuard Labs describes sandboxing as a practice employed by security technology to separate running progra…
Digital Attack on Korean networks: Wipers, Time-Bombs and Roman soldiers
On March the 20th, little after 2pm, several South Korean financial institutions and TV broadcasters networks were impacted by a destructive virus, which wiped hard drives of infected computers, preventing them to boot up upon restart. Since then, the team here has been up on the deck, dissecting the attack components. So far, here is what we’ve found out, that, to our knowledge, hasn’t been published anywhere yet: * The attack made use of two different droppers, in charge of d…
One Brand of Firewall is a Best Practice
In case you haven’t seen it, there’s an interesting research note authored by Greg Young of Gartner that posits “one brand of firewall is a best practice for most enterprises.” And, in particular we have to agree. Why? Let’s go back to 1999 and see. Taking a quote from Bruce Schneier’s, A Plea for Simplicity, “the worst enemy of security is complexity.” Thirteen years later, Gartner also seems to agree; saying basically that having different firewall platforms increases configuration and m…
Twitter Hacks: How Avoid Being the Next Victim
Perhaps it had been too long since Twitter was the center of the public attention. Drama junkies were treated to a triple-whammy of cyber news this week when miscreants hacked into the Twitter accounts of Jeep, Burger King and none other than the global hacker collective Anonymous. In an ironic twist of plot, the infamous hacker group’s Twitter account was apparently overtaken by rival hacktivists, according to the BBC.
IT Complexity Bolsters Argument for Managed Security
The forward drive and accompanying expense found in the integration of existing systems and infrastructure with new technologies is placing pressure on organizations to rethink network security strategies. Increasing complexity of both IT and physical security requirements, observes Frost & Sullivan in its “Analysis of the Global Managed Security Services Market” (Feb
New Zero-Day exploit – Astaro blocks that!
Dan Goodwin recently reported that a new Internet Explorer exploit has been released into the wild .