SQL Injection Worm on the Loose

Wednesday, May 7th, 2008

A loyal ISC reader, Rob, wrote in to point us at what looks to be a SQL Injection worm that is on the loose.  From a quick google search it shows that there are about 4,000 websites infected and that this worm started at least mid-April if not earlier.  Right ...

Malicious hardware may be next hacker tool

Thursday, May 1st, 2008

As if computer viruses and worms aren't enough of a nuisance, malicious hardware, which will be much more difficult to detect, could soon become a threat too. Today, computer viruses, which are programs downloaded either as an email attachment or when someone visits a website, are responsible for most computer attacks. ...

‘Long-Term’ Phishing Attack Underway

Monday, April 28th, 2008

The notorious Rock Phish gang has added a new twist to its phishing exploits that doesn’t require its victim to visit a malicious Website -- instead, it just loads a malicious keylogging Trojan onto the victim’s machine that steals information or credentials. Both Trend Microand F-Secure over the past few days ...

A Look at a Bank Worm

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

Malware authors will often have their files display something to the user so that they actually believe the file is legitimate. Many of us have experienced such tricks, including fake errors stating that a specific file could not be found or that the application failed to load properly. Today we ...

Reverse-Engineering Exploits from Patches

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

The automatic patch-based exploit generation problem is: given a program P and a patched version of the program P', automatically generate an exploit for the potentially unknown vulnerability present in P but fixed in P'. In this paper, we propose techniques for automatic patch-based exploit generation, and show that our ...

Malware to grow tenfold in 2008

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

The number of online threats will have grown tenfold by the end of 2007, according to researchers at anti-malware firm Kaspersky. Kaspersky analysts said at Infosec Europe 2008 that new malicious programs recorded on the internet, including viruses, worms and Trojans, amounted to 2.2 million in 2007, representing a fourfold increase ...

Protect Yourself From PC Security Pitfalls

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

Our columnist shows you how to get rid of spyware, shrug off spam, and stay safe on unsecured public networks. Viruses, spyware, and worms. Oh, my! We all know the dangers inherent in accessing the Internet, and we all take precautions. Yet our PCs still occasionally get infected because we can't know ...

The Snare Of Unauthorized Requests

Monday, April 21st, 2008

Almost everyone knows what CSRF or better unauthorized requests are. I never really embraced CSRF as the correct term for unauthorized request issues, because the term is outdated and inadequate to contemporary hacking. For me, an unauthorized request is the layer or automation of a hacking procedure without direct interference ...

A Case Study on Storm Worm

Friday, April 18th, 2008

A bot is a computer program installed on a compromised machine which offers an attacker a remote control mechanism. Botnets, i.e., networks of such bots under a common control infrastructure, pose a severe threat to today’s Internet: Botnets are commonly used for Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks, sending of spam, or ...

Storm Blogs

Monday, April 7th, 2008

Storm has once again turned its eye to the blogging community, specifically the Blogspot.com community. Several blogger sites with random or very quirky names have been sporting a love theme, Storm style. These sites appear to have been created solely for Storm's purposes and no legitimate blogger site has of yet ...