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IT Security Highlights March 11 2010
By Kelli Tarala | March 11, 2010
It’s official: Adobe Reader is world’s most-exploited application
Adobe’s ubiquitous Reader application has replaced Microsoft Word as the program that’s most often targeted in malware campaigns, according to figures compiled by F-Secure. Files based on Reader were exploited in almost 49 percent of the targeted attacks of 2009, compared with about 39 percent that took aim at Microsoft Word. Underscoring the surge of Reader attacks, online miscreants recently unleashed a new malware campaign that exploits vulnerabilities patched three weeks ago in the widely-used program. The attacks target financial institutions with a PDF file with a name that refers to the so-called Group of 20 most influential economic powers. When victims click on the file with unpatched versions of Reader, the file installs a backdoor that causes their system to connect to a server at tiantian.ninth.biz.
Full Story:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/09/adobe_reader_attacks/
Human exploit attacks surpass the software flaw approach
As millions of users flocked to Twitter, criminals followed. Twitter experienced a number of attacks involving phishing, spam, worms, DDoS, compromised DNS records and site defacement. Barracuda Labs released its annual report for 2009, and the shift towards human exploits was obvious - 69 percent of attacks were perpetrated using social engineering (FakeAV and phishing) and search result poisoning, compared to 39 percent carried out using software exploits.
Full Story:
http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=8997
Twitter to begin screening some links for phishing
Twitter launched a new link-screening service on March 8 aimed at preventing phishing and other malicious attacks against users of the popular microblogging service. Part of the new service is a new Twitter tool to shorten URLs, so users will see some links in e-mail notifications and direct messages from other users written as twt.tl.
Full Story:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9168378/
Phishing update: ‘No brand is safe’
Online fraud schemes and malware are casting an even wider net, far beyond the large national banks and well-known retailers, as phishers seek new victims. This is the word from the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG), No brand, no matter how small or obscure, is safe from online fraud says the APWG’s secretary general. “Once, only the largest banks were targeted,” he says. “Now every kind of enterprise from banks and credit unions of all sizes to charities to, in a recent case, a hardware manufacturer, are seeing their brands exploited in all manner of fraud schemes.”
Full Story:
http://www.bankinfosecurity.com/articles.php?art_id=2277
Half of network solutions only stop one in four network attacks.
Almost one in five participants at the RSA conference last week believe that their companies’ security policies are being effectively enforced, according to figures released by data center fabric company Brocade. That said, at least half of them seem to be unhappy with their companies’ security technology solutions. Brocade, which interviewed 144 RSA Conference attendees from a wide variety of different sectors, found that 18 percent of respondents believed company security policies were being totally enforced. Forty-eight percent of them said that their network security stopped one in four or fewer network attacks against their organizations.
New Internet Explorer code-execution attacks go wild
miscreants are exploiting a security bug in earlier versions of Internet Explorer that allows them to remotely execute malicious code, Microsoft warned on March 9. The vulnerability in IE versions 6 and 7 allows remote attackers to gain the same access to the affected PC as the local user. The bug, which stems from an invalid pointer reference, either doesn’t exist in IE 8 or can’t be exploited in that version, providing users with yet another strong reason to upgrade to Microsoft’s latest browser.
Full Story:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/09/internet_explorer_attacks/
Read the Full DHS Infrastructure Report:
www.enclavesecurity.com/blogresources/cdr_031110.pdf
Topics: DHS Infrastructure Reports |
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