Category: blog
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VB2014 paper: Ubiquitous Flash, ubiquitous exploits and ubiquitous mitigation
Chun Feng and Elia Florio analyse two Flash Player vulnerabilities and an IE one where Flash provides a helping hand. Since the close of the VB2014 conference in Seattle in October, we have been sharing VB2014 conference papers as well as video recordings of the presentations. Today, we have added ‘Ubiquitous Flash, ubiquitous exploits and…
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Linux systems affected by ‘GHOST’ vulnerability
Proof-of-concept email gives remote access to Exim mail server. If you administer Linux -based systems, you’d better schedule some time for patching, as a serious buffer overflow vulnerability has been discovered in the glibc library. The vulnerability exists in the gethostbyname() and gethostbyname2() functions, which are used to resolve hostnames – hence any piece of…
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VB2014 paper: Design to discover: security analytics with 3D visualization engine
Thibault Reuille and Dhia Mahjoub use DNS data to look for clusters of malicious domains. Since the close of the VB2014 conference in Seattle in October, we have been sharing VB2014 conference papers as well as video recordings of the presentations. Today, we have added ‘Design to discover: security analytics with 3D visualization engine’ by…
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Adobe to patch Flash Player zero-day next week
Patch due next week as malvertising leads to Bedep trojan downloader. As the news of a zero-day vulnerability in Adobe ‘s Flash Player actively being exploited reached the security community, the company made an out-of-band patch available on its website. It now appears that this update – version 16.0.0.287 – patches another vulnerability ( CVE-2015-0310…
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Alleged Flash Player zero-day used in Angler exploit kit
Adobe ‘investigating reports’. Vulnerable browser plug-ins are one of the most important infection vectors, which is why it is so important to keep them up to date. If you don’t, visiting a website infected with an exploit kit (a toolkit that attempts to exploit a number of vulnerabilities at once) could result in malware being…
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Research paper profiles victims of targeted attacks
Large organisations working in national security and international affairs run highest risk. Anyone can be a target of cybercriminal attacks these days. But some are bigger targets than others. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand that rocket scientists are more likely to be subject to targeted attacks than retirees who only…
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Paper: Nesting doll: unwrapping Vawtrak
Raul Alvarez unwraps the many layers of an increasingly prevalent banking trojan. Banking trojans remain one of the most prevalent kinds of malware. Among them, trojans based on Zeus have long been the most prevalent, but in recent months a relatively new trojan has been challenging the reign of Zeus: Vawtrak. Also known as Neverquest…
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VB2014 paper: OPSEC for security researchers
Vicente Diaz teaches researchers the basics of OPSEC. Since the close of the VB2014 conference in Seattle in October, we have been sharing VB2014 conference papers as well as video recordings of the presentations. Today, we have added ‘OPSEC for security researchers’ by Kaspersky researchers Vicente Diaz and Dani Creus. As long as you perform…
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WhatsApp spam on the rise
End-to-end encryption makes spam filtering more difficult. Spam sent through the WhatsApp messaging service is on the rise, mobile security firm AdaptiveMobile reports . This news should come as little surprise: any means by which messages can be spread quickly and cheaply has always been attractive to spammers, be that email, website comments or Twitter…
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What would Cameron’s ‘anti-terrorism’ proposals mean for the UK?
Proposals could cause serious damage to business and the economy, and are unlikely to stop terrorism. This week, in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the French offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine, UK prime minister David Cameron wondered whether the UK would ‘want to allow a means of communication between people which [it] cannot…