Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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VB2019 paper: DNS on fire
The “phonebook of the Internet” has well outlived physical phonebooks, but that doesn’t mean DNS is without its issues. There is a joke among incident responders that, even when you’re sure the problem isn’t DNS, it still ends up being DNS. Aside from configuration issues, DNS is also a very valuable target for adversaries. In…
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German Dridex spam campaign is unfashionably large
This research was performed by Martijn Grooten, Peter Karsai and Ionuț Răileanu. On this blog we have regularly reported on the tendency among malicious spam campaigns to be smaller in scale and more targeted, thus improving their chances of evading spam filters ─ indeed, we described exactly this strategy two days ago when writing about Emotet…
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Emotet continues to bypass many email security products
Emails with a malicious link or attachment form only a small minority of the spam that is sent every day. If it appears that such emails are more common than that, it is not just because such emails are potentially more damaging: we have repeatedly seen that they are far more likely to bypass email…
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VB2019 paper: We need to talk – opening a discussion about ethics in infosec
If infosec was ever a subject with little practical impact, it certainly isn’t today: infosec headlines feature in the mainstream media almost every day. This means that those working in the field are faced with ethical dilemmas that are impossible to avoid ─ even if you still want to consider it a mostly technical field.…
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Stalkerware poses particular challenges to anti-virus products
Did you know that October has been Cyber Security Awareness Month? Of course you did ─ it has been pretty hard to avoid it. But did you know that it has also, at least in the United States, been Domestic Violence Awareness Month? These two are more closely linked than they may at first seem:…
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VB2019 paper: Inside Magecart: the history behind the covert card-skimming assault on the e-commerce industry
Magecart is an umbrella-term for various groups that engage in placing JavaScript code on e-commerce sites to steal credit card info. Magecart attacks go back almost a decade but it became an infosec household name following some prominent breaches in 2018. Magecart is getting a lot of attention from security researchers, and RiskIQ ‘s Yonathan…
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VB2019 videos: partner presentations
With the final day of VB2019 three weeks behind us, we want to thank once again the 21 partners and sponsors of the conference for their support. In supporting the conference, the companies and organisations demonstrated how much they care about the sharing of research on current threats. We especially want to thank Platinum partners…
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VB tests the web security products that play an important role in fending off web-based threats
The web continues to be a major infection vector for individuals and organisations alike. Though the number of drive-by download attacks (often through exploit kits) is down from its peak half a decade ago, they have seen a bit of resurgence recently, with more than half a dozen exploit kits currently active ─ and tracked…
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VB2019 papers: Emotet and Ryuk
Targeted ransomware has become one of the biggest and most damaging cybercrime trends in recent years. ‘Targeted’ is a bit of a misnomer though: the operators of the ransomware rarely choose the victim organisations. Instead, they have the organisations ‘chosen’ through an infection with another piece of malware that is then used as a foothold…
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Responsible madness?
The debate on responsible disclosure is about as old as IT security itself. In a guest post for Virus Bulletin Robert Neumann suggests we need to reconsider a one-size-fits-all solution and instead look for a well-respected independent organization to handle security issues. (All views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not…
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