STE WILLIAMS

A group of hackers identifying themselves as Johor Hacking Crew have defaced 30+ sites hosted by Melbourne company ServersInSeconds.com.au.

There appears to be no motive for the attack other than the fact the hackers spotted a vulnerability and decided to exploit it to dish out a lesson in security. That lesson was delivered as a scrolling defacement and a Pastebin dump listing the afflicted sites.

The finger for the defacements was first pointed at Canberra company UberGlobal, as the servers reside on IP addresses an servers the company curates. UberGlobal officials told The Register The actual user, however, is ServersInseconds.com.au, which resells UberGlobal services but loads its own operating systems onto its servers. That OS is Red Hat Linux,.

Hackers defaced 30+ sites with the text above

ServersInSeconds.com.au owner Matt Goodwin said backups of the defaced sites are ready and that his team is working to restore normal service. Asked if he had any words for the Johor Hacking Crew, he drew a sharp breath, mastered himself and said he felt happier saying nothing, lest he again make the company a target. ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/26/johor_hacking_crew_strikes/

In punishment for running a story about Dutch ultra-nationalist Geert Wilders, Australia’s national broadcaster, the ABC, has been attacked, and forum and moderator credentials published.

The information has been posted to the Anonymous-branded “Pastebin lookalike” Anonpaste.me, and is reported here at Cyberwars.

The attacker used the Twitter handle @Phr0zenM to announce the attack, stating that the attack was carried out “for giving a platform for Geert Wilders to spread hatred”. The attack was apparently in response to this Lateline interview between presenter Tony Jones and Wilders.

The Register notes that during the interview, Jones frequently challenged Wilders on factual details, and on his understanding of Australia’s Muslim population.

As a result of the attack, nearly 50,000 users – most of whom have nothing to do with the ABC except as part of its audience – have had personal details published, including their names, posting nicknames, e-mail addresses, and (where this has been captured) location in the form of geographic coordinates.

The Register has sought comment from ABC Corporate Affairs, but at the time of writing has not received a return call. ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/26/abc_forums_cracked/

RSA 2013 Art Coviello, executive president of RSA, used the opening keynote of the RSA conference to criticize the habits of some in the industry for spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) as a marketing tool.

“I absolutely hate the term ‘Cyber Pearl Harbor’,” he said. “I just think it’s a poor metaphor to describe the state we are really in. What do I do differently once I’ve heard it? And I’ve been hearing it for 10 years now. To trigger a physically destructive event solely from the internet might not be impossible, but it is still, as of today, highly unlikely.”

Far more concerning is the economic impact of hacking, and the cost in terms of reputation that victims could face. Coviello cited the recent wave of attacks against US banks as an example of this and warned that similar attacks were coming, one way or the other. But the amount of FUD out there was causing people to back away from sorting out security, he said.

Nevertheless, Coviello wasn’t above spreading a few FUD-like warnings himself. Last year saw the concept of Big Data really make it into the mainstream, he said, but added that the move to storing such massive data sets was inherently risky, particularly as they are taken into the cloud.

By coincidence, RSA has just brought out its own Big Data security systems. Last month it announced a Security Analytics appliance that trawls though large data sets, and today it unveiled version 8 of its Authentication Manager, which is also configured for Big Data and uses a transactional risk engine based on feedback from 50 billion data points.

In the second keynote of the day, Scott Charney, VP of Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing Group, also struck an optimistic note, saying that while threats were out there, it was remarkable how far the industry had come towards its goal of fighting back against the online criminals.

“I’m an optimist,” he said. “You can be an optimist because you’re delusional or you can be an optimist for a reason. There is a case for optimism.”

But as the first day of the RSA wears on, it’s clear that no one got Coviello’s message about scaling back on the FUD factor. In one panel, Michael Chertoff, formerly President Bush’s Secretary of Homeland Security and now perv-scanner pimp lobbyist, warned that we might be facing a cyber 9/11. As the French say, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” (“the more things change, the more they stay the same”). ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/26/rsa_cyber_pearl_harbour/

RSA 2013 HP has kicked off the round of reports that accompany each RSA conference with its analysis of security vulnerabilities, and has revealed that although the overall trend is positive, the growing market for zero-day flaws is reducing the number of the most serious problems that are disclosed.

The long-term trend looks pretty good, but…

The number of software vulnerabilities has continued its overall downward trend from its 2006 peak, but while the numbers of the most critical threats hasn’t fallen much, HP researchers have seen a reduction in the number of serious vulnerabilities that are actually reported. HP attributes that slippage to the growing market for vulnerability data.

“We think a lot of these vulnerabilities are being sold in the black market or the grey one,” Mark Painter, marketing manager for Fortify HP enterprise security, told The Register.

“The growth of the grey market and the worth of vulnerabilities in dollars must have a reducing effect on the number of public disclosures that we see,” Painter told us. “Those dollars are there, and anything that goes down [the grey channel] doesn’t become public.”

Four of the six most common vulnerabilities are aimed primarily or solely at web applications: SQL injection, cross-site scripting, cross-site request forgery, and remote file inclusion. Together these account for 4 per cent of the total.

On the mobile front, the HP team tested a very small sample of 70 apps and found a host of problems. Over 37 per cent of applications had passwords that could be beaten using basic methods (such as Apple’s latest passcode-bypass woes), and 77 per cent had information-leakage flaws.

There was a relatively low rate for XSS vulnerabilities in mobile, with an unlucky 13 per cent of mobile apps at risk, but the data showed a worrying preponderance of financial and database management apps in the sample.

Elsewhere, HP reported a huge increase in the number of SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) vulnerabilities detected, the numbers of which have risen 68 per cent over the last five years. This likely reflects that people are more actively looking for such things post-Stuxnet, rather than any inherent instability in SCADA code. ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/26/grey_market_cuts_vulnerability_reporting/

The Japanese government will respond to the increasing threats from targeted cyber attacks by building a centralised advanced persistent threat (APT) database designed to aggregate threat intelligence so it can be shared with domestic security organisations and foreign governments.

The ¥800m project is being built in co-operation with foreign and domestic companies and government agencies and co-ordinated by the information security office of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, according to Japanese business news site SankeiBiz.

Targeted attacks on government bodies and private industry in Japan have spiked as per most other countries in the past year or two, most notably defence companies including Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Kawasaki Heavy Industries, and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).

Given most attacks come from servers outside of Japan, the database will apparently include information from the US as well as Asian countries, organised by type of malware, geographical location of attack servers, and so on.

The database will compile threat information in co-operation with victim organisations inside Japan, and also by using a “fake server” designed to impersonate specific targets and attract APT-style attacks, the report said.

The idea is that organisations and government officials will be able to use the information aggregated in the database to help build more effective cyber defence strategies, and intelligence will also be shared with the US.

Japan might be slightly late to the game with its response to targeted cyber attacks but with growing threat from outside its borders – especially nearby China, which was implicated in the Mitsubishi attack – is doing its best to make up for lost time.

That said, its FBI-style National Police Agency has been universally panned for its lack of cyber-savvy after being led a merry dance by a cat-loving hacker recently.

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/26/japan_apt_database_us/

RSA 2013 Signature-based malware identification has been around since the dawn of the computer security industry, but McAfee has said it’s dumping the system – or rather, adapting it – in an upgraded security suite which will (it claims) virtually eliminate susceptibility to botnets.

McAfee’s malware signature database has grown to over 113 million core samples in the last year. But rather than using just that data to spot malware, McAfee has now integrated behavioral heuristics into its security code so that it can spot unknown samples based on their operating characteristics. The end result could crush botnets as a threat, said the company’s GM of network security, Pat Calhoun.

“We’re getting rid of malware signatures, all our systems now work on behavior and reputation,” he said. “Customers no longer have to worry about botnets; we will take care of that for them. We can catch things that no one else can in the industry.”

Calhoun told The Register that when Intel took over McAfee in 2010, Chipzilla put extra funding into countering the threat from botnets. As a result, it now has the ability to search specifically for command-and-control server code, as well as the malware that brings new computers into the botnet fold.

In all, McAfee says it has made 38 new improvements to its security suite, and integrated its various modules much more tightly with each other. Integration of security products into a single unified suite has been the goal of the large security vendors for years, but this time McAfee thinks it has cracked it.

“You can’t take a set of tools, codify a few marketing relationships, and expect it to work,” explained McAfee CTO Mike Fay. “We have 150 such relationships and you need to merge them into a system. We’ve done this and over the next three years you’re going to see more innovation as a result than in the last 10 of McAfee’s history.”

Mac and PC users on Chipzilla’s hardware will get an advantage, of course, since McAfee’s Deep Defender relies on Intel’s kit for much of its efficacy. Fay said it would look at market demand and some technology rejiggering before it would integrate with AMD chips.

As for rootkits – a particular Intel bugbear – McAfee touted a recent test by AVLabs that it sponsored that highlighted the effectiveness of part of its suite at cutting this attack vector short (although it did not specify testing criteria). The tests give McAfee a 100 per cent rating at killing rootkits, compared to 83 per cent for Microsoft and 67 per cent for Symantec.

McAfee also announced it has bought in sandboxing technology from ValidEdge, which runs malware samples in a virtual machine to test their effects on Windows and other systems without letting it loose on the operating system. The first products using the technology will be out in the second half of this year. ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/26/mcafee_security_revamp/

RSA 2013 President Obama’s executive order on cybersecurity means security officers at critical infrastructure companies will get greater clearances from the government to access its information, says a Department of Homeland Security honcho.

The “unprecedented” executive order, which Obama revealed during his State of the Union address, will mean the government will give the private sector much more information about the threat landscape, DHS deputy undersecretary for cybersecurity Mark Weatherford said in a speech at the Cloud Security Summit in San Francisco on Monday.

The DHS is going to give more people at critical infrastructure companies security clearances so they can access greater amounts of government information about the “hundreds of thousands” of threats that the government profiles, he said.

This will let the government brief them on some of the “sensitive” threats it sees “that we can’t sanitize and issue more broadly,” Weatherford said.

It will give these companies information on attack signatures, he said, as well as the inside scoop on some effective countermeasures that the government has developed.

Along with this, the exec order means the DHS will work on its own internal bureaucratic processes to make sure it can tell the private sector about more of the threats about which it is informed, rather than letting them all disappear into a classified bucket that never gets shared with anyone.

“When I was in the private sector, that was the one thing I wanted more than anything else – if you have threat information that affects me, I need to know it,” Weatherford said.

Besides sharing more information, Weatherford revealed that the DHS will work closely with the National Institute for Science and Technology (NIST) to co-develop standards with the private industry to help companies stay secure.

“We are going to establish this framework that is voluntary, that will provide a baseline so people can aim for something they don’t have now,” he said.

Words like “voluntary” when combined with security fill The Register with concern. Although the executive order sounds very impressive, the onus will be on companies to follow best security practice to get all of this to work – something that even top tech companies seem to find quite difficult. ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/25/obama_cybersecurity_order_dhs_details/

RSA 2013 People have a tendency to skirt corporate IT policy and use their own applications on the network, and Skyhigh Networks thinks it has a way for IT admins to stop this from happening.

The company came out of stealth on Monday to announce the general availability of its Skyhigh Networks software, which can monitor any of 2,000 cloud-based applications and give admins a way to shut off unauthorized use of insecure, disapproved of, or other such banned apps.

“Cloud service use is exploding and it’s viral,” Rajiv Gupta, chief executive officer of Skyhigh Networks, told The Register. “Today there’s a myth that adoption of cloud services is impeded due to lack of security and privacy.”

Whether companies like it or not, cloud adoption happens; employees use consumer services such as Spotify, cloud storage from Dropbox, and even small Amazon Web Services instances for development, Gupta said.

Skyhigh Networks lets companies get a clear view of what employees in their organisation are doing – an approach that employees are sure to find invasive and chief security officers are likely to find beguiling.

“Even if customers expect their employees are using cloud services, they expect between 10 and 20. What we are showing them is their employees are using [more]. It’s an ‘oh crap’ moment. What you want to know is, are these services risky services or not?” Gupta said.

To that end, Skyhigh has profiled some 2,000 cloud applications and ranks the security of the apps via around thirty different factors, ranging from whether they are multi-tenanted to how data is stored. Its approach has some enterprises convinced, with big businesses like Cisco, General Electric, and Equinix all using the software.

But won’t organizations that adopt this all-seeing cloud tech go for a scorched earth policy and ban the majority of employee-used applications, The Register asked?

“It depends,” Gupta said. “Some organizations that are more heavy handed, their approach would be ‘I’m gonna shut them down’, [but] what we’re finding is the CIO, the CSO, are becoming more forward-thinking.”

By example, if a CIO finds through the Skyhigh Networks discovery process that more than 5 per cent of their employees in their business are using a particular app, then this could encourage them to get a contractual relationship with that company, Gupta said.

But the more likely scenario that strikes El Reg is the CIO finding out that employees are using a risky app – for example, Dropbox instead of Box.net – and shutting access down.

The technology is available both from the cloud, and as an on-premise software agent. It accesses the log files of an organizations’ firewalls, proxy servers, and other devices, then spits out a report on the apps it has found.

One company that tested the technology found that 46 cloud storage services being used within its organization, Gupta said. Once they discovered this, they tried to weed out some of the high-risk services so that they could easily track what was and wasn’t being used.

At the time of writing, Skyhigh Networks had not responded to technical queries from The Register. The technology costs between $2 and $10 per employee per month, depending on the size of the organization. ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/25/skyhigh_snoop_tech_helps_find_cloud_apps/

Microsoft and Yahoo! are way behind Google in fighting account hijacking, according to security experts.

Earlier this week Google said that “complex risk analysis” featuring “more than 120 variables” had reduced the number of compromised accounts on its system by 99.7 per cent, since the problem peaked in 2011. The claim is credible, according to Virus Bulletin anti-spam test director Martijn Grooten. But it looks like its rival providers are still battling to keep the account hijackers away – to the extent that the accounts of the two webmail providers are now a great deal more likely to be hijacked.

“Our own measurements show that Google may have a point when it says it is doing something right – and that Yahoo!, and to a lesser extent Hotmail (now Outlook.com), has a real problem,” Grooten explains in a blog post.

The VBSpam spam filter tests involve the collection of various streams of legitimate emails (since a spam filter that blocks most spam, but which blocks a lot of legitimate email as well, is of little practical use).

However, the legitimate feeds we use do occasionally feature spam email – usually from compromised accounts and typically sent to addresses contained in the compromised accounts’ address books. We have noticed a few emails from compromised Gmail accounts among these spam emails, but noticed that Yahoo! emails are far more prevalent.

Over the last eight months of testing Virus Bulletin found that, in the legitimate email feeds, about one in 115 emails from the Yahoo! were spam, compared with fewer than one in 4,800 from Gmail. Hotmail, Microsoft’s free webmail service (now Outlook.com), features one in 325 spam emails in legitimate feeds.

In the majority of cases, the spamming is coming from compromised legitimate accounts. So Virus Bulletin’s stats suggest that Yahoo! and MS need to do more to clamp down on account hijacking, perhaps by adopting some of the approaches used successfully by Google.

This is a problem not least because spam sent from compromised accounts “is notoriously hard to block, especially when the emails are sent to people in the accounts’ address books and include links to pages on compromised websites (that typically redirect to the payload on domains controlled by the spammers),” according to Grooten.

He adds: “A significant portion of the links in these emails attempt to install malware (typically via exploit kits such as Blackhole), they are more than a mere nuisance. By reducing the number of compromised accounts, webmail providers thus not only reduce abuse of their own systems, they also help make the internet a safer place,” he concluded.

Users can also help themselves by using secure passwords and trying to make sure their systems don’t get infected by malware but a big slice of the responsibility falls on webmail providers.

Google is doing something right – and Virus Bulletin figures tend to confirm that. “Blocking this kind of stuff is tricky, I do wonder if they can improve much more,” Grooten said.

Grooten added the caveat that the prices for hacked Gmail accounts on underground market don’t appear to have experienced significant price increase and this is odd in the context of supply dropping by a factor of 300.

What is clear is that Yahoo! and Microsoft aren’t doing as well as Google in combating the hijacking problem. Some of this might be explained by different demographics and hidden bias in Virus Bulletin stats, but not the wide difference in hijack-related spam incidents between Gmail and its two main webmail rivals.

“Gmail users have a reputation of being more tech-savvy than those using other webmail services, but this alone can’t explain the huge difference we see. Yahoo!, and to a slightly lesser extent Microsoft, would thus do well to take a leaf out of Google’s book,” Grooten said. ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/25/webmail_account_hijacking/

Microsoft appears to be the latest big tech firm to have been hit by cyber attackers targeting Macs with a zero-day Java vulnerability, following a sophisticated campaign which has already infected developers at Facebook and Apple.

In a blog post published late last Friday, Microsoft’s GM of Trustworthy Computing Security, Matt Thomlinson, explained that Redmond recently experienced a “similar security intrusion”.

He added the following:

“Consistent with our security response practices, we chose not to make a statement during the initial information gathering process. During our investigation, we found a small number of computers, including some in our Mac business unit, that were infected by malicious software using techniques similar to those documented by other organizations. We have no evidence of customer data being affected and our investigation is ongoing.”

Thomlinson sought to reassure customers by claiming that Microsoft’s continual system of internal security evaluation means “additional people, processes, and technologies” can be deployed if gaps are found, in order to prevent similar incursions in the future.

The extent of the attack is still unclear, although some researchers are claiming hundreds of other companies may have had their Macs targeted in the same way. The large scale breach of Twitter earlier this month has been linked to the same Java zero-day vulnerability.

As for those behind the attack – the usual suspects of China and Eastern European hackers have been mentioned.

Last week, Apple finally patched the Java security hole in Mac OSX which was being exploited in the attack, a fortnight after Oracle’s pre-Patch-Tuesday’ update fixed the same hole, in a move which will do nothing to reassure enterprise Mac users of the security of their platform.

Security researchers at Sophos are urging users to turn off Java in the browser as a matter of course in order to close down this growing area of risk.

All in all it was a pretty bad end to the week for Microsoft last Friday, after its Windows Azure storage cloud suffered a worldwide outage thanks to an expired SSL certificate. ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/25/microsoft_java_mac_apple_facebook_attacl/