The Flame Burning Inside Stuxnet
While the U.S. and Israel keep on mutually claiming the Stuxnet's paternity, Kaspersky Lab has unveiled further details about Flame…
While the U.S. and Israel keep on mutually claiming the Stuxnet's paternity, Kaspersky Lab has unveiled further details about Flame…
I have just received an email from the israeli hacker dubbed you-ri-k@n providing me with some details about a peculiar…
You-r!-k@n keeps on his personal battle against Iran. The latest target is the official website of Iran Energy Water (tw.org.ir),…
Update August 17: More details about Shamoon, the malware targeting Saudi Aramco and other Middle East companies belonging to Energy Sector.…
Yesterday Bloomberg reported the news of a new cyber attack in Middle East targeting an Oil Company. The latest victim…
The infosec chronicle has offered many interesting events in this first part of October. Upon all, the massive leak against…
(But in some cases may remain unknown for up to 2.5 years). A couple of days ago, two Symantec Researchers…
The year is gone, and here it is the last Cyber Attack Timeline for 2012 (first part here).
The most important cyber-events of this second part of December can be considered: the third phase of the operation Ababil carried on by the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters against U.S. Banks, the attacks of the Anonymous collective against the Westboro Baptist Church, and, last but not least the Cyberwar echoes coming from Iran.
The wave of DDoS attacks carried on by the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters has taken down Six U.S. Banks under the fists of DDoS attacks apparently unstoppable. Instead the Anonymous seem to have changed tactic in their personal fight against the Westboro Baptist Church, they did not limit to DDoS the church’s website, but also performed a couple of Twitter account takeover against some key persons (with the collaboration of UGNazi members).
Instead, on the Cyberwar front, Iran confirms to be a danger zone, with some reports of a new Wiper and a simil-Stuxnet malware (even if this second news has been downplayed in a second moment.
Other noticeable news include an alleged breach to Yahoo!, a massive breach against a Chinese HP domain and a strange, controversial breach against Verizon FiOS (with data apparently leaked six months ago).
If you want to have an idea of how fragile our data are inside the cyberspace, have a look at the timelines of the main Cyber Attacks in 2011 and 2012 and the related statistics (regularly updated), and follow @paulsparrows on Twitter for the latest updates.
Also, feel free to submit remarkable incidents that in your opinion deserve to be included in the timelines (and charts). To do so, you can use this form.
The Cyber Monday has just gone, and here we are with the second Cyber Attacks Timeline of November (Part I here).
Even if no massive breaches against retailers have been discovered so far (however do not get carried away since they will probably need several weeks to surface!), this month equally shows some remarkable events for Cyber Crime, Hacktivism and Cyber Espionage.
Actually I just really did not know where to begin, since each sector shows at least one noticeable events. However, after scrolling down the list, I believe that the crown of the month is all for the powerful Regin, the brand new cyber weapon discovered by Symantec. If you believed that the complexity of Stuxnet, Flame and Duqu was a closed page, you will have to change your mind.
This event has overshadowed the massive attack against Sony Pictures Entertainment, allegedly traced to North Korea, in the wake of the release of the comedy “The Interview”, which has been deemed discriminatory against the country and inciting to terrorism. This attack, which has more then one similarity with the infamous Dark Seoul, has completely blocked the Sony internal IT network and is making happy many individuals worldwide, since several Gigabytes of unreleased material are being leaked in these hours.
Last but not least the hacktivists are back! Not only the Syrian Electronic Army has exited stealth mode, with an attack to Gigya, an identity management platform, which has affected many illustrious victims worldwide, but also the Anonymous have been the authors of several attacks, just like the good old days, in the wake of the controversial decision of the Ferguson grand jury decision.
If you want to have an idea of how fragile our electronic identity is inside the cyberspace, have a look at the timelines of the main Cyber Attacks in 2011, 2012, 2013 and now 2014 (regularly updated). You may also want to have a look at the Cyber Attack Statistics, and follow @paulsparrows on Twitter for the latest updates.
Also, feel free to submit remarkable incidents that in your opinion deserve to be included in the timelines (and charts).
This year is nearly at the end but it looks like it is really endless, at least from an Information Security Perspective. As a matter of fact this 2011 will leave an heavy and embarassing heritage to Information Security: the Certification Authority authentication model, which has been continuously under siege in this troubled year; a siege that seems endless and which has shown its ultimate expression on the alleged compromise of yet another Dutch Certification Authority: Gemnet.
Gemnet, an affiliate of KPN, has suspended certificate signing operation after an intrusion on its publicly accessible instance of phpMyAdmin (a web interface for managing SQL Database) which was, against any acceptable best practice, exposed on the Internet and not protected by password. As in case of Diginotar, another Dutch Certification Authority which declared Bankrupt few days after being compromised by the infamous Comodo Hacker, Gamnet has the Dutch government among its customers including the Ministry of Security and Justice, Bank of Dutch Municipalities and the police.
After the intrusion, the attacker claimed to have manipulated the databases, and to allegedly have been able to gain control over the system and all of the documents contained on it, although KPN, claims the documents contained on the server were all publicly available. Moreover the attacker claimed the attack was successful since he could obtain the password (braTica4) used for administrative tasks on the server. As a precaution, while further information is collected about the incident, Gemnet CSP, KPN’s certificate authority division, has also suspended access to their website.
The breach is very different, in purpose and motivations, from the one occurred to Diginotar, at the end of July, which led to the issuance of more than 500 bogus Certificates (on behalf of Google, Microsoft, and other companies). In case of Diginotar the certificates were used to intercept about 300,000 Iranians, as part of what was called “Operation Black Tulip“, a campaign aimed to eavesdrop and hijack dissidents’ emails. For the chronicles, the same author of the Diginotar hack, the Infamous Comodo Hacker, had already compromised another Certification Authority earlier this year, Comodo (which was at the origin of his nickname). In both cases, the hacks were performed for political reasons, respectively as a retaliation for the Massacre of Srebrenica (in which the Comodo Hacker claimed the Dutch UN Blue Helmets did not do enough to prevent it), and as a retaliation for Stuxnet, allegedly developed in a joint effort by Israel and US to delay Iranian Nuclear Program.
But although resounding, these are not the only examples of attacks or security incidents targeting Certification Authorities: after all, the attacks against CAs started virtually in 2010 with the infamous 21th century weapon Stuxnet, that could count among its records, the fact to be the first malware using a driver signed with a valid certificate belonging to Realtek Semiconductor Corps. A technique also used by Duqu, the so called Duqu’s son.
Since then, I counted 11 other breaches, perpetrated for different purposes: eavesdropping (as is the case of the Infamous Comodo Hacker), malware driver signatures, or “simple” compromised servers (with DDoS tools as in case of KPN).
At this point I wonder what else we could deploy to protect our identity, given that two factor authentication has been breached, CAs are under siege, and also SSL needs a substantial revision. Identity protection is getting more and more important, since our privacy is constantly under attack, but we are dangerously running out of ammunitions.
(Click below for references)