Archive for the ‘IT Security’ Category

Just for the road

Posted by spaquet on June 14, 2011  |   Comments Off

Before moving our news feed to an other location (http://blog.up4b.com/), we’d like to share with you some ads for UK MoD. These ads reminded me some old ones from Symanctec displaying average users such as CEO’s PA, Accouting Manager, etc. and telling the CIO that those people are his/her biggest threat in his/her company.

Why, just because they’re doing thing without thinking twice. Their behavior can lead from virus infection to emailing “secret data” to competitors and this is what the MoD wants its soldier to keep in mind when using social network before and while being deployed.

So the is the reason of this advertising campaign, so British and terrific at the same time.

Enjoy some disco dancing terrorists and the careful with your mom.

Ad 1:

Ad 2:

UP4B offers a wide range of process and network analysis to make sure that your network is protected against what is really important for your business: information leak, network protection (penetration testing,…), network availability and more.

Feel free to contact us for more information on our IT Security services and get your company IT Sec ready.

Sony: 0 LulzSec: at least 2

Posted by spaquet on June 8, 2011  |   Comments Off

2011 is Sony’s year! After shutting down the PlayStation Network for a month, being hacked in Japan this time, Sony has temporarily shuttered yet another website following reports it may have suffered an attack by hackers.

The company’s Brazilian Music site was inaccessible for much of Tuesday as website engineers investigated a possible security breach, according to news reports.

On Friday, a group calling itself LulzSec targeted Sony’s movie division in an attack it claimed exposed more than 1 million consumer email addresses and passwords. It claimed the attack on the Sony Pictures website was achieved by exploiting a simple SQL-injection vulnerability, leading to the trove of unencrypted data.

Looks like Sony’s activities should be fully checked…

UP4B offers a wide range of process and network analysis to make sure that your network is protected against what is really important for your business: information leak, network protection (penetration testing,…), network availability and more.

Feel free to contact us for more information on our IT Security services and get your company IT Sec ready.

Cybercrime market value: about $1trillion

Posted by spaquet on June 7, 2011  |   Comments Off

2011 looks like a good year for cybercrime. Q1 has seen an unprecedented number of malwares and attacks leading the cybercrime market above $1trillion…

The cost of cybercrime has come back to the spotlight to a recent spate of high profile computer crimes: a hacker attack on Sony in May took its PlayStation Network down for 23 days after confidential information on tens of millions of network subscribers was breached; the company estimated the cost of that attack will total $171 million.

The amount of new malicious software, or “malware,” unleashed on the internet during the first three months of this year hit six million programs, according to a report last week by McAfee, the computer antivirus maker. “It’s been a busy start to 2011 for cybercriminals,” Vincent Weafer, senior vice president of McAfee Labs, said in a statement.

The increased difficulty in protecting data comes as the value of intellectual property is skyrocketing for companies. In 2009, 81% of the value of S&P 500 companies was “intangible assets” such as patented technology, proprietary data and market plans, according to an estimate by Ocean Tomo Intellectual Capital Equity. In 1985, only 68% of the S&P 500 market value was from intangibles, according to Ocean Tomo.

When bandits make off with intellectual property, the cost to the company does not equal the money made by cybercriminals.

UP4B offers a wide range of process and network analysis to make sure that your network is protected against what is really important for your business: information leak, network protection (penetration testing,…), network availability and more.

Feel free to contact us for more information on our IT Security services and get your company IT Sec ready.

En garde!

Posted by spaquet on June 6, 2011  |   Comments Off

Systems of an FBI-affiliated public-private partnership organization have been hacked and its website defaced by LulzSec. In addition, email addresses have been leaked from the database in the process…

Website defacements included mooching messages such as “LET IT FLOW YOU STUPID FBI BATTLESHIPS” and a video clip. Part of the message suggests that LulzSec launched the attack as some sort of response to the Obama administration’s plans to make hacking an act of war.

Apart from website meddling there were data losses including the personal info for 180 users at Infragard, a private-public partnership between the FBI and US business that works in cyber-security.

LulzSec tried the passwords exposed by the hack on other locations, allowing it to hack into other systems thanks to some users’ re-use of the same passwords.

LulzSec, group of hackers, shot to prominence last month with a high-profile hack against PBS followed days later by a break-in that yielded 1 million user records and coupon codes at Sony BMG sites and the Sony Pictures Entertainment site.

UP4B offers a wide range of process and network analysis to make sure that your network is protected against what is really important for your business: information leak, network protection (penetration testing,…), network availability and more.

Feel free to contact us for more information on our IT Security services and get your company IT Sec ready.

Upgraded TDSS rootkit gets self-propagating mechanism

Posted by spaquet on June 4, 2011  |   Comments Off

A new version of the TDSS rootkit, which also goes by the names Alureon and TDL4, is able to infect new machines using two separate methods, Kaspersky Lab researcher Sergey Golovanov wrote in a blog post.

The first is by infecting removable media drives with a file that gets executed each time a computer connects to the device.

The second method is to spread over local area networks by creating a rogue DHCP server and waiting for attached machines to request an IP address. When the malware finds a request, it responds with a valid address on the LAN and an address to a malicious DNS server under the control of the rootkit authors. The DNS server then redirects the targeted machine to malicious webpages.

Both propagation methods are perfect illustration that security without IT processes is nothing.

UP4B offers a wide range of process and network analysis to make sure that your network is protected against what is really important for your business: information leak, network protection (penetration testing,…), network availability and more.

Feel free to contact us for more information on our IT Security services and get your company IT Sec ready.

Unseen, uncaught!

Posted by spaquet on May 24, 2011  |   Comments Off

According to Trend Micro researcher Karl Dominguez: The vulnerability was actively being exploited using emails that contained malicious scripts and was able to stole email without warning.

Successful attacks required only that a Hotmail user open the malicious email or view it in a preview window. The commands embedded in the emails uploaded users’ correspondences and user contacts to servers under the control of attackers without requiring the victim to click on links or otherwise take any action.

The scripts also also had the capability of enabling email forwarding on the targeted Hotmail account, allowing attackers to view emails sent to the victim in the future…

Microsoft has now patched this bug, but it illustrates how important IT rules can be since it allowed attackers to silently steal confidential correspondences and user contacts from unsuspecting victims.

UP4B offers a wide range of process and network analysis to make sure that your network is protected against what is really important for your business: information leak, network protection (penetration testing,…), network availability and more.

Feel free to contact us for more information on our IT Security services and get your company IT Sec ready.

the bill please !

Posted by spaquet on May 24, 2011  |   Comments Off

The cost of a criminal intrusion that exposed sensitive data for more than 100 million Sony customers and resulted in a 23-day closure of the PlayStation Network will cost the company at least $171 million.

The estimated cost doesn’t included expenses related to any lawsuits that may be filed in response to the security breach, which was discovered on April 19. The estimate includes expenses of an identity theft prevention program and promotional packages to win back customers, among other things.

But the final cost might be far over since some Sony PlayStation Network services still have not been brought back online, as the PlayStation Store, which remains down, closing a venue that allowed the company to sell downloadable games.

UP4B offers a wide range of process and network analysis to make sure that your network is protected against what is really important for your business: information leak, network protection (penetration testing,…), network availability and more.

Feel free to contact us for more information on our IT Security services and get your company IT Sec ready.

And the winner is…

Posted by spaquet on May 19, 2011  |   Comments Off

Sony!

Just four days after the PlayStation Network reopened, Sony has taken down login and password recovery pages for the service following reports they contained a serious flaw that was actively exploited to hijack user accounts.

The vulnerability, which was first reported by UK-based gaming news site Nyleveia.com, required only that an attacker know the date of birth and email address associated with a targeted user’s account… forcing Sony to disable the login pages in order to prevent attacks.

Following the publication of this hack, Sony issued the following statement:

“We temporarily took down the PSN and Qriocity password reset page. Contrary to some reports, there was no hack involved. In the process of resetting of passwords there was a URL exploit that we have subsequently fixed.”

But this blunder raises new doubts about Sony’s ability to secure the PlayStation Network just as the company is trying to regain the confidence of dubious government officials and its 77 million account holders. Sony took down the service on April 20, following the discovery that core parts of its network had suffered a criminal intrusion that stole names, user names, passwords, birth dates, addresses, and other sensitive details of all its users. Company executives have said they can’t rule out the possibility that credit card data was also taken.

The exploit involved the bypass of a digital token system that Sony used when users reset their PSN password. Attackers could carry out the attack by visiting https://store.playstation.com/accounts/reset/resetPassword.action?token and then, in a separate browser tab, opening a different page on us.playstation.com and following Sony’s reset procedure, which required only the date of birth and email address associated with the account.

The attacker would then return to the original tab and, armed with the browser cookie just issued by Sony’s servers, complete an image verification on the page. The attacker would then proceed to a scree allowing him to change the victim’s password.

UP4B offers a wide range of process and network analysis to make sure that your network is protected against what is really important for your business: information leak, network protection (penetration testing,…), network availability and more.

Feel free to contact us for more information on our IT Security services and get your company IT Sec ready.

Sony PlayStation Network, the final word ?

Posted by spaquet on May 16, 2011  |   Comments Off

About one month after a serious breach in security occurred, exposing more than 77 million users’ personal details, Sony is gradually setting back to operation its PlayStation Network.

According to Kazuo Hirai, the executive deputy president of Sony Corp, Sony is making data protection a top priority.

Let’s hope this time they will.

UP4B offers a wide range of process and network analysis to make sure that your network is protected against what is really important for your business: information leak, network protection (penetration testing,…), network availability and more.

Feel free to contact us for more information on our IT Security services and get your company IT Sec ready.

More information can be found here

Sony PlayStation Network hack follow up

Posted by spaquet on May 14, 2011  |   Comments Off

Bloomberg News reported that the hackers who breached the security of Sony’s PlayStation network and gained access to sensitive data for 77 million subscribers used Amazon’s web services cloud to launch the attack.

The attackers rented a sever from Amazon’s EC2 service and penetrated the popular network from there, the news outlet said, citing an unnamed person with knowledge of the matter. The hackers supplied fake information to Amazon. to open a valid account (now closed).

Is Amazon cloud a hacker nest ?

German security researcher Thomas Roth earlier this year showed how tapping the EC2 service allowed him to crack Wi-Fi passwords in a fraction of the time and for a fraction of the cost of using his own computing gear. For about $1.68, he used special “Cluster GPU Instances” of the Amazon cloud to carry out brute-force cracks that allowed him to access a WPA-PSK protected network in about 20 minutes.

And in late 2009, a ZeuS-based banking trojan used the popular Amazon service as a command and control channel that issued software updates and malicious instructions to PCs that were infected by the malware.

More information can be found here (full Bloomberg article)

UP4B offers a wide range of process and network analysis to make sure that your network is protected against what is really important for your business: information leak, network protection (penetration testing,…), network availability and more.

Feel free to contact us for more information on our IT Security services and get your company IT Sec ready.