Archive for April, 2009

Conficker Update

Conficker infected 700 computers at the University of Utah including several hospital systems. An organization like that should know better and have policies and procedures in place for patching…especially when patches have been available for over 6 months. There just really isn’t any excuse.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30179873/
http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_12118088

Common Hacker Attack Pathways

In the 2008 Data Breach Investigations Report written by Verizon it discusses the most common methods of access (pathways) used to compromise networks. What they found from the 500+ caseload was the following:

Nearly half of all breaches exploited remote access and control systems. The report states that this is often remote access software [...]

Hannaford Breach Liability Case

In a SANS post recently it said “A federal judge will soon decide if Hannaford Bros. can be held liable for damages stemming from a data security breach late 2007 and early 2008. The attackers stole details of more than 4 million credit and debit cards. Attorneys for Hannaford have asked that the [...]

Continuity Engine releases “Community”

Continuity Engine, a company started in 2008 by former Founder of Perimeter eSecurity Andy Greenawalt, has just release their flagship product “Community”, a social networking concept with a compliance a business focus for financial institutions.
Community enables financial institutions to work together to create and manage complex documents that are required by federal and [...]

Financial Services Companies Have The Data Hackers Want

In the newly published study on financail data security breaches between 2000 and 2008, it reports that 12 percent of data breach incidents come from financial services companies, but account for over one third of all records compromised.
Financial services companies are often targeted by criminals because that is where the “crown jewels” are. [...]

The Easiest Way to Detect Conficker Compromised Systems

I was impressed with a method that some have developed to detect (in a very simple way) if your system is infected with Conficker. Certainly there are many tools out there, but nothing quite as simple as this. Go out to this website. Click on the “Eye Chart” link. Based on [...]

Is Your Identity Stolen Every 18 Months?

In the recently release financial institution data breach study by Kevin Prince at Perimeter eSecurity. The first part of the study breaks down just what we don’t know about data breaches. He states that according to a Dark Reading article where a survey of IT admins was conducted, only 11 percent of companies [...]

FBI Cybercrime Report

In the recently released annual FBI Cybercrime report, there is some interesting bits of data.

The jump in complaints can probably be partially correlated to the downturn in the economy. Several individuals predicted this would occur.
Here’s a look at the scams prompting the most complaints (by percentage), along with the average amount of [...]

Targeted vs. Opportunistic Attacks

In a Verizon report it discusses targeted vs. opportunistic attacks as they saw them as part of their 500+ caseload between 2005 and 2008. They determined the following:

Definitions are:
Opportunistic (Random) – Attacker(s) identified the victim while searching randomly or widely for weaknesses (i.e., scanning large address spaces) then exploited the weakness.
Opportunistic (Directed) – Although [...]

Hacker Difficulty Level

In the 2008 Data Breach Investigation Report by the Verison Business Risk Team, they determined the attack difficulty for attackers to exploit the systems that resulted in the data breach.
The chart and commentary follows a “path of least resistance” philosophy subscribed to by most security professionals. As they specify in the report, [...]