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AnswerThe following ports are used by GFI MailEssentials 14 and later. The firewall may need to be configured to allow connections using DNS, FTP, HTTP and HTTPS from the GFI MailEssentials machine to the update servers.
For the recommended multi-install firewall exceptions, please also check the following GFI knowledge base article:
DNS Port 53
Connections are done to the DNS server configured for the local machine. This is used for:
- IP DNS Blocklist
- URI DNS Blocklist
FTP Ports 20 and 21
In case of passive FTP ports 21 and a random port lower than 1024. Connection is done to ftp.gfisoftware.com to retrieve the latest version information.
HTTP / HTTPS Ports 80 and 443
This is used to download updates for Bayesian, Product Patches, Phishing, Spamrazer, and Anti-Virus engines.
Connections are done to the following addresses:
Remoting Ports 8013, 8015, 8021
Remoting is used in the latest builds of GFI MailEssentials for inter-process communication. Since all the GFI MailEssentials processes are running on the same server the firewall does not need to be configured to allow connections to or from the remoting ports. However, please ensure that no other application is installed on GFI MailEssentials machine that is listening on the mentioned ports. The remoting ports can be modified through the GFI MailEssentials switchboard, although it’s suggested to do so only after consulting GFI Technical Support (if required).
- Remoting Ports 9093, 9091,8015, 9096 9095
- Note the new ports 9096 and 9095 are used only in multi-server synchronization.
- Remoting Ports 9090, 9091, 8015
All auto-update functionality (such as Anti-Virus, SpamRazer, Bayesian, etc) in GFI MailEssentials runs over HTTP and HTTPS which can pass through the proxy server configured in the GFI MailEssentials configuration. Please ensure that the firewall has been configured to allow connections from the GFI MailEssentials server to connect to the proxy server on the ports defined in the configuration
Only GFI MailEssentials 14 (Build 20080915) downloads SpamRazer updates from http://db11.spamcatcher.net. GFI MailEssentials 14 SR1 (build 20081024) and later builds download SpamRazer updates from http://sn92.mailshell.net.
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A Network Approach to Analyzing Highly Recombinant Malaria Parasite Genes
Choosing a noise threshold requires balance between two competing requirements for correctly identifying network communities: minimize the number of incorrectly placed links, yet retain as many correctly placed links as possible to satisfy the network connectivity requirements of the community detection method. (A) The probability of two sequences sharing a block while not actually being related decreases as block length increases, modeled in S1. Each HVR's length and composition are taken into account separately (colored lines). Choosing a tolerance for false positives (grey line) specifies a minimum retained block length; since blocks are of integer length, the next largest integer is the minimum retained block length (squares). Curves for HVRs 3 and 5 are plotted, for which we would select thresholds of five and seven, respectively. Curves for all nine HVRs are shown in Fig. S6A. (B) For a choice of threshold 6 for HVR 1, the histogram of HVR 1 block lengths shows that a vast majority of the blocks are below the threshold (white bars) and that the retained blocks are widely distributed (green bars, inset). (C) Networks are fragmented as the block length threshold is increased and more links are discarded. The relationship between the size of the largest component and block length threshold is shown for the least-connected (HVR3) and most-connected (HVR7) networks. Some thresholds allow too many false positives, as described in panel A (grey lines), yet other thresholds fragment the network too much for reliable community detection (shaded region). Those points that are plotted in color above the shaded region are both sufficiently error-free and well connected that we may reliably infer network communities. For HVRs 2–4, even the most permissive false positive threshold results in a network that is too fragmented for community detection (red circle). Curves for all nine HVRs are shown in Figure S6B.
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Dr.Web Firewall protects your mobile device from unauthorized access and prevents leak of vital data through networks. This component monitors connection attempts and data transfers over the Internet, and helps you block unwanted or suspicious connections.
Dr.Web Firewall Features
Dr.Web Firewall is based on VPN for Android technology, so it does not require root access on the device. However, the VPN for Android technology sets a number of limits:
•First, only one application can use VPN at a time. Before enabling VPN, the application prompts you to provide it relevant permissions. If you give these permissions, the application starts using VPN, but it blocks access to VPN for other applications. Dr.Web Firewall requests VPN permissions every time you enable the component, after the device reboot, and after VPN requests from other applications. VPN is shared among the applications over time. Dr.Web Firewall can operate only when it gets full rights to use VPN.
•Enabling Dr.Web Firewall can result in inability to connect the device on which Dr.Web Firewall runs to other devices directly using Wi-Fi or local network. It depends on the device model and applications which are used to establish a connection between devices.
•When Dr.Web Firewall is enabled, you cannot use your device as a Wi-Fi access point.
To enable Dr.Web Firewall
1.On the main application screen (see ), select .
2.Select or use the toggle button in the top right-hand corner of the screen. By default, Dr.Web Firewall is disabled. Dr.Web request permission to use VPN. The permission is mandatory for Dr.Web Firewall operation.
Figure 35. Dr.Web Firewall on Android TV
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Monitoring your system is an essential part of security. It helps you discover what attacks are being launched against your system so that you can concentrate on plugging popular holes. Monitoring also lets you know when someone has successfully penetrated your defenses.
Some basic Linux commands can help you learn what constitutes normal activity on your system so that you know when things are out of the ordinary:
• Use the who command to find out who is logged in and what they're doing.
• Use the last command to find out when people normally log in.
• Use the log files, such as /var/log/secure, to monitor access to network services and to monitor failed login attempts.
• Use ps to find out what processes are normally running.
• Develop a feel for your system. Intruders often change that feel.
Use these commands to establish a feel for normal operation. Do not expect these commands to catch an intruder in the act. Be aware that if your system is broken into, all of these commands will probably be replaced with altered versions designed to hide illicit activity, and the log file will probably be stripped of incriminating information.
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If a URL category is included in the Decryption Rules, when the traffic for a website matching that URL category hits for the first time on the device, even if that website is excluded from Decryption using SSL-Exclude-Certificate settings, the firewall will not skip decryption based on SNI (Server Name Indication) included in Client Hello Packet.
The firewall still does a forward proxy for the connection, and sends a list of Supported Cipher Suites to the server.
If the server accepts the Client Hello proposed by the firewall, and sends a Server Hello / Certificate, the firewall then inspects the Server Certificate for the Common name and matches it against the configured SSL Exclude Certificate Settings. If it matches, then Server address and TCP port are added to the exclude cache for the particular rule they match. This exclude cache is then used for future connections matching the same parameters and will cause the firewall to even skip the proxy.
In case the server does not support the Cipher Suites send (overwritten) by the firewall, the Server might send an SSL error message or just send a TCP RST to the connection.
If the firewall is sending cipher suites that are unsupported by the Server, even after including the certificate in the SSL-Exclude-Certificate settings, then perform the following steps to resolve this issue.
Inside Objects > URL Category, click Add to create a new custom URL Category - ex ExcludeSSLdescryption, then add the URLs inside this category that you do not want decrypted.
Inside Policies > Decryption, Create a No-Decrypt rule above the SSL decryption rule which is being used for decrypting the rest of the traffic. Place the newly created URL Category - ExcludeSSLdescryption in the URL Category. This way, the traffic for the URL Category will be excluded from the decryption policy.
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In terms of collaboration, Structured Threat Information eXpression (STIX) and Trusted Automated eXchange of Indicator Information (TAXII) represent a revolution in the security industry. These protocols transformed the field of threat intelligence from a fragmented collection of information to a unified standard for information sharing. In this blog, I will examine this transition and how it came about.
Gartner defines threat intelligence as “evidence-based knowledge, including context, mechanisms, indicators, implications and actionable advice, about an existing or emerging menace or hazard to assets that can be used to inform decisions regarding the subject’s response to that menace or hazard.” In short, threat intelligence combines all known information about previously encountered threats to aid organizations in identifying and responding to similar threats in the future.
The old days of threat intelligence
Like any game of cat and mouse, the security industry has been chasing after cyber threats for as long as many IT professionals can remember. The more sophisticated and organized cyber attacks became, the harder security vendors worked to create comprehensive solutions. These security solutions eventually met all areas of attack detection and mitigation, and could produce every component of threat intelligence. Unfortunately, these components were highly disjointed due to multiple formats and sharing protocols.
Think about this in terms of a ransomware attack. Organizations rarely use just one security solution to deal with ransomware. Many need separate tools to identify ransomware activity in the first place, record information about malicious files, and actually respond to the threat. Now, imagine if all these tools couldn’t share threat information with each other.
Well, that was a big problem in the past; each tool used its own formats, and admins needed custom communication protocols to share information between security solutions. As you can imagine, consolidating threat information from all these sources took a lot of time. And with modern cyber attacks demanding immediate attention, less than real-time threat intelligence just wasn’t going to cut it anymore.
The STIX and TAXII revolution
In response to these problems, MITRE Corporation and the Department of Homeland Security together developed STIX and TAXII, community-driven protocols for information sharing that include details on what’s going on in the cybersecurity landscape, and how organizations can protect their network and analyze threats. Developing a common language across product and organizational boundaries opened the door for multiple sources to collaboratively update information about a single threat, giving organizations more complete threat intelligence. Together, STIX and TAXII have made sharing threat data more convenient and instantaneous, ensuring enterprises can quickly and effectively detect and respond to incidents.
Threat feeds based on STIX and TAXII provide up-to-date, reliable threat information, which is why many vendors have incorporated these protocols into their security solutions. In fact, our own log management solution, EventLog Analyzer, comes with a built-in STIX/TAXII threat feed processor, using the latest threat intelligence to monitor network logs for threats. You can learn more about it with this free solution brief.
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TOKYO >> Japan’s Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry has decided to create decoy computer systems to combat cyberattacks.
The decoy systems would resemble actual systems used by the government and well-known companies, and be used to attract computer viruses so the government can observe and analyze their routes of infection and other characteristics.
If a new cyberattack’s traits can be understood quickly, it could help in the creation of protective measures.
The National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, which the ministry oversees, plans to start building such systems in earnest in fiscal 2018 so they can be operational as soon as possible.
Cyberattacks often use methods such as email to infect the systems of companies and other entities with a virus.
Once inside, the virus can spread, enabling the attacker to steal information or control the system remotely.
Yet how viruses function once inside a system and continue to spread is often not well understood.
To prevent a virus from spreading, its method of attack need to be identified quickly to come up with countermeasures.
However, companies that are damaged by cyberattacks are often unwilling to share information externally, which means the infection may spread to other entities without countermeasures being taken.
This latest plan would involve creating a cyberspace that closely resembles a corporate system. Once a virus is lured in, its actions would be observed, and this information would be shared among companies involved in fighting cyberattacks, to create ways of preventing or containing infections.
The ministry is keen to get these decoy systems operating quickly, so it will include 200 million yen or about $1.8 million for this purpose in its requests for the fiscal 2018 budget.
The funds would be used to develop systems and other tools to share the results of the observations and analyses among related companies.
In May, a virus called WannaCry infected computers around the world, affecting major Japanese companies such as Hitachi Ltd. New cyberattacks have occurred one after another in recent years.
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Honeypot is a network attached system set up as a decoy to lure cyber attackers and detect, deflect and study hacking attempts to gain unauthorised access to Information System. In simple words you are using or making it very lucrative for the attacker to deflect their attention to their system which when they compromise doesn’t affect the actual network.
Sandbox is an environment isolated virtual machine in which potentially unsafe software code can execute without affecting Network resources or Local applications.
Let’s study them one by one to identify the differences.
What is a Honeypot?
Take an example of co-operate network where we get attack/malicious traffic from outside network
This network includes your users, Servers, routers, Internet Firewall, DMZ network, attackers and your Honeypot system. There is no such rule to put honey pot systems in the network i.e., you can put multiple Honeypot systems in the network as per the requirement OR as per the network topology.
Either you can put the Honeypot system in the inside Network or put it on the Gateway of the Network.
What’s the advantage that we get when we put the Honeypot system in the DMZ or outside network?
- Honeypot doesn’t increase the risk of an internal network which means an attacker is trapped inside the Honeypot, it wouldn’t crawl inside your internal network.
- External Honeypot reduces the alerts issued by firewall. Means lower number of alerts that are produced by external firewalls.
However there are disadvantages as well.
- External Honeypot cannot trap an internal attacker which means if the attacker is already inside your network Honeypot failed to identify it.
Honeypot placed inside the Network along with the servers
- It can also detect a misconfigured firewall which means if your firewall failed to stop the attacker and the attacker made it inside the network.
However there are some disadvantages as well.
- A compromised Honeypot if placed inside the network opens more doors for the attacker’s to attack internal systems which is a security risk.
- Moreover your firewall must adjust your filtering rule to allow traffic to Honeypot. You have put additional rules in the firewall to allow traffic towards the Honeypot server. Basically, it means you have to make the changes in your network configuration and network topology.
What is a Sandbox?
Most Sandboxing environments are applicable in the Software domain. Sandboxing offers a very safe and effective technique to validate your code, allowing you to analyse how the code works and how it provides security to your network and data from threats.
You might have heard about Virtual box or VMware box. So you can create virtual instances of your favourite operating system and apply software according to the environment. This is the partial example of the Sandbox. Whatever we perform here will be isolated from another VM machine/environment. We can test our code and rectify the loopholes from the running configuration. Furthermore you can test the Ransomware or Malware to check how it impacts the network.
You can also learn a lot of things which you design for your environment and run it on the virtual machine. Similarly you can apply mitigation control in your Virtual machine and once you successfully implement the resolution then you can apply the same in a real environment.
Sandboxing can be provided by Vendors like McAfee, Sophos, and Kaspersky.
- If we have a sample of a malware file, we can directly upload it to an isolated environment where it will run as a piece of software or code in its own sandbox and provide you with the analysis.
- You can also set a piece of code or untested software to the 3rd party sandbox vendor and where it can be analysed and inputs will be shared with you.
Honeypot vs Sandbox: Comparison Table
Below table summarizes the differences between the two:
Download the comparison table: Honeypot vs Sandbox
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I to Originate channels using AMI.When the other end indicates the channel is ringing, I need to do some system notification work.Everything works great when the ITSP sends a 180 Ringing response.Through AMI events I see the channel state changed ..
all,I created a set of Docker images running Asterisk and exposing AMI /ARI ports that i found to be quite useful for ARI / AMI development and regression.As they are based on Docker with whaleware, adding new configuration files to roll your own dialp..
Is there a mapping of AMI versions to Asterisk versions somewhere?For example, Asterisk 1.4 includes AMI version 1.0 (at least thats what I see when I connect to Ast 1.4 via telnet to the AMI port)Also, doe the AMI version changes reflect changes..
Is it possible to detect the failure of an agent to register with Asterisk via the AMI ?When I try to register with Asterisk 1.4 using an invalid password I dont see any event in the AMI, but see this in the messages log:[2013-10-05 22:05:03] NOTICE[245..
B.H. im using AMI Originate action (with async=true) to send outgoing calls to a SIP trunk (using asterisk-java library to connect to AMI).The problem is that in case of failed originate, OriginateResponse event is returning only the reason code wh..
Were using Asterisk 1.8.0 to run a call centre.There is a Java process which talks to Asterisk through AMI, which is part of the software stack that presents a user interface to the call centre agents.Were seeing a strange issue with AMI.Most of ..
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Virtual machine detection is a self-defensive property of many malware specimens. It is aimed at making it harder to examine the malicious program, because virtualization software, such as VMware, is a very popular tool among malware analysts. For instance, 3 our of 12 malware specimens recently captured in our honeypot refused to run in VMware.
If you're surprised that commercial packers exist, don't be. Programmers often rely on packers to protect legitimate programs from reverse-engineering. Specifically, "Themida is very popular in China, because developers use it to protect mobile applications," according to one post on the ExeTools Forum. "They want maximum security to protect their sensitive communication between software + mobiles."
Themida is probably based on an earlier packer called Xtreme-Protector; both tools seem to have been written by the same author. The Xtreme-Protector website includes a whitepaper that outlines some of the anti-reversing features built into this program.
As a malware analyst, one way you can deal with packed executables that check for the presence of VMware is to patch the malicious code, so that the offending routine never executes. Another option is to modify your VMware instance to make it more dificult for the malicious program to detect that it's running in a virtual machine. Such VMware-concealing techniques are still relatively immature, but they were documented by Tom Liston and Ed Skoudis at a recent SANS conference. The sides for their presentation Thwarting Virtual Machine Detection are available on-line.
ISC Handler on Duty
Nov 19th 2006
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Nov 19th 2006
1 decade ago
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Given October is CyberSecurity Awareness Month, bad actors will do bad actory things. Wordfence posted an article on the possibility of a hidden hack that will provide backdoor access to those bad actors. WordPress is still the largest and most popular platform for CMS, however, with great popularity comes great responsibility, especially when it comes to security. The recent discovery by Wordfence has shed light on a concerning issue – backdoor access masquerading as a legitimate plugin.
In this article, we will delve into this topic from the perspective of ServicePress. We will explore the implications and provide insights on how to safeguard your WordPress site from such vulnerabilities, and by enhancing ServiceNow with the application ServicePress, can reduce the strain on your System Admins by giving access to the Service Desk to analyze the sites and report back to the owners of the servers, which site to fix.
Backdoor access can be a gateway for malicious actors to infiltrate your website, potentially leading to data breaches, site defacement, and other harmful activities. WordPress users need to recognize the gravity of this issue, as their websites often handle sensitive customer information and financial transactions.
What to Look for
The plugin itself might not be a problem, but some of the code inside the plugin IS. Don’t look for a specific plugin, look for specific CODE. Here are some of the screenshots from WordFence to look out for.
A Closer Hook
Note: ALL code functions starts with
What you can do
Protecting Your WordPress Powered Website
- Plugin Verification: Always scrutinize the plugins you install. Choose reputable sources and verify the credibility of the developers. WordPress users should be especially cautious and ensure that the plugins they use are well-maintained and regularly updated.
- Regular Audits: Conduct routine security audits on your website. Utilize security plugins and services like Wordfence to scan for potential threats and vulnerabilities.
- Updates and Patch Management: Keep your WordPress and WooCommerce installations up to date. Security patches are often released to address known vulnerabilities, and timely updates can help protect your site.
- Monitoring and Incident Response: Implement a robust monitoring system to detect suspicious activities. Be prepared with a well-defined incident response plan in case of a security breach.
- User Permissions: Limit access to your site to only those who require it. Reduce access to those who don’t need admin or editor.
ServicePress Provides Insight
Understanding what is on your Network depends on your security procedures. Who has access to what? How much can they do? If you give each admin access to install plugins on their own site, you are potentially allowing plugins that shouldn’t be there. How can you as an organization review that many sites without getting a Windows/Linux System Admin to run a script to scan every directory in the tree of networked sites?
Well, ServicePress can narrow that down based on all of the sites installed. You can then have your ServicePress Administrator go and check which sites might have those possible Caching plugins and can better help serve the incident to the WordPress team. This is not about having the right information, it’s having ANY information so that you can quickly track what might be the problem. Everything is meta until you provide the context for that metadata.
The discovery of a backdoor access masquerading as a legitimate plugin in WordPress is a stark reminder of the need for vigilance in the digital world. ServicePress, as a WordPress and WooCommerce integration for ServiceNow, underlines the importance of maintaining strong security measures. By being proactive, conducting regular audits, and staying informed about potential threats, you can protect your website and the valuable data it hosts. In the age of rapidly evolving cyber threats, the mantra remains clear: Look deeper, stay secure, and safeguard your digital presence.
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These days, and especially in the pandemic’s aftermath, businesses go online extensively. And online payments are only driving this trend further.
However, the transition to online brings with it its risks, or “vulnerabilities,” to be more precise. These “web app vulnerabilities” give cyber criminals loopholes for attacks and disruptions on the product.
The stats show that 26% of all cyber-attacks are linked to web app vulnerabilities. Such intrusive breaches pose serious financial, reputational, and business risks.
However, the good news is that you can prevent and tackle web app security vulnerabilities with an experienced team of developers. As a Front-end developer, I always pay special attention to the web app vulnerabilities prevention.
In the article, I want to look at the top 6 common web app vulnerabilities and explain how to prevent them.
So let’s start!
What Are Web App Vulnerabilities and Why Are They Dangerous?
Let’s know the enemy in the face! What is a web app vulnerability in the first place?
Putting it simply, these are bugs, weaknesses, or gaps in the web app (or its code), system flaws – anything which can allow cybercriminals (but not only them) to change the logic of the app to their advantage.
Web app vulnerabilities allow cyber criminals to:
- Spread viruses;
- Steal users’ data;
- Commit fraud;
- Insert harmful information about the business;
- Make classified information public;
- Gain direct or public access to databases with valuable data.
That said, cybercriminals can use not only the inherent vulnerabilities in the web app. These types of gaps are called Technical or programming vulnerabilities. These are the system flaws or bugs that the development team has missed. Also, these can be third-party system flaws of the technologies used on the application (for example, weak cloud security parameters).
But besides the technical vulnerabilities, cyber criminals can also use social engineering techniques to manipulate the users’ lack of technical background and get access to the system’s parameters and gain the admin rules.
The good news is that we can predict many web app vulnerabilities, and prevent them using the best practices of coding. So let’s look at 6 common vulnerabilities and see how to prevent them.
6 Common Web App Vulnerabilities
Every case of website app vulnerability is unique and the list of vulnerabilities can go on endlessly. Below are listed the most common web application vulnerabilities that might come along with development.
Clickjacking Web Application Vulnerability
Clickjacking (also referred to as User Interface Redressing) is an attack where users think that they are clicking on one thing while clicking on another.
For example, the user visits the website seeing a luring button “Book a free trip” (or put here your guilty pleasure). Without hesitation, the user taps on the button, dreaming of their next vacation. But suddenly, something goes wrong, and all the money from the user’s bank account disappears into oblivion.
The thing is that the “Free something” button was just a cheese-in-the-mouth trap. The button meant “Transfer your money to the hackers’ account” or “Give us all the data you have, so we take advantage of it when you least expect it.”
Internet criminals usually use clickjacking website vulnerability to:
- Steal users’ login credentials;
- Get access to users’ microphone and webcam;
- Promote online scams;
- Spread malware.
How to Prevent Users From Clickjacking?
Clickjacking website vulnerability is usually done via iframe – an element that loads an external HTML element into a web page. So to avoid this web app vulnerability, make sure your code cannot be iframed.
How to do it?
For example, you can set the x-frame options that indicate if the browser can or cannot render the page in a <frame>, <iframe>, or <object> tag.
That’s what we did on the Aspiration project. In this case we used the value "sameorigin" for the x-frame option. That means, a page can be used via <frame>, <iframe>, or <object> only on Aspiration domain.
This formula allowed us to prevent clickjacking.
We helped to develop such apps as GOAT, Nomad, Dollar Shave Club. Check out more of our cases!
Broken Access Control
Leaks of users’ private data and account authorization is one of the most widespread web app vulnerabilities.
Many websites have specific standards on how complicated the password should be. And this is the best practice of how things should be.
However, there is no “password difficulty” benchmark on many other websites. And this is where the website vulnerability broken access control comes up. So when, for example, there is no limit for sign-in attempts, hackers can crack the account via a simple brute-force attack.
Brute-force attack is a method of finally guessing the password after multiple sign-in efforts.
How to Secure Your Web App From the Broken Access Vulnerability?
- First, use the Captcha test to ensure that this person fills in the password rather than a program.
- Strengthen the quality of passwords and limit sign-in attempts. Also, you can put a blank space after each shot.
- Do not allow users too simple word combinations in passwords like «qwerty» or «123456».
- Ensure all users follow the password difficulty rule: a minimum of eight letters with at least two capitalized and written symbols, notes, and numbers.
Hackers can often use the field spaces to inject grammatically possible constructions, capable of ruining the app’s logic.
For example, we can open a console panel on any website (Facebook, for example) and request the system to access the authorization tokens or tokens to get specific data. However, we can hardly do it if the console says “stop” to such malicious actions. And this is what the development should do – program the console to block such intrusions.
There are three types of malicious code:
The most famous attack among the three is SQL-based injection. SQL-based injections often happen when the website has no limitations on what the user can insert in the application's forms and fields.
Malicious code that gets into the web application can provide access for hackers to confidential information and admin rights.
How to Secure the User From Injection Flaws?
Firstly, protect the input fields. For example, only numbers should be available when the user is asked to input their phone number.
Secondly, automatize the vulnerabilities search in the code using special analytical instruments, like Taxis, DeepScan, and Kiuwan.
Sensitive Data Exposure
Another famous web app vulnerability is the leak of confidential information (or sensitive data exposure).
There are usually two reasons for data exposure:
- Low-quality of cryptography (or no one at all);
- Usage of insecure SSL protocols.
Thus, hackers can find the keys or decipher encrypted codes using indirect indicators and additional channels.
How to Secure Your App From Sensitive Data Exposure?
Limit the access to confidential data for the users without the proper rights. Also, use high-quality cryptography and protocols for user data protection in all states: stored or transmitted. If you want to learn more about data encryption on Android devices, check our our recent article. You'll find 3 best data protection algorithms.
Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF)
Another website vulnerability is server request forgery. This cruel trick helps hackers send fake server requests that can access firewalls or network access controls.
Using the server request forgery helps hackers access the website’s internal infrastructure and services, which can eventually lead to sensitive data leaks.
How to Secure Your Website From the SRF vulnerability?
- Whitelist any domain or address that your web app accesses;
- Make sure that authentication is enabled on any service that is used inside your network;
- Validate any input that the user sends to your application.
Vulnerabilities of External Elements
As sad as it is, writing clean code is not always enough. Digital criminals can also target their attacks on program software from third parties you use—for example, libraries or frameworks.
The vulnerabilities of such frameworks are well–known and sometimes are even put there on purpose.
How to Secure Your Website From Vulnerabilities In Third Parties?
- Always use the latest versions of the external code;
- Minimize the usage of external elements;
- Follow the announcements on the external code vulnerabilities. Once the exposure is announced – fix it on your side, and call it a day.
5 General Tips on Web App Vulnerabilities Prevention
Great, now we know all the web app vulnerabilities in the face. But website security takes more than particular measures to tackle the vulnerabilities. Instead, this complex of measures completes the whole vulnerability prevention system.
Here are 5 rules that you should include in your attack prevention routine on your web app.
Handle Safe Development Lifecycle
The first prevention mechanism is following the Safe Development Lifecycle (SDL).
The development team takes several interrelated measures at each stage of development. Here is the flow of how SDL can be implemented on your project:
- Preparatory phase: Education of the group about the SDL measures to be taken;
- Project planning stage: assumption of potential threats, setting security standards, GAP analysis;
- Project planning & development stage: code review, statistic analysis;
- Testing stage: dynamic analysis, fuzzing;
- Product launch: final GAP-analysis, final security testing;
- Maintenance: external soft tracking and assessment, scanning for vulnerabilities.
Web app vulnerability prevention is a complex and lasting process that requires a systematic approach.
Install a Web Firewall
A web firewall (WAF) is a protection tool that protects a web app from attacks by monitoring and blocking any malicious traffic. The tool also has some policies that help to determine malicious traffic and prevent it from entering the web app.
Do Regular Reviews
Make regular website security checks and fix the vulnerabilities found. If possible, make a white box analysis – audit with full access to the web app. Such tests should be implemented at each development stage.
Use the Latest Soft Versions
Refrain from using old visions of the servers, operating systems, CMS, or libraries. Update the systems regularly and install the latest patches.
Use Source Code Analyzer
Source code analyzers can find code vulnerabilities and weak spots at the earliest stages. It is much easier (and cheaper) to fix bugs at the beginning of development. The majority of analyzers can protect your web app from widespread vulnerabilities.
If you're looking for a dedicated development team that works fast, bring valuable suggestions and maintain high quality – Uptech is the best choice. Scale up your team and meet your growth with our experienced developers.
Prevention of web app vulnerabilities is complicated, requiring a systematic and structured approach. A critical factor in sustaining web app vulnerability prevention is an experienced development team.
With 7 years of experience in various domains (fintech, healthcare, real estate), Uptech knows how to tackle all the app vulnerabilities in your app and make it secure.
Contact our team to talk about your project!
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Graal [ Generic Repository AnALyzer ] with the help of Perceval’s Git backend fetches commits from a Git repository and provides a mechanism to plug third party tools/libraries focused on source code analysis. As of now, Graal produces analysis related to code complexity, quality, dependencies, vulnerability and licensing. In this chapter, you will learn the basics of working with Graal, including how to retrieve source code related analysis with the help of some of it’s backends.
Before starting, ensure that you have Python3 ready, and the Graal module installed, as detailed in Installing GrimoireLab Python modules.
Note: As of now, Graal is not integrated in Grimoirelab toolchain, it will soon be added to support source code related metrics.
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This post provides an in-depth analysis of the inner workings of Gooligan, the infamous Android OAuth stealing botnet.
This is the second post of a series dedicated to the hunt and takedown of Gooligan that we did at Google, in collaboration with Check Point, in November 2016. The first post recounts Gooligan’s origin story and provides an overview of how it works. The final post discusses Gooligan’s various monetization schemas and its take down. As this post builds on the previous one, I encourage you to read it, if you haven’t done so already.
This series of posts is modeled after the talk I gave at Botconf in December 2017. Here is a re-recording of the talk:
You can also get the slides here but they are pretty bare.
Initially, users are tricked into installing Gooligan’s staging app on their device under one false pretense or another. Once this app is executed, it will fully compromise the device by performing the five steps outlined in the diagram below:
As emphasized in the chart above, the first four stages are mostly borrowed from Ghost Push. Gooligan authors main addition is the code needed to instrument the Play Store app using a complex injection process. This heavy code reuse initially made it difficult for us to separate Ghost Push samples from Gooligan ones. However, as soon as we had the full kill chain analyzed, we were able to write accurate detection signatures.
Most Gooligan samples hide their malicious payload in a fake image located in assets/close.png. This file is encrypted with a hardcoded [XOR encryption] function. This encryption is used to escape the signatures that detect the code that Gooligan borrows from previous malware. Encrypting malicious payload is a very old malware trick that has been used by Android malware since at least 2011.
Besides its encryption function, one of the most prominent Gooligan quirks is its weird (and poor) integrity verification algorithm. Basically, the integrity of the close.png file is checked by ensuring that the first ten bytes match the last ten. As illustrated in the diagram above, the oddest part of this schema is that the first five bytes (val 1) are compared with the last five, while bytes six through ten (val 2) are compared with the first five.
As alluded to earlier, Gooligan, like Snappea and Ghostpush, weaponizes the Kingroot exploit kit to gain root access. Kingroot operates in three stages: First, the malware gathers information about the phone that are sent to the exploit server. Next, the server looks up its database of exploits (which only affect Android 3.x and 4.x) and builds a payload tailored for the device. Finally, upon payload reception, the malware runs the payload to gain root access.
The weaponization of known exploits by cyber-criminals who lack exploit development capacity (or don't want to invest into it) is as old as crimeware itself. For example, DroidDream exploited Exploid and RageAgainstTheCage back in 2011. This pattern is common across every platform. For example, recently NSA-leaked exploit Eternal Blue was weaponized by the fake ransomware NoPetya. If you are interested in ransomware actors, check my posts on the subject.
Upon rooting the device, Gooligan patches the install-recovery.sh script to ensure that it will survive a factory reset. This resilience mechanism was the most problematic aspect of Gooligan, from a remediation perspective, because for the oldest devices, it only left us with OTA (over the air) update and device re-flashing as a way to remove it. This situation was due to the fact that very old devices don't have verified boot, as it was introduced in Android 4.4.
This difficult context, combined with the urgent need to help our users, led us to resort to a strategy that we rarely use: a coordinated takedown. The goal of this takedown was to disable key elements of the Gooligan infrastructure in a way that would ensure that the malware would be unable to work or update. As discussed in depth at the end of the post, we were able to isolate and take down Gooligan’s core server in less than a week thanks to a wide cross-industry effort. In particular, Kjell from the NorCert worked around the clock with us during the Thanksgiving holidays (thanks for all the help, Kjell!).
Play store app manipulation
The final step of the infection is the injection of a shared library into the Play store app. This shared library allows Gooligan to manipulate the Play store app to download apps and inject review.
We traced the injection code back to publicly shared code. The library itself is very bare: the authors added only the code needed to call Play store functions. All the fraud logic is in the main app, probably because the authors are more familiar with Java than C.
Looking at the set of devices infected during the takedown revealed that most of the affected devices were from India, Latin America, and Asia, as visible in the map above. 19% of the infections were from India, and the top eight countries affected by Gooligan accounted for more than 50% of the infections.
In term of devices, as shown in the barchart above, the infections are spread across all the big brands, with Samsung and Micromax being unsurprisingly the most affected given their market share. Micromax is the leading Indian phone maker, which is not very well known in the U.S. and Europe because it has no presence there. It started manufacturing Android One devices in 2014 and is selling in quite a few countries besides India, most notably Russia.
Buried deep inside Gooligan patient zero code, Check Point researchers Andrey Polkovnichenko, Yoav Flint Rosenfeld, and Feixiang He, who worked with us during the escalation, found the very unusual text string oversea_adjust_read_redis. This string led to the discovery of a Chinese blog post discussing load balancer configuration, which in turn led to the full configuration file of Gooligan backend services.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 #Ads API acl is_ads path_beg /overseaads/ use_backend overseaads if is_ads … #Payment API acl is_paystatis path_beg /overseapay/admin/ use_backend overseapaystatis if is_paystatis ... # Play install acl is_appstore path_beg /appstore/ use_backend overseapaystatis if is_appstore ...
Analyzing the exposed HAproxy configuration allowed us to pinpoint where the infrastructure was located and how the backend services were structured. As shown in the annotated configuration snippet above, the backend had API for click fraud, receiving payment from clients, and Play store abuse. While not visible above, there was also a complex admin and statistic-related API.
Combining the API endpoints and IPs exposed in the HAproxy configuration with our knowledge of Gooligan binary allowed us to reconstruct the infrastructure charted above. Overall, Gooligan was split into two main data centers: one in China and one overseas in the US, which was using Amazon AWS IPs. After the takedown, all the infrastructure ended up moving back to China.
Note: in the above diagram, the Fraud end-point appears twice. This is not a mistake: at Gooligan peak, its authors splited it out to sustain the load and better distribute the requests.
So, who is behind Gooligan? Based on this infrastructure analysis and other data, we strongly believe that it is a group operating from mainland China. Publicly, the group claims to be a marketing company, while under the hood it is mostly focused on running various fraudulent schema. The apparent authenticity of its front explains why some reputable companies ended up being scammed by this group. Bottom line: be careful who you buy ads or install from: If it is too good to be true...
In the final post of the serie, I discusses Gooligan various monetization schemas and its takedown. See you there!
Thank you for reading this post till the end! If you enjoyed it, don’t forget to share it on your favorite social network so that your friends and colleagues can enjoy it too and learn about Gooligan.
To get notified when my next post is online, follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, or LinkedIn. You can also get the full posts directly in your inbox by subscribing to the mailing list or via RSS.
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Exegesis of Virtual Hosts Hacking
This is the first paper (as far as we know) written on the topic of virtual hosts hacking. It covers basic skills such as passive discovery techniques and (almost) stealth active discovery techniques. It also presents possible scenarios of exploitation.
Exegesis of Virtual Hosts Hacking was an experiment. The topic about hacking virtual hosts has been covered very vaguely in the past. This is the reason why we decided to develop standard techniques which can be implemented into our personal toolkits. Of course this led to a paper which you can read now.
Investigating the virtual hosts of a web server is quite important when performing penetration testing. In order to gain access to a particular site, the attacker may not always go trough the fontdoor but choose to attack a different site fist (going through the backdoor if you like). This is where knowing about various virtual hosts is coming quite handy. The most interesting bit in the paper is the actual investigation we’ve conducted at the time of writing. I am not completely sure how many readers realise the types of security implications that are behind the shared virtual hosting architecture.
Here is a excerpt from the paper:
There is a lot that we can say about finding virtual hosts from a given IP address. Sometimes this task is straightforward, other times a bit of thinking is required. However, in general it is not a mission impossible.
During the last few years, domain name databases have emerged like mushrooms after a rainy day. This has certainly increased the awareness among security professionals about the possibility of using virtual hosts as backdoors when testing the security of a given organization. In reality, a good attacker will try to break into your organization by knocking on the not-so-obvious doors.
The process of getting all valuable virtual hosts usually falls into the passive, enumeration gathering practices and it is based on querying databases from the public sector. However, we will also look at some active enumeration techniques for finding virtual hosts.
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It is due to File saved on a network drive, which blocks service running in the background, preventing the upload of any document that contained certain text. Users can contact their IT network team to remove the block/file encryption to be able to upload the document.
- User can create a Word document locally and save the file on the Desktop without using shared network file, which allows uploading the document without an error.
- Upload file in Adobe Sign directly by fetching from the Network shared drive causes an error.
- When a user downloads the file from the Network shared drive and saves the file on a Desktop locally and tried to upload in Adobe Sign, error occurs.
- User A can share file that is unable to upload in Adobe Sign to another user B who is on a different network. When user B upload the file locally, no error occurs.
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Data flow: Accessing content, applications, and public Internet destinations using Safe Mode
This data flow describes how data travels between devices and a public Internet destination using Safe Mode. With Safe Mode,
CylanceGATEWAYblocks apps and users from accessing potentially malicious destinations and enforces an acceptable use policy (AUP) by intercepting DNS requests. The
CylanceGATEWAYcloud services evaluate each DNS query against the configured ACL rules and network protection settings, and then instructs the agent to allow or block the request in real time. If allowed, the DNS request completes normally over the bearer network. Otherwise, the
CylanceGATEWAYagent overrides the normal response and prevents access.
The above diagram shows the following sequence.
- TheCylanceGATEWAYagent has Safe Mode enabled and the user attempts to access an Internet destination.
- TheCylanceGATEWAYagent intercepts the DNS request that is made from the device and queries theCylanceGATEWAYcloud services with information from that request.
- The agent proxies the DNS request to the original DNS server.
- TheCylanceGATEWAYcloud services evaluate each query against the configured ACL rules and network protection settings, and then instructs the agent to allow or block the request.
- If access is allowed, the agent proxies the original DNS server's response back as the response to the original DNS request. Otherwise, the agent injects a DNS response that blocks access.
- The agent uses the results of an allowed DNS request to access an Internet destination.
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ANNFiD is an experimental forensic tool that identifies file types using neural networks. A GUI tool is used to train the network for new file types. It is intended to be used to determine the nature of corrupted files.
A Web-based document management system.
Unit tests for MariaDB and MySQL.
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Skip to Main Content
Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) is a collection of wireless mobile nodes that dynamically forms a network. Many routing protocols exist to find the shortest path using various resources. A novel approach based on fuzzy and rough set theory is described in this work for the selection of effective routing paths using minimum number of resources. This paper shows the rough set technique that can be employed to generate simple rules and to remove irrelevant attributes (resources) for evaluating the best routing paths. An example is also given to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed method.
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Access rules are used to manage traffic going through the NextGen Firewall X-Series. The firewall service is tightly integrated with Application Control, IPS, and the URL Filter service.
About Firewall Objects
Use firewall objects to reference specific networks, services, user groups, or connections when creating firewall access rules. You can use the firewall objects that are preconfigured on the NextGen Firewall X-Series or create custom firewall objects. The main purpose of firewall objects is to simplify creation and maintenance of access rules. Firewall objects are re-usable, which means that you can use one firewall object in as many rules as required. Each firewall object has a unique name that is more easily referenced than an IP address or a network range (see Firewall Objects).
Watch the video below for a short demo on how to configure access rules.
Access Rule Settings
For each access rule, you can configure the following settings:
- Name – The name of the access rule. This name is displayed on the BASIC > Active Connections, Recent Connections, and IPS Events pages.
- Description – An additional description field for the access rule.
- Action – Specifies how the firewall handles network traffic that matches the criteria of the rule. The following actions are available:
- Allow/Block – Allow: The firewall passes all network traffic that matches the access rule. Block: The firewall ignores all network traffic that matches the access rule and does not answer to any packet from this particular network session.
- Reset – The firewall dismisses all network traffic that matches the access rule. Matching network sessions are terminated by replying TCP-RST for TCP requests, ICMP Port Unreachable for UDP requests, and ICMP Denied by Filter for other IP protocols.
- DNAT – The firewall rewrites the destination IP address, network, or port to a predefined network address. Enter multiple destination IP addresses for load balancing or fallback configurations. To additionally forward to a different port, you can append the port number to the IP address. E.g., 172.16.0.10:80
- Redirect to Service – The firewall redirects the traffic locally to one of the following services that are running on the firewall: Caching DNS, SIP Proxy, HTTP Proxy, VPN, SSL VPN, or NTP.
Connection – Defines the outgoing interface and source (NAT) IP address for traffic matching the access rule. The following table lists the five default connection objects:Predefined Connection Object
Outgoing Interface and IP Address Determined By Default (SNAT) Change the source IP address of network packets to the IP address of the interface with the lowest metric according to the routing table. No SNAT Connection is established using the original source IP address. Use if simple routing with NAT is desired. SNAT with DSL IP Source NAT with the IP address of the DSL uplink. SNAT with 3G IP Source NAT with the IP address of the 3G uplink. SNAT with DHCP IP Source NAT with the IP address of the DHCP uplink.
You can also create custom connection objects. For example, multiple source IP addresses and interfaces can be specified in the same connection object. This allows failover or session-based balancing between up to four links. Balancing can be achieved using either a round robin or weighted random algorithm.
- Service – Describes the protocol and protocol/port range of the matching traffic. You can define one or more services for the access rule. You can select a predefined service object or create your own service objects (see: Service Objects).
- Source – The source IP address/netmask of the connection that is affected by the rule. You can select a network object or explicitly enter a specific IP address/netmask. You can also create your own network objects (see: Network Objects).
- Destination – The destination IP address/netmask of the connection that is affected by the rule. You can select a network object or explicitly enter a specific IP address/netmask.
You can adjust the bandwidth for all matching traffic:
- Bandwidth policies protect the available overall bandwidth of the Internet connection. Network traffic is classified and throttled or prioritized within each access rule. To adjust the overall bandwidth of each network interface, go to the NETWORK > IP Configuration page. There are eight predefined bandwidth policies. For additional information, see How to Configure Bandwidth Policies or QoS.
- Bandwidth policies for application traffic are configured in the application policy rules. For more information, see How to Configure an Application Policy.
For more granular control, you can configure access rules that are applied only to specific users or during specific times.
- Users can be used as a criteria for the rule. Use the Barracuda DC Agent to enable the firewall to be aware of which connection belongs to a specific user. You can also create users objects (see: User Objects).
- You can create access rules that are only active for specific times or dates. For example, you can create a time object that includes only Mondays and the hours of 8:00 am to 9:00 am. An access rule including this time object will only allow traffic during the time span defined in the time object (see: Schedule Objects).
You can also configure the following advanced firewall settings:
Interface Group – When creating an access rule, you can assign interfaces that the source address is allowed to use. Arriving packets of traffic that match the rule are then processed to the specified network interfaces according to the interface group settings. For more information, see How to Create Interface Groups.
- SYN Flood Protection – SYN flood protection protects against a common kind of DoS attack. The firewall can eliminate SYN flooding attacks for inbound or outbound attacks. The firewall completes the handshake and only then performs a handshake with the actual target. This helps to protect the target from SYN flood attacks. Disabling SYN flood protection can cause an overhead in packet transmission, but can speed up interactive protocols like SSH.
For optimal protection, SYN Flood Protection needs to know the Maximum Sessions and the Maximum Sessions per Source IP address that can be opened before the firewall takes measures. In Always On mode, the firewall compares these two values against the current session values, blocks the source IP if one of the two limits is exceeded, and frees the allocated session resources. In Automatic mode, the firewall switches to a different TCP handshake mode to protect the network.
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Trailrunner7 writes “Welcome to the age of targeted attacks, Mac users. Perhaps having grown tired of owning Windows machines around the world for the last few years, attackers have now taken up the challenge of going after Macs with the same kind of targeted attack tactics that have served them so well in the Windows world. Researchers have found a new attack that employs two separate pieces of malware, a malicious Word document and some techniques for maintaining persistence on compromised machines, and the campaign is specifically targeted at Mac users. The command-and-control domain involved in the attack is located in China and the attack exploits a three-year-old vulnerability in the way that Office for Mac handles certain Word files, according to researchers at AlienVault, who discovered and analyzed the attacks.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Memory Safety for Low-Level Software/Hardware Interactions
Source: University of Illinois
Systems that enforce memory safety for today's operating system kernels and other system software do not account for the behavior of low-level software/hardware interactions such as memory-mapped I/O, MMU configuration, and context switching. Bugs in such low-level interactions can lead to violations of the memory safety guarantees provided by a safe execution environment and can lead to exploitable vulnerabilities in system software. In this work, the authors present a set of program analysis and run-time instrumentation techniques that ensure that errors in these low-level operations do not violate the assumptions made by a safety checking system.
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What is Trojan:Win32/Formbook!MTB infection?
In this article you will locate about the definition of Trojan:Win32/Formbook!MTB and also its unfavorable impact on your computer. Such ransomware are a kind of malware that is specified by on the internet fraudulences to require paying the ransom money by a sufferer.
Most of the cases, Trojan:Win32/Formbook!MTB infection will instruct its sufferers to launch funds transfer for the purpose of counteracting the changes that the Trojan infection has actually introduced to the sufferer’s tool.
These alterations can be as follows:
- Executable code extraction;
- Creates RWX memory;
- The binary likely contains encrypted or compressed data.;
- Network activity detected but not expressed in API logs;
- Ciphering the papers located on the victim’s disk drive — so the victim can no more use the data;
- Preventing normal accessibility to the sufferer’s workstation;
The most typical channels where Trojan:Win32/Formbook!MTB Ransomware are injected are:
- By methods of phishing emails;
- As an effect of customer ending up on a resource that hosts a malicious software;
As soon as the Trojan is efficiently infused, it will either cipher the information on the victim’s computer or stop the device from operating in a correct fashion – while likewise positioning a ransom note that mentions the demand for the sufferers to impact the payment for the purpose of decrypting the files or restoring the data system back to the first problem. In a lot of instances, the ransom note will turn up when the client restarts the PC after the system has currently been harmed.
Trojan:Win32/Formbook!MTB distribution channels.
In different corners of the world, Trojan:Win32/Formbook!MTB expands by leaps and bounds. However, the ransom money notes as well as tricks of obtaining the ransom money quantity may differ relying on certain regional (local) settings. The ransom notes and tricks of obtaining the ransom money amount might vary depending on certain local (local) setups.
Faulty notifies concerning unlicensed software application.
In specific areas, the Trojans often wrongfully report having found some unlicensed applications made it possible for on the target’s gadget. The sharp after that demands the individual to pay the ransom.
Faulty declarations concerning unlawful content.
In nations where software piracy is less prominent, this technique is not as effective for the cyber frauds. Conversely, the Trojan:Win32/Formbook!MTB popup alert might wrongly claim to be stemming from a police institution and will certainly report having located child porn or other prohibited data on the gadget.
Trojan:Win32/Formbook!MTB popup alert might falsely claim to be deriving from a law enforcement organization and also will certainly report having located youngster pornography or other prohibited information on the gadget. The alert will similarly contain a requirement for the customer to pay the ransom.
File Info:crc32: E2AD571Cmd5: 7579e33ff9a14044b7692be83adc73b7name: cyber.jpgsha1: 5e5038c597b8a9ea9d44ed7981e7aea3ea5f26acsha256: 9107a8988792e1ec695a1d662a6b0f7668a6fbfb6352897c1f5bfe85addf2994sha512: 3504e72f115f92e91ec29c53f17c5279328ec74845b630efffa38c5064e8b6c6e9e2255be948954f4514302655a86f2ccb7ca42d5a45178986eea68e66776fbassdeep: 3072:q9opOJBsmAkCXt3W+2rPHTJzrPL+1/RH0CjPwHU:Rc0xX5WTrPHTVj+dx0EI0type: PE32 executable (GUI) Intel 80386, for MS Windows
Version Info:0: [No Data]
Trojan:Win32/Formbook!MTB also known as:
|Elastic||malicious (high confidence)|
|K7AntiVirus||Trojan ( 00536d121 )|
|K7GW||Trojan ( 00536d121 )|
|Invincea||ML/PE-A + Troj/Formbook-A|
|MAX||malware (ai score=100)|
|Cynet||Malicious (score: 100)|
|ESET-NOD32||a variant of Win32/Formbook.AA|
|SentinelOne||DFI – Malicious PE|
How to remove Trojan:Win32/Formbook!MTB virus?
Unwanted application has ofter come with other viruses and spyware. This threats can steal account credentials, or crypt your documents for ransom.
Reasons why I would recommend GridinSoft1
There is no better way to recognize, remove and prevent PC threats than to use an anti-malware software from GridinSoft2.
Download GridinSoft Anti-Malware.
You can download GridinSoft Anti-Malware by clicking the button below:
Run the setup file.
When setup file has finished downloading, double-click on the setup-antimalware-fix.exe file to install GridinSoft Anti-Malware on your system.
An User Account Control asking you about to allow GridinSoft Anti-Malware to make changes to your device. So, you should click “Yes” to continue with the installation.
Press “Install” button.
Once installed, Anti-Malware will automatically run.
Wait for the Anti-Malware scan to complete.
GridinSoft Anti-Malware will automatically start scanning your system for Trojan:Win32/Formbook!MTB files and other malicious programs. This process can take a 20-30 minutes, so I suggest you periodically check on the status of the scan process.
Click on “Clean Now”.
When the scan has finished, you will see the list of infections that GridinSoft Anti-Malware has detected. To remove them click on the “Clean Now” button in right corner.
Are Your Protected?
GridinSoft Anti-Malware will scan and clean your PC for free in the trial period. The free version offer real-time protection for first 2 days. If you want to be fully protected at all times – I can recommended you to purchase a full version:
If the guide doesn’t help you to remove Trojan:Win32/Formbook!MTB you can always ask me in the comments for getting help.
User Review( votes)
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Securing Ad Hoc Networks
Zhou, Lidong; Haas, Zygmunt
Ad hoc networks are a new wireless networking paradigm for mobile hosts. Unlike traditional mobile wireless networks, ad hoc networks do not rely on any fixed infrastructure. Instead, hosts rely on each other to keep the network connected. The military tactical and other security-sensitive operations are still the main applications of ad hoc networks, although there is a trend to adopt ad hoc networks for commercial uses due to their unique properties. One main challenge in design of these networks is their vulnerability to security attacks. In this paper, we study the threats an ad hoc network faces and the security goals to be achieved. We identify the new challenges and opportunities posed by this new networking environment and explore new approaches to secure its communication. In particular, we take advantage of the inherent redundancy in ad hoc networks --- multiple routes between nodes --- to defend routing against denial of service attacks. We also use replication and new cryptographic schemes, such as threshold cryptography, to build a highly secure and highly available key management service, which forms the core of our security framework.
computer science; technical report
Previously Published As
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The constraints of the policy in the traffic limiting policy include quintuple, time period, user identity, and application protocol.
When using the optical bypass interface, the Bypass link has two working modes, automatic mode and forced mode.
In the application scenario of the virtual firewall technology, the more common service is to provide rental services to the outside. If the virtual firewall VFW1 is leased to enterprise A and the virtual firewall VFW2 is leased to enterprise B, what is the following statement incorrect?
What are the scenarios in which the USG series firewall service port sends gratuitous ARPs when the following configurations are performed?
In the application scenario of IPSec traversal by NAT, the active initiator of the firewall must configure NAT traversal, and the firewall at the other end can be configured without NAT traversal.
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Site Info for www.geni.us
The language for www.geni.us website is en (claimed), en (detected).
Geniuslink - URL Shortener for Creators and Affiliates
Geniuslink is the world’s most intelligent URL shortener. Create links that dynamically route users to different destinations based off their devices, operating systems, countries, and even date of click.
www.geni.us has geni.us as domain name.
Character encoding is a type of encoding scheme that assigns a number to each character for digital representation, and it is used to represent a repertoire of characters in textual data computation, storage, and transmission.
UTF-8 is a character encoding of variable widths that is used in electronic communication.
HTTP compression is a feature that can be applied to web servers and clients to maximize transfer speed and bandwidth usage.
The most popular compressions on the web today are Gzip and Brotli.
Content Security Policy (CSP)
The Content Security Policy (CSP) is a computer security standard designed to avoid cross-site scripting (XSS), clickjacking, and other code injection attacks caused by malicious content being executed in the context of a trusted web page.
The X-Frame-Options HTTP response header can be used to to avoid click-jacking attacks by preventing the content to be included in other websites.
JQuery UI is a collection of GUI widgets, animated visual effects, and themes implemented with jQuery, Cascading Style Sheets, and HTML.
Nginx is a web server that can also be used as a reverse proxy, load balancer, mail proxy and HTTP cache.
Responsive Web Design
Responsive Web Design (RWD) is a web design approach that ensures web pages look good on a variety of devices and window or screen sizes.
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The Android.Fakeapp Trojan has been infecting Google’s mobile platform for ages in different forms, and one of its latest variants mimics Uber’s interface. According to Symantec, which discovered the new variant after looking at several, the Trojan pops up on screen in regular intervals in an effort to fool you into typing your phone number and password. When you press enter, it sends your log-in credentials to a remote server: the Trojan’s creators could then use your log-in to compromise your other accounts or to sell them to fellow hackers on the black market.
This Fakeapp variant doesn’t stop at presenting a copy of Uber’s log-in screen. To give you a false sense of security and to prevent you from becoming suspicious and changing your password too soon, it even loads a screen from the legitimate app that shows your location after you press enter. It apparently does that by deep linking to a URL in the real application that starts up Ride Request activity using your location as the pick-up point.
Submitted by: Arnfried Walbrecht
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Toward trustworthy recommender systems
ACM Transactions on Internet Technology
Publicly-accessible adaptive systems such as collaborative recommender systems present a security problem. Attackers, who cannot be readily distinguished from ordinary users, may inject biased profiles in an attempt to force a system to "adapt" in a manner advantageous to them. Such attacks may lead to a degradation of user trust in the objectivity and accuracy of the system. Recent research has begun to examine the vulnerabilities and robustness of different collaborative recommendation
... ues in the face of "profile injection" attacks. In this paper, we outline some of the major issues in building secure recommender systems, concentrating in particular on the modeling of attacks and their impact on various recommendation algorithms. We introduce several new attack models and perform extensive simulation-based evaluation to show which attack models are most successful against common recommendation techniques. We consider both the overall impact on the ability of the system to make accurate predictions, as well as the degree of knowledge about the system required by the attacker to mount a realistic attack. Our study shows that both user-based and item-based algorithms are highly vulnerable to specific attack models, but that hybrid algorithms may provide a higher degree of robustness. Finally, we develop a novel classification-based framework for detecting attack profiles and show that it can be effective in neutralizing some attack types.
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In 2016, Avanan pioneered the concept of securing Microsoft 365 via API. Back then, customers needed to be educated about this novel approach. Now, it’s becoming mainstream, with scores of new companies popping up all the time, claiming to provide superior security via API.
- In the booming API email security space, there are two modes: prevention and detection
- Detection can only respond to malicious emails and attachments, allowing them into the environment before removing it
- Detection is also limited in the type of features it can offer
- Prevention can prevent malicious emails from reaching the inbox, and offer a slew of other, critical features
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Bulk IP lookup allows you to determine the location of multiple IP addresses in one go. In most cases, you can perform a bulk IP lookup for thousands of IP addresses with a single query. The lookup results reveal IP geolocation data, including:
- The geographical location (i.e., country, region, city, and latitude and longitude coordinates)
- Time zone
- Internet service provider (ISP)
- Type of Internet connection
- Autonomous System (AS) details
- Domain names resolving to the IP address
IP geolocation data from a bulk IP lookup can provide different insights for organizations, helping them perform essential business functions. This post tackles the top 5 use cases of bulk IP lookup.
Top 5 Uses of Bulk IP Lookup
With thousands of cyber attacks launched every day, the cybersecurity sector needs all the help it can get. Thousands if not millions of malware and phishing emails are sent daily, reflecting the aggressiveness of cyber attackers.
With insights from IP geolocation data, cybersecurity professionals can possibly obtain the locations of entities communicating with their networks.
Which IP addresses can be traced to regions that are known cybercrime hotbeds? Which are located in areas that the organizations don’t serve? The answers to questions like these can help security teams detect and prevent suspicious activities.
Bulk IP lookup also helps cybercrime investigators better understand the malicious infrastructures threat actors use. For instance, geolocation data was used to gather context around Emotet, Trickbot, and Dridex command-and-control (C&C) servers. It helped identify the locations of the servers, ISPs, and domains that resolved to the malicious IP addresses.
Fraudsters have gone digital and can be lumped together with cybercriminals. Even so, anti-fraud technologies are also being developed to better detect and prevent fraud, such as those involving card-not-present (CNP) transactions.
Bulk IP lookup tools feed data into fraud detection systems by checking for inconsistencies in transaction location. Below are some examples of how IP geolocation data can help.
- Fraud prevention systems compare a customer’s logged location (i.e., residential address on file or previously verified locations) against the area where the current transaction is being made. If the transaction is done in a never-before-logged place, it should probably be denied.
- A bulk IP lookup can detect IP addresses that are from high-risk areas where cybercrime mostly originate. While blocking addresses by country could be restrictive for businesses, inspecting them and the data they are requesting for would be prudent.
Some regulations may require organizations to determine the locations of website visitors and clients. Otherwise, they could face penalties. User privacy regulations are perfect examples of this. Failure to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), for instance, can cause businesses to pay a fine of as much as €20 million.
Therefore, validating website visitors’ locations through bulk IP lookups helps ensure that privacy laws are not violated. Organizations can offer different content based on the privacy regulations of a visitor’s country or state.
Content personalization is not only used to comply with a country’s privacy laws. It could also mean displaying website content in visitors’ local languages and using their local currencies.
Ultimately, this practice enhances the website visitors’ user experience, thereby telling search engines like Google that the sites should be ranked higher in certain locations. A bulk IP lookup can make content personalization more precise, as it provides detailed geographical data.
Location-Based Marketing and Advertising
Location-based marketing and advertising are among the most popular uses of bulk IP lookups. Marketers employ IP geolocation to segment their customers and send them geo-targeted advertisements.
Businesses also use geolocation data with geofencing technology to send coupons and sale alerts to customers who physically go near their stores. Such a strategy is an effective way of grabbing customer attention.
Bulk IP lookups can benefit organizations in several ways, including fraud and cybercrime protection, regulatory compliance, and marketing.
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Calls SDK for Android offers a logging system that allows you to keep track of a number of events and activities while running your app. You can closely monitor the operation of the Calls SDK and improve debug efficiency using our log system.
How to enable logging in the SDK
To display log output to the console, specify log level by using the
setLoggerLevel() method as shown below:
Log levels can be used to control log outputs. If logging is enabled at the specified log level, it also enables logging at all lower levels. The priority level of logs are in the following order: LOGGER_NONE (0) < LOGGER_ERROR (1) < LOGGER_WARNING (2) < LOGGER_INFO (3).
List of logger levels
Not used for writing log outputs.
Logs that represent the failure of the Calls SDK execution.
Logs that indicate potentially problematic situations.
Logs that track the general events of the Calls SDK.
The log output follows the general Android log format.
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WordPress is a free online Open source content Managed system focused on PHP and MySQL. It is one the powerful and most used blogging tool.As there is too many up’s and down’s in WordPress usage, it requires a security improvement, so the penetration test is essential to find the vulnerabilities and to secure you WordPress powered blog.Security researcher Daniel Cid says, in 2016 At least 15,769 WordPress websites – and probably more – have been compromised. With Sucuri report almost 78% of infected websites were built on the WordPress platform.
WordPress penetration testing with WPScan
WPscan is a WordPress vulnerability scanner created by Ryan Dewhurst and it was sponsored by Sucuri.It comes pre-installed with BackBox Linux, Kali Linux, Pentoo, SamuraiWTF, BlackArch and it will not support windows.With Wpscan we can enumerate theme, plugins, users, HTTP proxy and Wpscan will not check the source code of the page.To Enumerate WordPress version, theme and plugin
wpscan –url https://tutorials.gbhackers.com/test/ –enumerate pwpscan –url http://tutorials.gbhackers.com/test/ –enumerate tTo Enumerate WordPress users
wpscan –url http://tutorials.gbhackers.com/test/ –enumerate u To launch a brute-force attack
wpscan –url http://tutorials.gbhackers.com/test/ –wordlist /root/Desktop/password.txt –username kcwtoTo Enumerate timthumbs
If you are still using TimThumb, even after a very serious vulnerability, you have one more reason to be concerned.wpscan –url http://tutorials.gbhackers.com/test/ –enumerate ttTo store Output in a separate File
wpscan –url http://tutorials.gbhackers.com/test/ –debug-output 2>debug.logPenetration testing is an art and the active analysis depends upon the security researcher, here we evaluated some of the basic and important checks that need to be with the WordPress powered website. You Can find more Infosec resources and security news in our Website https://gbhackers.com
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This script is (C) 2002-2013 Tenable Network Security, Inc.
The remote router has a denial of service vulnerability.
The remote device appears to be a Cisco 12000 Series router.
According to its version number, it is vulnerable to a denial of
service issue. Forcing it to send a large number of ICMP unreachable
packets can slow down throughput. A remote attacker could use this to
degrade the performance of the network.
See also :
Upgrade to the latest version of the software, or disable/rate
limit the sending of ICMP unreachable packets.
Risk factor :
Medium / CVSS Base Score : 5.0
CVSS Temporal Score : 4.3
Public Exploit Available : true
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Users running XP SP2, Vista or even a third-party firewall client such as ZoneAlarm have probably seen this warning: “… such and such program attempted to make a connection to the Internet and was blocked.” This is supposed to create a warm-and-fuzzy feeling for users. Here is messaging indicating that some shady application running on your computer attempted to do something sketchy, but the clever security system caught it and prevented harm. The reality is a bit different.
First to be clear: firewalls are very important for defense-in-depth. (Although there are alternative security paradigms such as the Jericho forum that seeks to dispense with them altogether.) Main function of a firewall is to block inbound connections, in other words stop other computers “out there” in the wild-wild web from attempting to access resources on the machine “here.” The firewall used this way is the first line of defense; even when the access attempt seems harmless– “surely it would be denied!”– there is no reason to take risks. Exploitable bugs in the access-control software have caused machines to be compromised simply by connecting to them. The further upstream one can detect and
But outbound blocking is an altogether different function. In this case, there is some software already running inside the trusted boundary, admitted into the inner sanctum. The firewall in this case prevents that code from communicating with the outside world. What purpose does that serve? With the exception of parental controls– which is rarely the intended effect– the answer is “not much.” The reason is that blocking assumes malicious intent on the part of the application. Perhaps it is trying to connect to some nefarious host out there and do something dubious, such as ship private user documents off to Russia or download more malware. The problem is once malicious code is running with the same privilege as user, it is very hard to cut off all of the communication channels to the outside world for one basic reasons: processes and applications do not have strong identity.
While the host-based firewall attempts to create the illusion that application X is highly-regarded and application Y is not to be trusted with talking to the outside world, in reality it has a very hard time sorting out between them. This is because applications are not intended to be an isolation boundary in an operating system. They are not protected against each other. Simple example: if Y is not allowed to open outbound connection, it can often launch a copy of X to do the same thing instead or prior to Vista subvert the internal workings of X. For “X” substitute Internet Explorer– launching a URL is sending information to a website. In fact malware authors already implemented a more reliable form of this strategy: when they need to phone home, for say downloading a new copy of the botnet software, they use the Background Intelligent Transfer System (BITS) as documented by Symantec. BITS is a trusted operating-system component and has no problem by-passing the firewall, even when acting under orders from malware. There was a minor stir around this when news initially surfaced, including articles at the Register and BBC. In fact it should have been greeted with a yawn were it not for the firewall itself setting unrealistic expectations around what can be accomplished in the way of outbound blocking.
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The Aquis Water Network Management Leak Detection System (LDS) has been designed with the ultimate model-based engine for water pipelines. LDS allows near real-time identification of leaks and bursts on transmission networks and the estimation of the leak volume based on the mass balance methodology.
The Aquis Water Network Management LDS provides several customizable options for checking incoming measurements and emulating missing or faulty data. Furthermore, users have access to a straightforward configuration of the system that allows a clear presentation of results via the comprehensive graphical user interface.
Leak alarms are stored in the LDS event log and may be transferred to the SCADA system by means of the LDS-SCADA intercommunication.
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a. Complete the fields.
b. Click the Next button.
After you log on or create your account, the filtering level page displays.
10. Select a filtering level and click the Next button.
The Setup is complete page displays.
11. Click the Take me to the status screen button.
The Status page displays. Parental controls are now set up for the router.
12. To enable Parental Controls, click the Enable Live Parental Controls.
After you set up and enable Parental Controls, you can change the web filtering level for each device on the
network through the network map page of the genie app.
Allow or Block Access to Your Network
You can use access control to block or allow access to your network.
To set up access control:
1. Launch a web browser from a computer or wireless device that is connected to the network.
2. Enter http://www.routerlogin.net.
A login window opens.
3. Enter the router user name and password.
The user name is admin. The default password is password. The user name and password are case-sensitive.
The BASIC Home page displays.
Control Access to the Internet
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Cognitive Radios (CR) are designed to dynamically reconfigure their transmission and/or reception parameters to utilize the bandwidth efficiently. With a rapidly fluctuating radio environment, spectrum management becomes crucial for cognitive radios. In a Cognitive Radio Ad Hoc Network (CRAHN) setting, the sensing and transmission times of the cognitive radio play a more important role because of the decentralized nature of the network. They have a direct impact on the throughput. Due to the tradeoff between throughput and the sensing time, finding optimal values for sensing time and transmission time is difficult. In this thesis, a method is proposed to improve the throughput of a CRAHN by dynamically changing the sensing and transmission times. To simulate the CRAHN setting, ns-2, the network simulator with an extension for CRAHN is used. The CRAHN extension module implements the required Primary User (PU) and Secondary User (SU) and other CR functionalities to simulate a realistic CRAHN scenario. First, this work presents a detailed analysis of various CR parameters, their interactions, their individual contributions to the throughput to understand how they affect the transmissions in the network. Based on the results of this analysis, changes to the system model in the CRAHN extension are proposed. Instantaneous throughput of the network is introduced in the new model, which helps to determine how the parameters should adapt based on the current throughput. Along with instantaneous throughput, checks are done for interference with the PUs and their transmission power, before modifying these CR parameters. Simulation results demonstrate that the throughput of the CRAHN with the adaptive sensing and transmission times is significantly higher as compared to that of non-adaptive parameters.
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Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) is a label based switching technique initiated by Internet Engineering Task Force to bring the speed of layer 2 switching to layer 3. Its label based switching technique allows routers to make the forwarding decision based on the contents of label instead of performing a complex route lookup table. Furthermore it allows explicit routing to overcome links and nodes failure in the network. For fault recovery multiprotocol label switching has two domains called Protection Switching and Rerouting. Explicit routing, in it the alternative paths are pre-established through MPLS core router (ingress node).
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Learning Cyberattack Patterns With Active Honeypots
NAVAL POSTGRADUATE SCHOOL MONTEREY CA MONTEREY United States
Pagination or Media Count:
Honeypots can detect new attacks and vulnerabilities like zero-day exploits, based on an attackers behavior. Existing honeypots, however, are typically passive in nature and poor at detecting new and complex attacks like those carried out by state-sponsored actors. Deception is a commonly used tactic in conventional military operations, but it is rarely used in cyberspace. In this thesis, we implemented active honeypots, which incorporate deception into honeypot responses. In five phases of testing, we incorporated deception techniques such as fake files, defensive camouflage, delays, and false excuses into a Web honeypot built with SNARE and TANNER software, and an SSH honeypot built with Cowrie software. Our experiments sought to investigate how cyberattackers respond to the deception techniques. Our results showed that most attackers performed only vulnerability scanning and fingerprinting of our honeypots. Some appeared to be performing horizontal scanning, accessing both honeypots in the same phase. We found that the attackers were primarily non-interactive and did not respond to customized deception. We also observed that attackers who established a non-interactive session might be unable to exit the session without external intervention. Thus, we can delay to penalize these attackers. We also discovered that some attackers used unusual means of transferring files to the SSH server, and we recommend exploring how deception can be used against such techniques.
- Computer Systems
- Military Operations, Strategy and Tactics
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With the influx of attachments with dangerous content, there is a need for a service that can determine whether or not an attachment is safe to open. Anti-virus scans on attachments are not sufficient these days, and are easy to work around, especially considering how rampant ransomware is, which encrypts your data, including backups, and requires a ransom payment to unlock. The only sure way to see if a suspicious attachment should be opened on your network is to actually open it on dedicated systems, see what it does, and give it a score. This is where ContentCatcher Detonator comes in.
Most malicious attachments are intelligent and check certain machine parameters before they execute to prevent giving themselves away easily. These parameters are ineffective against Detonator since the systems used to execute the files are no different than a normal workplace pc. After the file is executed, its actions are scored by Detonator. If the malware performs high risk actions such as “phoning home” to a command and control server or creating registry keys in run or runonce, then it is given a high score in our system and sent to your quarantine.
ContentCatcher Detonator requires no work on the client side. If our email filtering service is currently in use on your network, Detonator is a simple add on.
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K L University
Wireless networks usually consist of sensors perceiving data and sinks gather the data. However, it is complex for such approaches about mobility to develop the offered multipath routing algorithms and also for the mobile sinks to function as gateways to join with infrastructure. To look up the shortcomings, Unreliability at the broadcast-level can result in imperfect flooding coverage or extreme re-flooding, creating path maintenance either unreliable or costly. The authors present Concentrated Dissimilate Algorithm, a very simple algorithm that strengthens the reliability of spreading in such networks. Their algorithm requires only limited information, and resides as a service between the MAC layer and network layer, taking information from both.
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Finding Malware on a Web Scale
- 1.7k Downloads
Over the last several years, we have created a series of techniques designed to detect and prevent malicious software or malware. These techniques focus on detecting malware that infects web pages. Much of this research has been done in close collaboration with a major search engine, Bing, which is interested in making sure it does not present malicious results to its users, independently of the user’s browser, location, or operating system. As such, detection needs to be as general and wide-reaching as possible. While some of the techniques summarized below can be deployed within a web browser, our primary deployment model involves crawling the web in an effort to find and blacklist malicious pages.
In the rest of this paper, we will summarize three related projects: Nozzle, Zozzle, and Rozzle. Nozzle is a runtime malware detector. Zozzle is a a mostly static malware detector. Finally, Rozzle is a de-cloacking technique that amplifies both.
- Kolbitsch, C., Livshits, B., Zorn, B., Seifert, C.: Rozzle: De-cloaking internet malware. In: IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (May 2012)Google Scholar
- Ratanaworabhan, P., Livshits, B., Zorn, B.: Nozzle: A defense against heap-spraying code injection attacks. In: Proceedings of the Usenix Security Symposium (August 2009)Google Scholar
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- Ph.D. Candidate
- Department of Computer Science
- The University of Texas at Austin
Ensuring the reliability of high-level programs is becoming more difficult with the ever-increasing complexity of computing systems. Although automatic program analysis tools have found great success, they have limited scope because they target specific kinds of undesirable behavior, such as buffer overflows. Incorrect compiler transformations and the absence of analysis systems for some high-level languages suggest that a lowest-common-denominator strategy, namely machine-code analysis, will facilitate extensive program verification.
For this dissertation project, we are developing a general framework for the mechanical verification of software by analyzing its corresponding machine code. To this end, we are specifying a formal and executable model of the x86 instruction set architecture (ISA) using the ACL2 theorem-proving system. Notably, this model can be used for the functional verification of user-mode as well as supervisor-mode programs. This project will provide the capability to mechanically verify a wide variety of properties of x86 programs, including their correctness with respect to behavior, security, and resource requirements.
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The term “Virtualization Technology” is generally used in relation to server virtualization, software virtualization, or hypervisor virtualization. There are many ways that VTT can be employed. Some of these include:
In a large organization or many big companies, the ability to reduce costs, improve efficiency and provide security is one of the major and essential factors. And we know that System Integrator is only the business of getting different servers to work together. The first step of this process is to assign each server to a manager. This enables management to assign responsibility for maintenance and integration tasks to those who have the most relevant experience and knowledge.
What is Virtualization Technology
In most of the well-reputed companies, the same resources are used to perform many tasks. For example, if an individual is an IT professional and is trying to reduce their costs. It is likely that the teamwork in the virtualization technology assigned to them would be used to perform all of the tasks required by the management.
In a rapidly growing company, there are often many projects that must be completed at an exact time, but the resources are limited. At times, it can become necessary to assign an individual or a small group of individuals to perform tasks on a project.
But without a framework or a proper strategy, these projects could be easily compromised. In order to prevent this from happening, resource-light management teams have been created.
Security is one of the major concerns for a large organization. When security issues are not addressed at an early stage. It can cause a loss of reputation and revenue. As such, it is necessary to have a system in place which can be used as a reference to make certain that the security issues are being dealt with properly.
Virtualization Technology Uses:
Nowadays, Visualization technology is becoming most popular and increasing at a very fast rate. This is when multiple companies have access to the same resources. This increases their capability to collaborate on projects and makes their efforts much more effective for the customers.
In most instances, a development process is implemented by companies in order to make sure that their applications are compatible with other open-source projects. In other cases, a new feature or product can be added to an existing application.
One of the most common problems that most companies experience is the increase in overall cost when additional resources are added to existing infrastructure. This can be used to further reduce the overall cost of the infrastructure by reducing the costs associated with implementing that infrastructure.
In some instances, a large company may require the capability to run a large number of systems concurrently, and virtualization technology allows the company to achieve this.
It has been proven over the years that the majority of the cost savings experienced by large companies is gained through the use of shared services. But there are numerous other aspects to consider. The use of virtualization technology reduces the operating costs that would otherwise be associated with installing and running the applications.
In larger businesses, most of the applications are in fact housed in the same environment. It is important that the application is able to share resources with other applications.
Virtualization technology is one of the most cost-effective solutions available to businesses that are able to use various utilization requirements. With the use of cost-effective practices, business owners can achieve higher productivity, lower costs, and increased time to market.
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To support the preparation of participants in the different modules to the Cyber Defence Monitoring Suite, the Centre provides an online web-based course on network and log monitoring. This course is open to all individuals from NATO CCDCOE Sponsoring Nations, Contributing Participants as well as NATO bodies. This course can be accessed through the NATO e-Learning Joint Advanced Distributed Learning Portal.
- List the ways of physically connecting a sensor to a monitored network
- Describe the differences between an NIDS and an NIPS
- Deploy an NIDS and NIPS sensor on a network
- List the pros and cons of well-known network monitoring solutions such as Snort, Suricata, Bro and Moloch
- Describe the BSD syslog protocol, its shortscomings and recommended solutions for log collection
- List the event logging formats and log collection tools of Windows
- Describe the purpose of log correlation and the functionalities of the Simple Event Correlator (SEC), which can be used for that
- List various log analysis and data visualization tools
- Describe the purpose and the pros and cons of security information and event management (SIEM) systems
The TA of this module is the same TA, as the targeted TA of the different modules to the Cyber Defence Monitoring Suite.
- Network Monitoring
- Instructions about the sensor placement in a Network Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems (NIDS/NIPS) are provided. Common network monitoring solutions are introduced as well
- Log Monitoring
- First, the BSD syslog protocol, used for event logging, is described. Then, tools and solutions for log collection, log correlation and log analysis are introduced
The requirements of the Cyber Defence Monitoring Suite modules apply.
The course can be accessed through the NATO e-Learning Joint Advanced Distributed Learning portal and is available to all users of the portal. Once registered, users may access the course by navigating to the ‘Centres of Excellence’ -> ‘COE Cyber Defence’ -> ‘Network and Log Monitoring’ course listing.
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1. A generic term used to describe malicious software such as viruses, Trojan horses, spyware, and malicious active content. (McAfee.com, accessed 15 Nov 2010).
2. [Malicious] software such as viruses or Trojans designed to cause damage or disruption to a computer system. (AFDD 3-13).
3. Malicious software that secretly accesses a computer system without the owner's informed consent. A general term to mean a variety of forms of hostile, intrusive, or annoying software or program code, including computer viruses, worms, Trojan horses, spyware, most rootkits, and other malicious software or program. (Wikipedia).
Source: Terms & Definitions of Interest for DoD Counterintelligence Professionals, Office of the National Counterintelligence, https://www.dni.gov/files/NCSC/documents/ci/CI_Glossary.pdf
3. Comes from the terms "malicious" and "software". Generic term for software which carries out harmful functions on a computer. This comprises amongst others viruses, worms, Trojan horses.
Source: Information Assurance Situation in Switzerland and Internationally, Reporting and Analysis Centre for Information Assurance MELANI, https://www.newsd.admin.ch/newsd/message/attachments/11945.pdf
4. Software or firmware intended to perform an unauthorized process that will have adverse impact on the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of a system. For example, a virus, worm, Trojan horse, or other code-based entity that infects a host. Spyware and some forms of adware are also examples of malware.
Source: Election Terminology Glossary - Draft, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), https://pages.nist.gov/ElectionGlossary/
5. Malicious software; software designed to interfere with a computer’s normal functioning (e.g., viruses, Trojan horses, spyware) (Merriam-Webster).
Source: Independent Panel on Internet Voting, British Columbia, https://elections.bc.ca/docs/recommendations-report.pdf
6. Malicious types of software such as adware, spyware, viruses.
Source: An Investigation into Foreign Entities Who Are Targeting Servicemembers and Veterans Online, Vietnam Veterans of America, https://vva.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/VVA-Investigation.pdf
7. Software that compromises the operation of a system by performing an unauthorized function or process.
Source: Explore Terms: A Glossary of Common Cybersecurity Terminology, National Initiative for Cybersecurity Careers and Studies (NICCS), https://niccs.us-cert.gov/about-niccs/glossary
8. A computer program that is clandestinely placed onto a computer with the intent to compromise the privacy, accuracy, or reliability of the computer’s data, applications, or operating system.
Source: U.S. Cyberspace Solarium Commission, March 2020, https://subscriber.politicopro.com/f/?id=00000170-c638-d8f7-a7f1-f63b33510000
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Google Play Trojan Infects, Then Attacks
A new Android Trojan that disguises itself as the Google Play store app is being used to send distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and SMS spam.
Doctor Web, the Russian antivirus software firm that discovered the Trojan, said it was very versatile and could impact infected users and recipients of malicious communications in a variety of ways.
"Upon receipt of such a command, [the Trojan] starts to send data packets at the specified address," Doctor Web wrote on its blog. "If the malicious program is required to send an SMS, the command message will contain the message text and the number to which it should be sent.
"Activities of the Trojan can lower performance of the infected handset and affect the well-being of its owner, as access to the Internet and SMS are chargeable services. Should the device send messages to premium numbers, malicious activities will cost the user even more."
In order to feign legitimacy, the app will take users to the official Google app store when they click on it. Doctor Web noted that it's unclear exactly how users become infected, but believes it relies on tricking users via social engineering in order to spread.
Once users become infected with this particular Trojan, they can see their bill skyrocket if criminals choose to clandestinely send premium text messages, and they can be enlisted into DDoS attacks and spam campaigns.
Android users can protect their phones from a variety of threats by downloading apps only from the official Google Play store and keeping track of which applications are given critical permissions.
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There are many reasons to block websites. Some websites contain a virus and harmful content. When a user clicks on the link to the website virus enters in the user’s computer. Virus automatically starts spreading and infects other data and files present on the computer. To be safe from this kind of threat user need to Block Websites of this kind. Blocking Website is the best way to be protected from hackers and intruders. One should know How to block a website. There are many ways of website blocking. Website blocking can be done on a specific browser, entire OS, or on the router network. Among all the method of Website Blocking, blocking at specific browser level is very simple. Blocking website at browser level is simple, fast and easiest way. Different methods are followed to block a site on different browsers.
Steps to block a website on Internet Explorer:
• Open the browser and go to Internet tool option.
• After that choose Security tab and there choose red restricted sites based icon. There click site button which is present below the icon.
• In the popup, manually write the website URL one by one you want to block. Click Add after writing the name of each site.
• When done click close and click Ok.
• Now, these sites are blocked and if a user clicks these sites link by mistake Internet Explorer gives a warning message.
Taking precautions is the best way to get protected from the attackers and hackers. Sometime Hacker uses this technique to hack someone personal system and steal information. They send website link by email or any method when a user clicks it they start their procedure. block websites does not require any qualification or professional skills. It is very simple and easy. There are many tutorial and videos available on the internet that teaches to How to block a website.
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What is Trojan:Win32/Comisproc infection?
In this short article you will find concerning the interpretation of Trojan:Win32/Comisproc as well as its adverse impact on your computer system. Such ransomware are a kind of malware that is clarified by online frauds to demand paying the ransom money by a sufferer.
It is better to prevent, than repair and repent!
In the majority of the instances, Trojan:Win32/Comisproc ransomware will certainly advise its victims to initiate funds transfer for the purpose of neutralizing the changes that the Trojan infection has introduced to the target’s gadget.
These modifications can be as complies with:
- Executable code extraction. Cybercriminals often use binary packers to hinder the malicious code from reverse-engineered by malware analysts. A packer is a tool that compresses, encrypts, and modifies a malicious file’s format. Sometimes packers can be used for legitimate ends, for example, to protect a program against cracking or copying.
- Unconventionial language used in binary resources: Spanish (Modern);
- Uses Windows utilities for basic functionality;
- Installs itself for autorun at Windows startup. There is simple tactic using the Windows startup folder located at:
C:\Users\[user-name]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\StartMenu\Programs\Startup. Shortcut links (.lnk extension) placed in this folder will cause Windows to launch the application each time [user-name] logs into Windows.
The registry run keys perform the same action, and can be located in different locations:
- Network activity detected but not expressed in API logs. Microsoft built an API solution right into its Windows operating system it reveals network activity for all apps and programs that ran on the computer in the past 30-days. This malware hides network activity.
- Attempts to disable UAC.
User Account Control or just UAC is a part of the Windows security system which prevents apps from making unwanted changes on PC.
UAC includes several technologies 1:
- File and egistry Virtualization;
- Same-desktop Elevation;
- Filtered Token;
- User Interface Privilege Isolation;
- Protected Mode Internet Explorer;
- Installer Detection;
- The sample wrote data to the system hosts file.;
- Anomalous binary characteristics. This is a way of hiding virus’ code from antiviruses and virus’ analysts.
- Unusual version info supplied for binary;
- Uses suspicious command line tools or Windows utilities;
- Ciphering the papers found on the target’s hard disk — so the target can no longer utilize the data;
- Preventing regular access to the victim’s workstation. This is the typical behavior of a virus called locker. It blocks access to the computer until the victim pays the ransom.
The most common channels whereby Trojan:Win32/Comisproc are injected are:
- By means of phishing e-mails;
- As a repercussion of customer winding up on a source that organizes a malicious software program;
As quickly as the Trojan is successfully injected, it will certainly either cipher the information on the target’s PC or avoid the device from operating in an appropriate fashion – while likewise placing a ransom note that mentions the need for the targets to effect the settlement for the function of decrypting the papers or recovering the data system back to the first problem. In many instances, the ransom money note will certainly show up when the customer reboots the PC after the system has actually already been harmed.
Trojan:Win32/Comisproc circulation networks.
In different edges of the world, Trojan:Win32/Comisproc grows by jumps as well as bounds. However, the ransom money notes and also techniques of obtaining the ransom amount might differ relying on particular local (regional) setups. The ransom money notes as well as tricks of obtaining the ransom quantity might differ depending on specific neighborhood (regional) settings.
Faulty notifies about unlicensed software.
In specific locations, the Trojans frequently wrongfully report having actually identified some unlicensed applications allowed on the victim’s device. The alert after that requires the customer to pay the ransom money.
Faulty declarations regarding unlawful web content.
In nations where software program piracy is less preferred, this technique is not as efficient for the cyber fraudulences. Additionally, the Trojan:Win32/Comisproc popup alert might wrongly assert to be deriving from a law enforcement establishment as well as will report having located kid pornography or other unlawful information on the device.
Trojan:Win32/Comisproc popup alert might incorrectly claim to be acquiring from a legislation enforcement establishment and will certainly report having located child porn or other illegal data on the device. The alert will similarly have a demand for the customer to pay the ransom.
File Info:crc32: EAE02CB8md5: 89d4851739cc28c897ba41d36e93344fname: 89D4851739CC28C897BA41D36E93344F.mlwsha1: 7925aafe047e9b5f71dd89a51598e675ec32a34asha256: 96d8241386f19e2c12efaa618595e1bfd2ba6b98a7b5984b2834374cbb08f134sha512: 68e5f87f728493685db67f53654691da0ab3362d0ceb1688014b00603cc329fcf6dbc9e105613da5532d507b5e77102f2f95819fd0e9dd9e4aa3934139f3b41dssdeep: 384:l+O8TLaXD2ldl5/W16tSFlrwqIvkzR7DSW40IRE/TLaXD2:l1ie4cfzRnYCetype: PE32 executable (GUI) Intel 80386, for MS Windows
Version Info:Translation: 0x0c0a 0x04b0LegalCopyright: Microsoft msnInternalName: filtrandoFileVersion: 1.00CompanyName: MessengerComments: haber q show con esta wada u_uProductName: Proyecto1ProductVersion: 1.00OriginalFilename: filtrando.exe
Trojan:Win32/Comisproc also known as:
|Elastic||malicious (high confidence)|
|Cynet||Malicious (score: 100)|
|MAX||malware (ai score=100)|
How to remove Trojan:Win32/Comisproc virus?
Unwanted application has ofter come with other viruses and spyware. This threats can steal account credentials, or crypt your documents for ransom.
Reasons why I would recommend GridinSoft2
There is no better way to recognize, remove and prevent PC threats than to use an anti-malware software from GridinSoft3.
Download GridinSoft Anti-Malware.
You can download GridinSoft Anti-Malware by clicking the button below:
Run the setup file.
When setup file has finished downloading, double-click on the setup-antimalware-fix.exe file to install GridinSoft Anti-Malware on your system.
An User Account Control asking you about to allow GridinSoft Anti-Malware to make changes to your device. So, you should click “Yes” to continue with the installation.
Press “Install” button.
Once installed, Anti-Malware will automatically run.
Wait for the Anti-Malware scan to complete.
GridinSoft Anti-Malware will automatically start scanning your system for Trojan:Win32/Comisproc files and other malicious programs. This process can take a 20-30 minutes, so I suggest you periodically check on the status of the scan process.
Click on “Clean Now”.
When the scan has finished, you will see the list of infections that GridinSoft Anti-Malware has detected. To remove them click on the “Clean Now” button in right corner.
Are Your Protected?
GridinSoft Anti-Malware will scan and clean your PC for free in the trial period. The free version offer real-time protection for first 2 days. If you want to be fully protected at all times – I can recommended you to purchase a full version:
If the guide doesn’t help you to remove Trojan:Win32/Comisproc you can always ask me in the comments for getting help.
User Review( votes)
- Microsoft Ignite: How to disable User Account Control (UAC) on Windows Server
- GridinSoft Anti-Malware Review from HowToFix site: https://howtofix.guide/gridinsoft-anti-malware/
- More information about GridinSoft products: https://gridinsoft.com/products/
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Cognitive Radio (CR) networks are vulnerable to selfish attacks, where secondary users increase their accessing probability to enhance their own utilities, resulting in serious performance degradation in CR networks. Therefore, we formulate the secure access for CR networks into a static game called Back off Window Control Game (BWCG) and a repeated game with punishment mechanism based on the CSMA protocol. We have proven the existence of a Nash Equilibrium in the BWCG game and design a punishment mechanism to motivate selfish users not to perform selfish attacks in the repeated game. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can improve the network performance and the punishment mechanism can efficiently prevent selfish attacks in CR networks.
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CallerIP scans all the ports on your system and alerts you to any mailicious backdoors or active web services which could provide unauthorized access. For Windows XP systems the program name is also identified, which helps you determine if the process is legitimate. Harmful backdoors may be installed on your system without your knowledge, possibly disguised as a legitmate program, or by visiting a legitimate website that has been infected by a worm or virus. Many users then inadvertently allow these programs to access the Internet through their firewall, which enables an attacker to gain access to their system. By monitoring all active connections to and from your system, CallerIP helps identify threats that may not be detected by a firewall. CallerIP should be used in addition to a firewall and anti-virus program for added protection.
IP and Port monitoring software. • View all incoming/outgoing connections • View process names and port numbers • Automated alerts • Connection origin • Server for remote monitoring
Minimum Requirements • 1Gb memory, 80Mb disk space, 1Ghz processor • Internet Connection • Windows XP/2003/Vista/Windows 7 • Sun Java JRE (Java Runtime Environment) version 6 update 20 or above.
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Our approach to securing the enterprise has changed, and breach detection technology has been largely instrumental in this process. This report from NSS Labs is the first in a three-part series on the impact of the breach detection system (BDS).
One of the newest security technologies on the market today, breach detection is a technology that that has undergone rapid change in a short amount of time. Vendor innovation has been extraordinary and customer interest has been intense. In light of current security events, security practitioners have had to confront several new realities:
Today’s security devices are required to “detect the invisible” – unknown malware and their indicators of compromise (IoC). A breach detection system can do this and more, and all on a single platform.
The NSS 2014 Market Intelligence Brief on breach detection systems offers the following definition:
“Through constant analysis of suspicious code and identification of communications with malicious hosts, breach detection solutions (BDS) are capable of providing enhanced detection of advanced malware, zero-day and targeted attacks that could bypass defenses such as next generation firewalls (NGFW), intrusion prevention systems (IPS), intrusion detection systems (IDS), antivirus/endpoint protection (including host IPS), and secure web gateways.”
The breach detection market has a history that dates back almost 15 years. Breach detection systems first surfaced circa 2005, and by 2010 the technology had begun to gain momentum. Today, the BDS market is exploding; most traditional antivirus vendors have released some version of a breach detection product, some as recently as early 2014.
Evolution of Breach Detection Systems
Breach detection systems have become popular because they can detect malware that would otherwise go undetected, i.e., the malware cannot be detected using traditional means.
Early breach detection focused on identifying inbound malware; today, many BDS incorporate outbound elements during analysis, such as data exfiltration and other indicators of compromise, which provide security teams with critical forensic information. While the inbound phase of a breach is concerning, it is the outbound phase (attempted data exfiltration) that is most important, since it represents the last opportunity to detect the threat before irreversible damage, i.e., data loss, occurs.
Dynamic investigation of unknown threats is a core requirement of a beach detection system. To this end, most BDS use sandbox technology, or malware “detonation chambers.” Typically, sandboxes are virtual machines (VMs); bare metal sandboxes can also be utilized, but they are not common (by using VMs, multiple sandboxes can be installed on a single appliance and these sandboxes can be quickly re-created). Sandboxes are considered a baseline feature in today’s leading breach detection products. They are, however, computationally expensive, and most vendors limit their use, instead relying on other malware detection techniques.
The ability of a breach detection system to “detect the invisible” is particularly important because of the many zero-day attacks that are tailored for specific organizations. Such attacks are concerning because they represent a clear desire for data exfiltration. When data is compromised, the impact to the business, or even the economy, is considerable. The 2014 Cost of Data Breach Study by the Ponemon Institute states: “The average cost for each lost or stolen record containing sensitive and confidential information increased from $188 to $201. The total average cost paid by organizations increased from $5.4 million to $5.9 million.”
Breach detection systems have become a compelling alternative to traditional security technologies that fail to detect breaches. Despite its complexity and cost, enterprises would be well served to review the technology closely.
Next up: a discussion of the features in emerging and leading BDS; the expanding definition of BDS and how this technology fits into big data system analytics (BDSA), including security information and event management (SIEM) and continuous forensics analytics (CFA).
Jason Pappalexis is a Research Director at NSS Labs, Inc. the world's leading information security research and advisory company. Follow him on Twitter @jsnppp.
Follow us on Twitter (@NSSLabs) to keep informed as new research is released.
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Bidirectional forward detection (BFD) is the protocol designed for detecting fast forwarding path failure detection various media types, encapsulations, topologies and routing protocols. BFD helps in providing a consistent failure detection method.
In NSX-T environment where Edge node in edge cluster exchange its BFD keep-alive status on management and tunnel (TEP/overlay) interface to get proper communication among each Edge/host transport nodes in NSX-T environment.
eg: When the standby Edge node on T0 gateway fails to receive keep-alive status on both (management & tunnels) interfaces then in that case its not going to become active as its already in standby state. What its looses is its interface communication either from management of overlay.
Some features of BFD
- High availability uses BFD to detect forwarding path failures.
- BFD provides a low-overhead detection of fault even on physical media that do not support failure detection of any kind, suck as Ethernet.
- BFD keep alive were sent to both management and tunnel interfaces.
- The Tier-0 gateway supports the BFD protocol to protect the connection within the routing peers (External/physical).
- BFD allows and protect both static and dynamic routers.
- Provides fast detection of node (edge or physical gateway) or uplink failures.
- Enable multiple BFD sessions if multiple link exist between two system.
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How To Protect Against AppCloner in Android Apps
What is AppCloner?
AppCloner is a malicious third-party app that allows anyone to make a clone or fake version of a legitimate app, which they can then republish on Google Play as a legitimate app.
This process typically involves downloading app cloning software that allows threat actors to clone other apps without needing root access to the device. The attacker selects the app they want to clone, then the software creates a clone of the chosen app and presents it as a new icon.
Each clone operates independently and can have unique user credentials or settings. The attacker can then use the cloned app in the same way they would the original app, except now they are able to log in with a second account of their choice.
For example, an attacker can download the original PayPal app (or any other app) from Google Play, then use App Cloner to make a copy of it (aka a ‘clone’), embed hidden malware inside the clone, and republish it on Google Play as if it were the real PayPal app.
Why is it Necessary to Protect Against AppCloner?
One of the primary concerns regarding AppCloner is its ability to bypass the security features of original applications, resulting in a vulnerability where cloned apps can access and potentially misuse sensitive user data. Here are some examples of how app cloning is misused:
Lack of Automatic Updates: Cloned apps do not receive automatic updates, making them more susceptible to security risks.
Changing App Name and Icon: Attackers can give the cloned app a different name and alter the icon’s appearance.
Adjusting Permissions and Settings: Attackers can remove permissions, allow installation on an SD card, turn off auto-start, enable immersive mode, and more.
Cloned apps pose a significant risk to businesses because they can lead to substantial financial losses, service erosion, and data breaches. With the potential for misuse, promo abuse, manipulation, and account takeover, businesses must be able to detect and prevent the use of cloned apps by bad actors.
Appdome’s Defense Against AppCloner
To address the growing concerns surrounding AppCloner, Appdome offers robust protection for mobile app developers. Our OneShield Anti-Tampering features are designed to safeguard apps against such invasive modifications, ensuring that the integrity and security of your Android applications remain uncompromised.
- How to use Appdome OneShield: Anti-Tampering
- How to Prevent Code Tampering in Android & iOS Apps
- How to Build Anti-Debugging in Android & iOS Apps
If you have any questions, please send them our way at support.appdome.com or via the chat window on the Appdome platform.
Thanks for visiting Appdome! Our mission is to secure every app on the planet by making mobile app security easy. We hope we’re living up to the mission with your project.
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The monitoring infrastructure provides an overview of running services and their status to the EFPF administrators and service providers. It is intended mainly to below mentioned functionalities.
Collection of run time metrics of running containers at different hosts. This mainly includes the resource and network bandwidth usage of the running containers
Alerting helps the administrators or the maintainers to know the service status without manually following the service status visualizations. The administrators can create different alerting rules and get notifications through different channels.
Logging gives an insight to the running applications and their behaviour. This can be used by the service providers to deduce the causes for malfunctioning and to get an overview of the client behavior.
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Listen to post:
While zero trust promises reduced exposure to security incidents and data breaches, as well as simplified compliance with regulatory requirements, deploying a zero trust architecture is not as simple as implementing least privilege access controls and replacing legacy virtual private networks (VPNs) with zero trust network access (ZTNA). Effective zero trust security acknowledges that strict access controls will not block all threats and takes steps to manage the security risks of authenticated users.
An integrated security architecture that goes beyond ZTNA is essential for effective zero trust security.
Zero Trust is About More Than Access Controls
Zero trust is a model intended to address the security risks associated with the legacy, perimeter-focused security model. Under this model, insiders — connected directly or via a VPN — are granted unrestricted access to corporate networks, systems, and applications.
Due to the limitations of VPNs, the focus of zero trust discussions is often on controlling users’ access to corporate resources. By strongly authenticating users and implementing the principle of least privilege and granting users only the access and permissions that are required for their roles, access management can significantly decrease an organization’s security risks.
However, strong user authentication and access control are not enough for zero trust. While zero trust can ensure that only legitimate, authenticated users have access to corporate resources, these users can still pose a threat due to malice, negligence, or compromised devices. Additionally, attackers may target an organization through attack vectors not associated with user accounts, such as exploiting a vulnerable web application. Effective zero trust architectures must have controls in place to address the threats not mitigated by strong access control.
Microsegmentation Limits Corporate Security Risks
Network segmentation is not a new concept. The legacy castle-and-moat security model is designed to segment an organization’s internal, private network from the public Internet. By forcing all traffic crossing this border to flow through network firewalls and other security solutions, organizations prevent some threats from ever reaching their systems.
Microsegmentation is designed to manage the potential damage caused by threats that manage to bypass perimeter-based defenses and gain access to an organization’s internal network. By breaking the enterprise network into multiple small networks, microsegmentation makes it more difficult for a threat to move laterally through an organization’s systems.
The primary goal of zero trust security is to limit the probability and impact of security incidents, but these breaches will still happen. Microsegmentation reduces the impact of these breaches by limiting the systems, applications, and data that an attacker can access without crossing additional security boundaries and subjecting their actions to further inspection.
Microsegmentation Needs More Than Just ZTNA
For many organizations, ZTNA is the cornerstone of their zero trust security strategy. By replacing legacy, insecure VPNs with ZTNA, an organization gains the ability to enforce least-privilege access controls and dramatically reduce the probability and impact of cybersecurity incidents.
However, while ZTNA is an invaluable solution for zero trust security, it’s not enough on its own. ZTNA provides the access controls needed for zero trust, but additional solutions are needed to implement microsegmentation effectively. In addition to ZTNA’s access controls, companies also need to be able to inspect network traffic and block potential threats from crossing network boundaries.
True zero trust security requires multiple solutions, not only ZTNA but also a network firewall and advanced threat prevention capabilities. Ideally, these solutions should be integrated together into a single solution, providing an organization with comprehensive security visibility and management without the complexity and network performance impacts of a sprawl of disparate standalone security solutions.Using SASE For ZTNA: The Future of Post-Covid 19 IT Architecture | Webinar
SSE and SASE Enable Effective Zero Trust Security
SSE and SASE converge ZTNA, Firewall as a Service (FWaaS), and Advanced Threat Prevention capabilities — including an Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) and Next-Generation Anti-Malware (NGAM) within a single solution. Additionally, as a cloud-native security platform, SSE or SASE can be deployed near an organization’s users and devices, minimizing network performance impacts while providing consistent security visibility and policy enforcement across the corporate WAN.
Cato provides the world’s most robust single-vendor SASE platform, converging Cato SD-WAN and a cloud-native security service edge, Cato SSE 360, including ZTNA, SWG, CASB/DLP, and FWaaS into a global cloud service. With over 75 PoPs worldwide, Cato optimizes and secures application access for all users and locations, and is easily managed from a single pane of glass. Learn more about implementing an effective zero trust security program with Cato SASE Cloud by signing up for a free demo today.
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As the data-protection industry leader with our vaultless tokenization solution, you’re probably wondering why we would take what seems like a step backwards and start offering a less secure method to safeguard data.
We can’t blame you for wondering, but there’s a rational reason why, with the newly released version 8.1 of the Protegrity Data Protection Platform, we’re now offering dynamic data masking (also known as DDM) as well as monitoring.
In a nutshell, we want to give you choice on how you protect data. We also want to give organizations that aren’t quite ready to embrace something as comprehensive as tokenization to still join our family and be in position to someday further their protection postures should they decide to take that step forward.
That’s the nutshell explanation. Here’s a little more behind our thinking:
For decades, Protegrity has been the clear industry leader in securing data through tokenization, which has generally been considered the most secure method for protecting data. Tokenization substitutes sensitive data elements (information such as Social Security and bank account numbers) with a non-sensitive equivalent called a token. A token has no intrinsic or exploitable value. Instead, a token is a substitute that irreversibly de-identifies sensitive data and therefore makes the protected data useless to hackers.
While effective, DDM, on the other hand, is nonetheless a less secure method of data protection. As the name might suggest, DDM is a column-level security feature that masks data, while not altering its original form. The sensitive data is still there; it has not been substituted with a non-sensitive token or equivalent. But it is masked from viewing by unauthorized users. DDM is often a default data-protection method often offered natively by platform vendors such as cloud providers. It is simple to implement and allows for rapid protection of data where the level of sensitivity and risk is relatively low.
Monitoring is yet another data-protection method, and it’s also new with v8.1. It’s often used to safeguard less sensitive data such as someone’s residence (city and state)—essentially, data that does not map to a specific person but, in combination with other data, could allow for a bad actor to identify individuals. When organizations monitor data, they’re usually performing transactional auditing to provide context as to who is accessing data, which data they’re accessing, and how it is being accessed.
So why would the leader in data protection appear to be “going backwards” towards less-secure protection methods such as DDM and monitoring? The simple answer is we want to provide customers with many data protection choices, enabling them to closely align the level of data protection to the level of data sensitivity, all within a single policy.
Also, using DDM and monitoring now puts customers on a faster path to data-protection maturity for the day when they decide they need a more comprehensive and stronger protection posture. They will be able to strike a balance between compliance with highly useable native database security such as role-based access control on one end, to the highly secure Protegrity Vaultless Tokenization on a single platform on the other end.
In practice, multiple data protection methods at the column level within a single policy significantly expand the ability to analyze data to drive innovation.
Envision, if you will, an organization that has a customer database that includes name, street, city, state, and Social Security number. With v8.1, the organization can choose to mask the street, monitor city and state, and tokenize the name and Social Security number. This allows less sensitive data such as city and state to be available for analytics, without the need to de-tokenize before use, while the highly sensitive name and Social Security number data elements are replaced by tokens and therefore remain useless.
Protegrity’s product roadmap continues to open doors for customers to protect their data anywhere and everywhere it resides and is used within the enterprise.
Providing a simpler path to data protection maturity helps customers achieve data velocity—the fast speed with which data moves from a source to analytics—and enables them to make the most of all data, without the usual roadblocks and delays.
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What is code-access security?- Code access security prevents systems from the code being accessed from unknown origins.
- It helps prevent trusted code from intentionally or accidentally compromising security.
- It allows code to be trusted based on permissions.
- It can reduce the lifelikeness of the code being malicious.
- It also reduces the extent to which a code can be trusted.
- Most common security mechanisms give rights to users based on their logon credentials (usually a password) and restrict resources (often directories and files) that the user is allowed to access.
- However, this approach fails to address several issues: users obtain code from many sources, some of which might be unreliable; code can contain bugs or vulnerabilities that enable it to be exploited by malicious code; and code sometimes does things that the user does not know it will do.
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Skyfile Ransomware is a malicious application that encrypts user’s files and appends .sky extension at the end of their titles. No doubt, in exchange for a decryption tool the malware’s creators would want to receive a payment. The only problem is no one can guarantee these people will hold on to their end of the deal even if you pay the ransom. Thus, we would advise the infection’s victims to consider this option very carefully. If you decide you do not want to gamble with your savings, you should get rid of Skyfile Ransomware with no hesitation. The instructions located below can help you with this task as they will list all necessary steps needed to remove the malware manually. Keep it in mind if you have any copies of data that was encrypted you can replace locked files with them as soon as the system is secure again.
Our specialists are not sure if this is the file version of Skyfile Ransomware; meaning, the malware might still be in the development stage. Nonetheless, if it is already being distributed, we think it could be spread via infected email attachments or unsecured RDP connections. This is why to keep your system protected from such threats it would be advisable to stay away from suspicious Spam emails or any other emails originating from unknown sources. Moreover, to lessen the chances the system could be attacked while exploiting its vulnerabilities, researchers recommend not to keep any outdated programs. The same goes for your operating system as it should always be up to date too. Additionally, we should mention users are advised to watch out for malicious web pages and to acquire a reliable security tool.
Once, Skyfile Ransomware settles in it should check whether the user has any antivirus tools installed. At the moment of writing, the sample we tested did not do anything, but if it gets updated, it may attempt to delete the security tool or disable it. It might create lots of files on the Windows and other directories, although after the encryption process some of them are erased automatically. During the encryption, the malicious application should lock user’s documents, pictures, photos, and other personal files. Instead of renaming them the threat is supposed to append a specific extension, e.g., sunrise.jpg.sky. Later on, the infection should delete the shadow copies and so make it impossible to recover files via system backup. Afterward, Skyfile Ransomware should show a window saying all personal files were locked and asking to read a text document called HOW TO DECRYPT.txt. Inside of it, users might find instructions on how to pay a ransom. Of course, as said earlier we do not recommend doing because there are no guarantees any of your files will get decrypted. Instead of putting up with the malicious application's developers demands we would advise erasing the malware and restore the data you can from copies on cloud storage, removable media devices, etc.
To eliminate Skyfile Ransomware manually, you would need to remove all data created by it. To make it easier for you to find such files, our specialists have prepared the recommended deletion instructions located a bit below this text. Needless to say, if the task appears to be a bit too difficult, you should not hesitate to acquire a reliable security tool and set it to scan your system.
|#||File Name||File Size (Bytes)||File Hash|
|1||SkyFile Decryptor.lnk||1055 bytes||MD5: 3314791c3e81818f64bd6304f530eb58|
|2||738f961b84c02d46dc93f45f65034fa28475ba89a2fd44deede40d2e669020ba.exe||312320 bytes||MD5: 047a6de8ee4137cf6b6c856723bd2019|
|3||SkyFile Decryptor.exe||38912 bytes||MD5: 35af6c81780ef86a78ae05139510435c|
|#||Process Name||Process Filename||Main module size|
|2||SkyFile Decryptor.exe||SkyFile Decryptor.exe||38912 bytes|
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Truly effective organizational security begins with anticipation and ends with continuous testing.
To defeat hackers, it’s imperative to assume their perspective to help anticipate their next move. When you understand an attacker’s perspective on your network, you can anticipate the most likely methods of attack.
Then, because cybercriminals can defeat any defense given enough time, it’s essential to continuously test an organization’s defenses—ideally with a real-time, multi-technique attack targeting the most critical assets.
In other words, a breach and attack simulation.
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Malheur is a tool for the automatic analysis of malware behavior (program behavior recorded from malicious software in a sandbox environment). It is designed to support the regular analysis of malicious software and the development of detection and defense measures. It allows for identifying novel classes of malware with similar behavior and assigning unknown malware to discovered classes. It can be applied to recorded program behavior of various formats as long as monitored events are separated by delimiter symbols, e.g. as in reports generated by the popular malware sandboxes CWSandbox, Anubis, Norman Sandbox, and Joebox.
FreeFuzzyTime is a time reasoner based on Fuzzy Temporal Constraint Networks (FTCN), which treats fuzzy temporal information efficiently. It can be integrated into applications for diagnosis. This is especially important in areas like Intensive Care Units, where patients' data are handled by a temporal database. FuzzyTime uses a structure which consists of three levels of abstraction. The upper layer is the user interface, where a translator transforms the expressions introduced by the user into temporal relations between temporal entities (points and intervals). The semantics of a user’s expressions are analyzed and stored in the intermediate layer, or temporal world. Finally, the bottom layer is based on the FTCN model.
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This post is also available in: 日本語 (Japanese)
In July 2018, Unit 42 analyzed a targeted attack using a novel file type against at least one government agency in the Middle East. It was carried out by a previously unpublished threat group we track as DarkHydrus. Based on our telemetry, we were able to uncover additional artifacts leading us to believe this adversary group has been in operation with their current playbook since early 2016. This attack diverged from previous attacks we observed from this group as it involved spear-phishing emails sent to targeted organizations with password protected RAR archive attachments that contained malicious Excel Web Query files (.iqy).
.iqy files are simple text files containing a URL which are opened by default by Excel. Once opened, Excel will retrieve whatever object is at the URL inside the file. These files have most recently been found in use by criminals to deliver commodity RATs such as Flawed Ammyy. In DarkHydrus’s case, the preferred payload retrieved in their previous attacks were exclusively open-source legitimate tools which they abuse for malicious purposes, such as Meterpreter and Cobalt Strike. However, in this instance, it appears that this group used a custom PowerShell based payload that we call RogueRobin.
The actors sent the spear-phishing emails between July 15 and 16. Each of the emails had a password protected RAR archive attached named credential.rar. The body of the message, seen in Figure 1 was written in Arabic and asks the recipient to review the document within the archive. The message also includes the password 123456 that is required to open the RAR archive. The credential.rar archive contained a malicious .iqy file named credential.iqy.
Figure 1 Message body in delivery email
Google Translate renders the Arabic message as:
Please review and review the attached file
The credential.iqy is an .iqy file (SHA256: cc1966eff7bed11c1faada0bb0ed0c8715404abd936cfa816cef61863a0c1dd6) that contains nothing more than the following text string:
Microsoft Excel natively opens .iqy files and will use the URL in the file to obtain remote data to include in the spreadsheets. By default, Excel does not allow the download of data from the remote server, but will ask for the user’s consent by presenting the dialog box in Figure 2:
Figure 2 Excel security notice for .iqy files
By enabling this data connection, the user allows Excel to obtain content from the URL in the .iqy file. The contents within the releasenotes.txt file (SHA256: bf925f340920111b385078f3785f486fff1096fd0847b993892ff1ee3580fa9d) contains the following formula that Excel will save to the “A0” cell in the worksheet:
The formula uses a command prompt to run a PowerShell script that attempts to download and execute a second PowerShell script hosted at the URL hxxp://micrrosoft[.]net/winupdate.ps1. By default, Excel will not launch the command prompt application, but will do so with the user’s consent via the following dialog box in Figure 3:
Figure 3 Confirmation of access of remote data
The winupdate.ps1 script (SHA256: 36862f654c3356d2177b5d35a410c78ff9803d1d7d20da0b82e3d69d640e856e) is the main payload of this attack that we call RogueRobin. Its developer used the open source Invoke-Obfuscation tool to obfuscate this PowerShell script, specifically using the COMPRESS technique offered by Invoke-Obfuscation. The decompressed PowerShell payload has some similarities to the PowerShell Empire agent, such as the use of a jitter value and commands referred to by job ID, but we do not have conclusive evidence that the author of this tool used Empire as a basis for their tool.
Before carrying out any of its functionality the payload checks to see if it is executing in a sandbox. The payload uses WMI queries and checks running processes for evidence that the script may be executing within an analysis environment. The specific sandbox checks include:
- Using WMI to check BIOS version (SMBIOSBIOSVERSION) for VBOX, bochs, qemu, virtualbox and vm.
- Using WMI to check the BIOS manufacturer for XEN.
- Using WMI to check if the total physical memory is less than 2900000000.
- Using WMI to check if the number of CPU cores is less than or equal to 1.
- Enumerates running processes for “Wireshark” and “Sysinternals”.
If the payload determines it is not running in a sandbox, it will attempt to install itself to the system to persistently execute. To install the payload, the script will create a file %APPDATA%\OneDrive.bat and save the following string to it:
powershell.exe -WindowStyle Hidden -exec bypass -File “%APPDATA%\OneDrive.ps1”
The script then writes a modified copy of itself to %APPDATA%\OneDrive.ps1, with the code that performs this installation omitted. To persistently execute when the system starts, the script will create the following shortcut in the Windows startup folder, which will run the OneDrive.ps1 script each time the user logs in:
The payload itself communicates with its configured command and control (C2) servers using a custom DNS tunneling protocol. The domains configured within this payload are:
The DNS tunneling protocol can use multiple different DNS query types to interact with the C2 server. The payload has a function it calls early on that tests to see which DNS query types are able to successfully reach the C2 server. It iterates through a list of types and the first DNS type to receive a response from the C2 server will be used for all communications between the payload and the C2 server, which are in the following order (editor’s note: AC is not a DNS record type but is a mode where the trojan will perform a request for an A record requiring ac as a subdomain):
- AC – (see note above)
The payload uses the built-in Windows nslookup application with specific parameters and specially crafted subdomains to communicate with the C2. To establish communications with the C2, the payload will first get a system specific identifier issued by the C2 server. The initial DNS query sent by the payload to obtain the system specific identifier uses the following structure, which includes the current process identifier (PID) as the subdomain of the C2 domain:
<current process id>.<c2 domain>
The C2 server will provide the system specific identifier within the answer portion of the DNS response. Table 1 explains how the payload obtains the system identifier from the C2 server’s answer depending on the query type:
|A||Uses the regular expression ‘(\d+)\-.$Global:domain’ to get the decimal value from the answer|
|AAAA||The payload will split the IPv6 answer on “:” take the and digits treat them as a hexadecimal value to obtain an integer.|
|AC,CNAME,MX,TXT,SRV,SOA||Uses the regular expression ‘Address:\s+(\d+.\d+.\d+.\d+)’ and uses the decimal value in the first octet of that IPv4 address|
Table 1 Breakdown of query types
Once the system identifier is obtained, the payload gathers system specific information and sends it to the C2 server. The information gathered is added to a string in the following structure:
<IP address>|<computer name>|<domain>|<username>|<isAdmin flag>|<hasGarbage flag from config>|<hasStartup flag from config>|<“hybrid” mode flag from config>|<sleep interval from config>|<jitter value from config>
The payload will base64 encode this string and use its DNS tunneling protocol to transmit the data to the C2. The tunneling protocol transmits data by sending a series of DNS queries with the data within the subdomain of the C2 domain. The structure of each of these outbound DNS requests is as follows:
<system ID>-<job ID>-<offset in data><more data flag>-<random length of base64 encoded data between 30 and 42 characters>.<c2 domain>
The payload will look for different responses to these outbound queries depending on the type of DNS request that the payload uses to communicate with the C2. The following shows the specific IP addresses or strings used by the C2 to transmit a success or cancel message depending on the type of DNS query used for C2 communications:
After providing system specific information, the payload will Interact with the C2 server to obtain commands, which the payload refers to as jobs. The C2 will provide a string that the payload will use to determine the command to execute based on its command handler. To obtain strings to treat as commands, the payload will issue a series of DNS queries to resolve domains with the following structure:
<system id>-<job ID>-<offset data specific to job>.<c2 domain>
The C2 server will provide responses to these queries that contain answers in IPv4 or IPv6 addresses depending on the type of DNS query the payload uses to communicate with its C2 server. The payload will use a specific regular expressions dependent on the type of DNS query was used to obtain the command string, which can be seen in Table 2:
|DNS TYPE||Regex Pattern|
Table 2 Types of responses provided by C2
These regular expressions are used to build strings that the payload will then subject to its command handler. We analyzed the payload to determine the commands available, which provide a variety of remote administration capabilities. The command handle looks for the following command strings in Table 3:
|$fileDownload||Uploads the contents of a specified file to C2|
|$importModule||Adds a specified PowerShell module to the current script|
|$screenshot||Executes the contents of the command, which should be the string ‘$screenshot’. We are not sure if this works, but the command name would suggest it is meant to take a screenshot|
|$command||Runs a PowerShell command and sends the output to the C2|
|slp:\d+||Sets the sleep interval between C2 beacons|
|$testmode||Issues DNS queries of A, AAAA, AC, CNAME, MX, TXT, SRV and SOA types to the C2 servers attempting to determine which DNS query types were successful. This command will automatically set the DNS type to use for actual C2|
|$showconfig||Uploads the current configuration of the payload to the C2|
|slpx:\d+||Sets the sleep interval between outbound DNS requests|
|$fileUpload||Downloads contents from the C2 server and writes them to a specified file|
Table 3 Commands available to payload
The following domains are configured within the payload to be used as C2s. Thematically, each domain appeared to be attempting to spoof the legitimate domain of an existing technology provider with an emphasis on security vendors.
The listed C2 servers all resolved to IPs belonging to a service provider in China at 188.8.131.52/24, which is the IP address used by the C2 server to send a cancel communications message to the end system. These IPs provided insufficient data for additional investigations. However, each of the listed domains used ns102.kaspersky[.]host and ns103.kaspersky[.]host as their name servers. Examination of ns102/ns103.kaspersky[.]host revealed that the second level domain kaspersky[.]host was illegitimate and not owned by the legitimate Kaspersky Labs. Passive DNS resolution of kaspersky[.]host revealed two IPs of interest, 107.175.150[.]113 and 94.130.88[.]9.
94.130.88[.]9 showed passive DNS resolutions of two additional domains, 0utlook[.]bid and hotmai1[.]com. It is unknown what these domains may have been used for but based on the similarity of domain spoofing and sharing an IP, they are likely part of the adversary infrastructure. 107.175.150[.]113 showed one other domain resolution, <redacted>.0utl00k[.]net. We were able to link this specific domain as a C2 for another weaponized document (SHA256: d393349a4ad00902e3d415b622cf27987a0170a786ca3a1f991a521bff645318) containing a PowerShell script very similar to the one found in this attack. Examining the second level domain of 0utl00k[.]net revealed another IP of interest, 195.154.41[.]150. This IP contained two other domain resolutions following the vendor spoofing theme: allexa[.]net and cisc0[.]net. Expanding upon cisc0[.]net, we discovered several weaponized documents and payloads using this domain as a C2, from mid to late 2017.
Open source intelligence provided by ClearSky Security indicates the domain cisc0[.]net is possibly related to the adversary group known as Copy Kittens. While there are significant tactical overlaps such as similarity of techniques used as well as victimology, we were unable to uncover significant evidence of relational overlaps. Further information regarding the Copy Kittens adversary can be found in a paper titled Operation Wilted Tulip.
Our own dataset provides a solid grouping of the DarkHydrus group, with significant overlaps in C2 infrastructure as well as similarities in weaponized binaries. C2 domains were also left online and reused over an extended amount of time, such as the domain micrrosoft[.]net which was used in this attack in addition to two other payloads in January 2017 and July 2017.
Studying the other samples, we have attributed to DarkHydrus, we are able to ascertain that this adversary has mainly leveraged weaponized Microsoft Office documents using tools available freely or from open source repositories such as Meterpreter, Mimikatz, PowerShellEmpire, Veil, and CobaltStrike. The documents generally do not contain malicious code and instead are weaponized to retrieve remote files containing malicious code on execution. Due to the modular nature of the delivery document, available data for analysis for these attacks are dependent upon the operational nature of the C2 server at the time of execution.
The DarkHydrus group carried out an attack campaign on at least one government agency in the Middle East using malicious .iqy files. The .iqy files take advantage of Excel’s willingness to download and include the contents from a remote server in a spreadsheet. DarkHydrus leveraged this obscure file format to run a command to ultimately install a PowerShell scripts to gain backdoor access to the system. The PowerShell backdoor delivered in this current attack may have been custom developed by the threat group, however, it is possible that DarkHydrus pieced together this tool by using code from legitimate open source tools.
Palo Alto Networks customers are protected by:
- The micrrosoft[.]net domain has had a malicious classification since March 3, 2017.
- All C2 domains associated with this payload have a command and control classification.
- Traps provides endpoint protection, as it can block Excel from creating a command prompt process.
- AutoFocus customers may learn more from the DarkHydrus tag
Related SHA256 Hashes
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Be Aware! It’s just not average ransomware! This can encode a file and demand a ransom in order to recover your files. Known as “Jigsaw Ransomware”, this is a dangerous cryptovirus that uses the ASE algorithm to encrypt various files stored in computers.
According to Cyber Security Companies, this ransomware once collected about $450,000 within a single year from the victims. It is named for its “Punishment Concept” alike to the plot of the horror movie “Saw”.
Luckily it is not widespread yet but still, it is important to take necessary measures to curb the attack. Cyber Security experts claim that this ransomware targets mainly German, Spanish, Turkish, English, French, Portuguese and Vietnamese users, basically those who receive ransom notes translated in their language.
How does Jigsaw Ransomware works?
The ransomware enters as a countdown timer with the help of malicious spam emails. Once it is able to enter the target computer the timer starts tickling. At first in a span of 24 hours, it deletes a file every hour. Then within a day it gradually increases the power by deleting about 100 files and within the third day it will delete thousands of files. It will then become a terrible situation if your system lacks a good backup to restore.
Look at the picture below, how a jigsaw ransom looks like:
This ransomware uses the AES algorithm to encrypt various files from the targeted device. They target mainly .jpg, .docx, .mp4, .mp3, etc.
Here are three easy steps that how you can thwart ‘Jigsaw Ransomware’
Ransomware is one of the most problematic threats on the Digital landscape in this era. But there are some ways you can protect yourself from it. Here are the three easiest steps that will help you to thwart Jigsaw Ransomware.
- 1. Regular backups should be made on every computer. Keep in mind to unplug the backup drive when the system isn’t used.
- 2. Install an Internet Security Software to prevent the ransomware from entering on the computer.
- 3. Update all the software very often as these threats can sneak in through vulnerabilities in software programs.
If we apply these measures we can win a large part of the battle against ransomware. But we also have to keep up to date with the emerging threats as they appear so that we can successfully tackle them.
Note: If every you get hacked never pay the ransom. There is no guarantee that you will get the files back after paying a ransom. It’s better to stay safe than sorry!
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Part 1: The Challenge
In today’s connected society, the threat posed by cyber actors and the reality of countless high-profile breaches have catapulted cyber security to a top priority for most organizations. According to recent studies, today, cyber crime and cyber espionage are estimated to cost the global economy over $400 billion each year. However, this estimate fails to take into account the damage to the indirect victims of these crimes. Nowhere is this more evident than within the federal government, where the damage caused by a data breach could negatively impact overt and covert operations spanning decades, putting the country, its operatives, and its citizens at risk.
The threat landscape faced by federal agencies is vast and evolving rapidly. Threat actors are constantly changing their tactics to sidestep defenses, leveraging zero-day vulnerabilities and compromised endpoints to subvert secure perimeters. Today, the dynamic nature of the threat, coupled with the diversity of federal IT environments, has made it impossible for organizations to mitigate every potential threat and patch every security vulnerability. Instead, organizations must develop a proactive defense strategy, driven by intelligence that enables them to anticipate the moves of their adversary, detect attacks early on, rapidly neutralize threats, and dynamically prioritize mitigation efforts all within the context of their business or mission goals.
The growing complexity of IT systems is pushing the limits of internal security teams. According to recent surveys, it takes most companies an average of almost 30 days to remediate half of their systems for a given vulnerability. In other words, as much as half of the infrastructure remains vulnerable even 30 days after the discovery of a vulnerability. Even more startling is the pace at which new attacks are surfacing, putting organizations in an endless battle, deploying stale patches and updating security rules to block every known threat possible. However, the reality is that you can’t block every threat and mitigate every vulnerability, so organizations must find ways to focus their efforts on the most dangerous threats.
Active defense has emerged as an approach to cyber security that shifts the focus from preventative controls toward active identification and remediation of threats and actors. Active defense is often confused with offensive cyber tactics, in which organizations seek to “hack back” at their attackers. However, active defense is simply about the proactive defense of an organization’s systems, resources, and data. There are many ways to achieve this proactive posture, but it starts with an organization developing a better understanding of the unique threats and adversaries it faces. This includes classifying the key targets within the organization, understanding the specific attack vectors and exploits that pose the most significant risk to those targets, and identifying the actors that might carry out these attacks. Getting to this level of focus on the threats facing an organization and achieving an active defense posture requires the use of targeted intelligence and analytic capabilities, such as those offered by popular commercial cyber intelligence services, including Verisign’s iDefense Security Intelligence Services.
In short, the cost of not integrating intelligence into security operations is significant and growing. When operating in a domain as complex and dynamic as cyber space, organizations can no longer afford to rely on passive or reactive security techniques or a static perimeter.
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Windows 10 security focused Sandbox broken and left without a fix for a month
It's just one of the errors that have plagued the latest Windows update
One of the most anticipated features of the Windows 10 May update for security conscious Windows users is broken.
Windows Sandbox is a feature that should allow users to open a suspicious website in a virtual machine-like environment to test whether a visit would result in malicious code being executed on their computer.
It's a security feature many were excited about, but the feature now launches with an error code "0x80070002" for some users. Microsoft said, "we are working on a resolution and estimate a solution will be available in late June".
Windows Sandbox is a feature only available to Windows Pro and Windows Enterprise customers, two iterations of the operating system specifically targeted at businesses.
Windows Sandbox exists as a browser extension that works based on an organisation's group policy. This means that the network administrator can apply settings for devices across the company so Sandbox would work in the same way for the IT department as it would for the CEO.
The extension cross-references a website with those known to be a security risk and then puts the website in the Windows Sandbox mode if the user clicks on the web page.
The feature would be useful for businesses that could come to a halt if a malicious program wormed its way into the network due to one employee visiting a nasty site. The Sandbox mode is wiped after every session so businesses can remain assured that if a malicious program was detected, it wouldn't leave the Sandbox and get into the network.
"When the sandbox is closed it effectively wiped and restored to its original state," said Sean Wright, security researcher, and Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) Scotland chapter leader.
"This is extremely useful when performing research on potentially malicious software. It provides a clean state every time the sandbox is opened from new."
Microsoft announced that it was working on a similar feature to its Sandbox mode back in December. It was to take the form of a desktop virtual machine-like app that would allow users to not just run webpages in a Sandbox mode, but any software without the risk of causing any lasting harm from malicious code.
The mode is currently in a testing phase but there are plans to roll it out to enterprise customers too.
The faulty Sandbox mode isn't the only issue Microsoft is having with its May update (V1903) - machines running certain AMD RAID drivers weren't able to update due to the drivers being incompatible with the update.
"On computers that have AMD Ryzen or AMD Ryzen Threadripper processors, certain versions of AMD RAID drivers are not compatible with the Windows 10 May 2019 update," said Microsoft.
"If a computer has these drivers installed and configured in RAID mode, it cannot install the May 2019 update of Windows 10. If you start the installation process, the process stops."
The issue persists for both updates and fresh installs but is easily resolved. To get the update to work, the affected users must download and install the latest version of the AMD RAID drivers and restart their machine before re-initialising the update or install.
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The ICM/IPCC Application Gateway is a mechanism for interfacing the Call Router to an arbitrary customer application. The call router, under control of the routing script, as defined using the script editor, will be able to make queries of a host, and base subsequent routing decisions on the results obtained.
- Controlling where and how the call is routed.
- Passing arbitrary data to the site receiving the call (via translation routing), in case doing this through CTI is not possible
- Retrieving additional call (caller) context data to determine further call processing
- Executing transactions on a back-end system, for example during a script controlled IVR self-service application
Please see Resources page for Documentation
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Here is a phishing email that I thought would be a good reminder of this kind of emails. The threat actor are using the U.S. Red Cross. This is what they are doing this time is sending an email title Red Cross Blood Drive. Then in the email would say something like download this file that is attached for information on the blood drive. If you get a popup with to read it click a button to disable macros so the attachment’s content can be shown. It will show you a list ;however, behind the since the hidden malware executes to steals your data from the computer.
If you get any file that you do not know who it is coming from or expecting a file that is asking you to disable any security items. Do not do it and just delete the file.
Owner / Tech
Robert’s Computer Service LLC
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A Zero Trust strategy begins with data protection and then adds extra levels of security. For example, suppose an attacker breaches your perimeter controls, exploits a misconfiguration, or bribes an insider. To begin, it is vulnerable to both external and internal threats. External threats include malware and ransomware. Internal threats can come from malicious insiders operating from trusted accounts.
For example, insiders can become a threat by clicking on a phishing link or falling for a social engineering scam
In addition, missing a database update or making a tiny configuration change could provide an attacker with the entry point necessary to infiltrate an organization. Zero Trust is a framework that should protect against all of these attack vectors.
Zero Trust has grown in popularity as a security framework. Recent large-scale data breaches demonstrate that businesses must be more active in their Cybersecurity efforts, particularly when it comes to data protection, and a Zero Trust model may be the best way.
Zero Trust implies that no one should trust — not even people behind a firewall.
Nevertheless, insider attacks remain a significant danger, and easy access to billions of compromised credentials has rendered breaching the perimeter trivial for the vast majority of hackers.
The data is at the core of Zero Trust—and with reason. Organizations with visibility into their data and activity can identify unusual behaviour even when other security protections breached.
How Zero Trust Security Works?
Zero Trust security has developed into a comprehensive approach to Cybersecurity that includes various technologies and processes.
The goal of Zero Trust security is to safeguard the business against sophisticated cyber threats and data breaches.
Data security is at the center of Zero Trust. The data that attackers seek to steal is the most valuable asset.
While other security procedures are necessary, monitoring data activity exposes a critical vulnerability. Regardless of the attack’s mode of operation
The Zero Trust Framework will focus on the following aspects.
Zero Trust [Data PROTECTION\
A Zero Trust strategy begins with data protection and then adds extra levels of security. For example, suppose an attacker breaches your perimeter controls, exploits a misconfiguration, or bribes an insider.
In that case, they will have minimal access to valuable data under Zero Trust, and rules will be in place to detect and respond to irregular data access before it being a breach.
Given that data is the ultimate target for attackers and internal threats, the Zero Trust Framework’s first pillar should be data. Businesses must understand where it resides, who has access to it, what is sensitive or stale, and how to monitor data access to discover and act to any risks.
Attackers must be able to navigate your network to steal data, and Zero Trust networks make this as complex as possible by segmenting, isolating, and restricting your network using next-generation firewall technologies.
Humans are almost certainly your security strategy’s weakest link. So limit, monitor, and tightly enforce your users’ access to resources on and off the network. All user activity on your network should be trusted but verified. Monitor your users to guard against the rare human error caused by phishing, poor passwords, or malicious insiders.
A workload is a word used by the infrastructure and operations team to refer to the whole stack of apps and back-end software that enables customers to interact with your business, and unpatched customer-facing applications are a frequent attack vector against which you must defend.
Therefore, consider the entire stack as a threat vector, from storage to the operating system to the web front-end, and protect it using Zero Trust-compliant rules.
The Internet of Things has emerged in an explosion of devices on your networks during the last few years. Unfortunately, each of these linked devices represents a potential entry point for attackers to your network. To achieve Zero Trust, security teams must isolate, secure, and control all network devices.
Visibility and Analytics
To effectively enforce Zero Trust concepts, equip your security and incident response teams with visibility into everything that happens on your network – as well as the analytics necessary to make sense of it all.
For example, advanced threat detection and user behavior analytics are critical for staying on top of potential attacks in your network and detecting abnormal behavior in real-time.
Automation enables you to maintain all of your Zero Trust security solutions operational and enforce your Zero Trust standards. Humans are incapable of monitoring the volume of events required to enforce Zero Trust.
Automate as much of your cleanup, monitoring, and threat detection systems as feasible to free up human resources for other critical duties such as incident response.
Principles of the Zero Trust Security
1. Access to all Resources
The first fundamental principle of Zero Trust is to authenticate and validate all resources’ access. re-authenticate each time a user accesses a file sharing, application, or cloud storage device.
Regardless of the access point’s location or hosting model, it would help if you assumed that any attempt at network access is harmful until proven otherwise.
To achieve this set of controls, remote authentication and access protocols, perimeter security, and network access controls will need to implement.
2. Adopt a least privilege model
The least privilege access model is a security model that restricts each user’s access to the minimum amount necessary to perform their job. By limiting access to each user, you prevent an attacker from obtaining access to vast volumes of data through a single compromised account.
To begin, determine which folder permissions expose your sensitive data and correct any excessive permission. Next, create new groups, assign them to data owners, and then use these new groups to implement least privilege access.
Conduct frequent access and group membership audits and empower data owners to control who has access to their data. IT should not be in charge of the Finance team’s data access; the Finance team should be in its order.
3. Inspect and log everything.
Everything must be inspected and verified by zero trust standards. Monitoring every network call, file access, and email for malicious activity is not something a single person, let alone a whole team of humans, can.
Monitoring and logging are likely the most critical skills for a Zero Trust security model to function correctly. For example, you can detect the difference between a regular login and a compromised user account when monitoring and data security analytics in place. In addition, you will notice if a ransomware assault is currently underway or if a hostile insider attempts to upload files to their cloud drive.
Attaining this level of Cybersecurity insight is tough. The majority of tools in this category require you to write excessively complex rules or generate a high volume of false positives.
Instead, the appropriate system will utilize unique baselines for each user account and detect abnormal behaviors based on perimeter telemetry, data access, and user profile behavior.
The data-centric Zero Trust framework can serve as an effective barrier against data breaches and advanced Cybersecurity threats.
However, all attackers require to breach your networks are time and motivation – firewalls and password rules are ineffective in deterring them. Instead, internal barriers should construct and actively monitored to detect their movements when, not if, they break in.
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Locky is a ransomware family that encrypts victims’ files and demands money to decrypt the files. It has infected many computers in a short time due to a huge spam campaign.
The downloaded Locky ransomware is compressed and uses a PLib-depack function for decompression. It employs the Wow64DisableWow64FsRedirection function to disable file system redirection for the calling thread.
On execution, the malware checks whether the operating system is Russian:
If the system operating system is Russian, the malware deletes itself. Otherwise it starts the infection of the victim’s machine by adding the Locky footprint in HKCU\Software\Locky:
Locky calls the GetVolumeNameForVolumeMountPoint function and retrieves a volume GUID path for the volume that is associated with the specified volume mount point. From the retrieved data, using Microsoft’s cryptographic function API, the malware calculates the MD5 hash:
Later, Locky retrieves system information such as OS name, service pack, OS, language, and unique ID.
Control server communications
The collected system information is encrypted with the following encryption code:
After the system information is encrypted, it is posted to attacker’s control server.
The control servers are hardcoded in this sample:
The replies from the control server are decrypted by the malware with the following decryption code:
After successful infection the malware stores user ID, ransom note and RSA public key, and completed value name under the Locky registry key:
Encrypted file types
The malware searches and encrypts the victim’s files with the following file extensions and renames them with .locky.
After file encryption, the malware changes the desktop background to the recovery-instruction image, which clearly states the procedure to get the private key and decrypt the files.
On following the link to get private key, the victim lands on the payment procedure page, and can buy the Locky decryptor:
Update March 8: Locky is not the ransomware associated with the recent well-publicized attack on a Southern California hospital.
About the Author
Categories: McAfee Labs
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Table of Content
The Warning Header is a general header in HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) used to carry additional information about the status or transformation of the message body. It can provide extra details about the server's operation which weren't reflected in the status code.
Warning: <warn-code> <warn-agent> <warn-text> [<warn-date>]
warn-code is a three-digit integer,
warn-agent is a token reflecting the warning's sender,
warn-text is a quoted string containing the warning text, and optional
warn-date in HTTP-date format represents when the warning was created.
- Warn-code: A three-digit code that indicates the specific warning.
- Warn-agent: Represents the server that added the warning header.
- Warn-text: Provides a brief explanation about the warning.
- Warn-date: Optional; indicates the time when the Warning header was added in HTTP-date format.
Warning: 199 Example-Server "This is an example warning" Warning: 110 Example-Server "Response is stale"
The HTTP Warning Header is not directly exposed to the API for manipulation or interception in the above listed browsers and it is typically handled by the browser's networking stack. It's also important to note that the
Warning header field is generally not used by modern HTTP clients and APIs for security reasons, as its content is not reliably secured.
How to modify Warning header
ModHeader is a Chrome extension used to modify request and response headers. With ModHeader, one can add, modify or remove an HTTP request header.
Here's how to use it:
- Install the ModHeader extension from the Chrome Web Store.
- After successful installation, click on the ModHeader icon in your browser toolbar.
- In the ModHeader tab, click on 'Request Headers'.
- Input the desired value in the
110 Any_Server "Response is stale"
- Save the changes.
However, as mentioned earlier, modern browsers do not use the
Warning header and modifying it might not provide any practical utility from the client's side.
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Archive files such as the .zip and .rar formats are now the most popular method for spreading malware infections.
The findings from a report by HP Wolf Security mark the first time on the vendor’s records that Microsoft Office documents were not the most popular file format for use in malware attacks. The company’s third-quarter report shows that archive files logged a 42% attack share, while Office was barely behind, at 40%.
The Q3 2022 Quarterly Threat Insights Report also found a significant surge in popularity for archives, as the formats have seen their use grow some 22% since the first quarter of the year. According to the HP Wolf Security team, the primary appeal of archive files to threat actors is that they are harder to detect.
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|T1358||Review logs and residual traces|
Execution of code and network communications often result in logging or other system or network forensic artifacts. An adversary can run their code to identify what is recorded under different conditions. This may result in changes to their code or adding additional actions (such as deleting a record from a log) to the code.
|T1393||Test ability to evade automated mobile application security analysis performed by app stores|
Many mobile devices are configured to only allow applications to be installed from the mainstream vendor app stores (e.g., Apple App Store and Google Play Store). An adversary can submit multiple code samples to these stores deliberately designed to probe the stores' security analysis capabilities, with the goal of determining effective techniques to place malicious applications in the stores that could then be delivered to targeted devices.
|T1356||Test callback functionality|
Callbacks are malware communications seeking instructions. An adversary will test their malware to ensure the appropriate instructions are conveyed and the callback software can be reached.
|T1357||Test malware in various execution environments|
Malware may perform differently on different platforms (computer vs handheld) and different operating systems (Ubuntu vs OS X), and versions (Windows 7 vs 10) so malicious actors will test their malware in the environment(s) where they most expect it to be executed.
|T1359||Test malware to evade detection|
An adversary can run their code on systems with cyber security protections, such as antivirus products, in place to see if their code is detected. They can also test their malware on freely available public services.
|T1360||Test physical access|
An adversary can test physical access options in preparation for the actual attack. This could range from observing behaviors and noting security precautions to actually attempting access.
|T1361||Test signature detection for file upload/email filters|
An adversary can test their planned method of attack against existing security products such as email filters or intrusion detection sensors (IDS).
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Transferring a domain from one company to another typically involves the use of a unique domain name authorization code, which different companies refer to as an EPP authorization code, a domain name password or an Auth-Info code. This code can be used as a safety measure against unsolicited transfer attempts with all gTLD and with most ccTLD extensions. The code can be obtained only by the owner of the particular domain name and is provided by the present domain registrar company. It must be given to the new domain name registrar company because the transfer process cannot be initiated without it. The code is case-sensitive and commonly includes numbers and special symbols, so as to stop unauthorized people from cracking it. Certain companies even reset the codes of domains registered through them every once in a while for even better security.
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external criterion Structure: Criterion for judging an external executable sample.
external criterion structure
When an external executable exits, a criterion is needed to judge what the executable's result means. The best practice is to determine the result entirely on the exit code. This is fast and reliable.
Alternatively, the last few kilobytes of the executable's stdout or stderr can be interpreted or parsed for a numeric result.
Where possible avoid using stdout or stderr, because the interpretation requires reading from disk. This will slow down sampling times.
Back to external criterion.
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The Matrix-ITLOCK Ransomware is an updated version of the AES-Matrix Ransomware, a file-locker Trojan that can encrypt your files automatically. These attacks prevent documents, images, and other media from opening, and provide leverage to the threat actor, who demands ransoms for his unlocking assistance. Keeping backups and attending to your network's security standards are useful deterrents against infections from this family, and victims can uninstall the Matrix-ITLOCK Ransomware with any reliable anti-malware program.
More RaaS Trojans to Tell You that 'It's Locked!'
The series of new members for the AES-Matrix Ransomware family is remaining unabated in September, which the Matrix-ITLOCK Ransomware being a follow-up after the recent Matrix-NEWRAR Ransomware and the Matrix-FASTBOB Ransomware. With evidence of its distribution against unknown targets, the Matrix-ITLOCK Ransomware is probably infecting vulnerable business networks and may be using e-mail tactics or compromising logins directly. Once it gains a foothold on the PC, it can prevent media files from opening with limited recourse available to the user.
The Matrix-ITLOCK Ransomware uses AES encryption for the primary locking mechanism against the user's files and may block formats including GIF or JPG pictures, Word or Adobe PDF documents, archives such as ZIP and others. The Matrix-ITLOCK Ransomware also overwrites the names of this media, making them unidentifiable, beyond providing a bracket-enclosed e-mail address for the negotiations and an '.ITLOCK' extension. Malware researchers also find further ransoming details inside of an RTF document that the Matrix-ITLOCK Ransomware generates, although they recommend against paying any fee for potentially faulty or fake decryption services.
Additional symptoms also may be apparent, depending on how the threat actors are configuring the Matrix-ITLOCK Ransomware. Side effects also may include:
- The Matrix-ITLOCK Ransomware may flood any free space on the drive with junk data for interfering with advanced recovery software.
- The Matrix-ITLOCK Ransomware also may hijack the desktop and replace its wallpaper with another ransom note.
- Like all but the simplest of file-locker Trojans, the Matrix-ITLOCK Ransomware also supports erasing the Windows restore points or VSS data.
Your Best Defense against a Lock that may Have No Key
The new versions of the AES-Matrix Ransomware contain effective, RSA-based protection against decryption attempts by third parties. Due to the limited file-recovering potential, malware experts recommend implementing prevention-based security standards that are effective against the Matrix-ITLOCK Ransomware's family. Using sophisticated and customized passwords, preventing easy access between multiple PCs that share a network, and avoiding potentially toxic contact with corrupted e-mail attachments are some of the most useful precautions for countering the Matrix-ITLOCK Ransomware and other, RaaS-based Trojans.
While the Matrix-ITLOCK Ransomware is more likely for compromising for-profit entities, such as corporate servers, than the PC of a single PC user, its attacks are effective in a majority of Windows environments equally. Symptoms of its encryption routine are negligible until after it finishes locking each file in turn, which can include data on other PCs over network shares. Anti-malware programs of most brands should quarantine the Matrix-ITLOCK Ransomware on sight and may uninstall it safely for further damage prevention.
The tools to stop Ransomware-as-a-Service attacks are in every user's hands, but many businesses and individuals, still, are vulnerable. Any files worth a ransom to get back from the Matrix-ITLOCK Ransomware infections also are things that should be kept copied to an appropriate backup location safely.
Use SpyHunter to Detect and Remove PC Threats
If you are concerned that malware or PC threats similar to Matrix-ITLOCK Ransomware may have infected your computer, we recommend you start an in-depth system scan with SpyHunter. SpyHunter is an advanced malware protection and remediation application that offers subscribers a comprehensive method for protecting PCs from malware, in addition to providing one-on-one technical support service.
Why can't I open any program including SpyHunter? You may have a malware file running in memory that kills any programs that you try to launch on your PC. Tip: Download SpyHunter from a clean computer, copy it to a USB thumb drive, DVD or CD, then install it on the infected PC and run SpyHunter's malware scanner.
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LiSa: Sandbox for automated Linux malware analysis
Project providing automated Linux malware analysis on various CPU architectures.
- QEMU emulation.
- Currently supporting x86_64, i386, arm, mips, aarch64.
- Small images built w/ buildroot.
- Radare2 based static analysis.
- Dynamic (behavioral) analysis using SystemTap kernel modules – captured syscalls, openfiles, process trees.
- Network statistics and analysis of DNS, HTTP, Telnet, and IRC communication.
- Endpoints analysis and blacklists configuration.
- Scaled with celery and RabbitMQ.
- REST API | frontend.
- Extensible through sub-analysis modules and custom images.
Copyright 2019 Daniel Uhříček
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How Attackers Use Your Metadata Against YouFebruary 14, 2009 – 8:47 AM
To steal your identity, a cybercriminal doesn’t have to have direct access to your bank account or other personal information. Often, he collects information about you from a variety of seemingly innocuous sources, then uses that data to map out a strategy to crack your online defenses and drain your accounts.
Such methods are well-known to security professionals. But what those same professionals often overlook is this approach also can be used to crack the defenses of sensitive business files, as well. Rather than trying to gain access to your data, itself, the bad guys are analyzing the so-called harmless information about your files — collectively known as metadata — and using it to develop attacks that can drain your business of its most sensitive information.
Metadata is a powerful feature of many document and file types, including Microsoft Office documents, PDFs, JPGs, ZIP files, and multimedia formats. Depending on the application and the file, metadata might contain information such as author names, user names, version of the software used to create the file, the user’s operating system, and sometimes even the computer’s MAC address. Armed with this data, an attacker can develop exploits that might work not only on a specific file, but on all similar file types in an enterprise.
Armed with this data, an attacker can target users, as well as the computing environment within their enterprises. Several instances of metadata mishaps have been in the news in recent years. In one case, attackers used data they collected from the “track changes” feature in Microsoft Word. In another case, they took advantage of failed attempts to black out data in PDF files.
These cases make it clear: Once your documents leave the internal network — either through email or Web publishing — those files and the metadata they contain are fair game for attackers.
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A fake CloudFlare DDoS (distributed denial of service) check page is being used by a Nuclear exploit kit (EK) gate to load a malicious redirection page to serve malware, according to security firm Malwarebytes. [Read More]
President Barack Obama on Tuesday unveiled a new cybersecurity "national action plan" calling for an overhaul of aging government networks and a high-level commission to boost security awareness. [Read More]
The investment in access certifications have reduced the workload on IT, but by treating all entitlements and users the same, we’ve put the burden on LOB managers to manage the risk of excessive access.
DLP provides a range of business benefits, including compliance support and intellectual property protection. The concept isn’t a new one, but the ability to put it to use in an easier, more viable manner is.
While flexibility offers countless benefits for corporations and their employees, this new emphasis on mobility has also introduced a new set of risks, and this in turn re-ignites a focus on endpoint security.
After designating 2014 as “The Year of the Mega-Breach,” the security community hoped to bring awareness to the challenge of protecting customer data. As it turns out, the breaches of 2015 make the previous year’s ones pale in comparison.
Specific malicious payloads, URLs and IP addresses are so ephemeral that they may only be used once in the case of a true targeted attack. Intelligence should make you better prepared to evaluate and solve new problems that you haven’t encountered before.
Alert monitoring should entail an assessment of effectiveness and a realization that increasing volumes can't be managed by overwhelmed staff. How can your team cut through the noise and better-manage security alerts?
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Powers, Simon T and He, Jun
A Hybrid Artificial Immune System and Self Organising Map for Network Intrusion Detection.
Information Sciences, 178, (15), .
Full text not available from this repository.
Network intrusion detection is the problem of detecting unauthorised use of, or access to, computer systems over a network. Two broad approaches exist to tackle this problem: anomaly detection and misuse detection. An anomaly detection system is trained only on examples of normal connections, and thus has the potential to detect novel attacks. However, many anomaly detection systems simply report the anomalous activity, rather than analysing it further in order to report higher-level information that is of more use to a security officer. On the other hand, misuse detection systems recognise known attack patterns, thereby allowing them to provide more detailed information about an intrusion. However, such systems cannot detect novel attacks. A hybrid system is presented in this paper with the aim of combining the advantages of both approaches. Specifically, anomalous network connections are initially detected using an artificial immune system. Connections that are flagged as anomalous are then categorised using a Kohonen Self Organising Map, allowing higher-level information, in the form of cluster membership, to be extracted. Experimental results on the KDD 1999 Cup dataset show a low false positive rate and a detection and classification rate for Denial-of-Service and User-to-Root attacks that is higher than those in a sample of other works.
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Encord Computer Vision Glossary
Outlier detection in computer vision refers to the process of identifying data points or objects that are significantly different from the majority of data points in a given dataset or image. Outliers can be caused by a variety of factors such as sensor noise, errors in image acquisition or processing, or the presence of unusual objects in the scene.
In computer vision, outlier detection is often used in applications such as object detection, image segmentation, and anomaly detection. For example, in object detection, outlier detection can be used to identify objects that do not fit the expected size, shape, or color of the objects of interest. In image segmentation, outlier detection can be used to identify regions of the image that do not belong to any of the pre-defined classes or clusters.
There are several approaches to outlier detection in computer vision, including statistical methods, machine learning algorithms, and deep learning models. Statistical methods involve calculating various statistical measures such as mean, standard deviation, or median of the data and identifying data points that fall outside of a specified range. Machine learning algorithms such as Support Vector Machines (SVMs) or Random Forests can be trained on labeled data to identify outliers. Deep learning models such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) can be trained to learn the features of normal data and identify outliers based on the deviations from the learned features.
Overall, outlier detection is an important task in computer vision as it enables the identification and removal of noise and anomalies in the data, leading to more accurate and reliable results in various computer vision applications.
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Roee Eilat and Udi Weinsberg are Research Scientist Managers within Facebook Core Data Science (CDS), a research and development team working on improving Facebook’s processes, infrastructure, and products that enable more than 1.5 billion people to communicate with one another every day. This work was done during Adam N. Breuer’s internship with CDS.
What we did
Online social networks are frequently targeted by malicious actors who create fake accounts for the purpose of carrying out abuse. Broadly, abuse is conducted in three phases. First, malicious actors create accounts. Then, these accounts need to establish connections with real users (e.g., by sending friend requests on Facebook). Finally, once they establish a sufficient number of connections, fake accounts can expose their social networks to a variety of malicious activities and abuse.
In our paper, “Friend or Faux: graph-based early detection of fake accounts on social networks,” we focus on the detection of new fake accounts that manage to evade registration-time classifiers but have not yet made sufficient connections to perpetrate abuse. This means that we target accounts that manage to circumvent defenses that target new accounts immediately when they are created, e.g., using a suspicious email or IP address. In this work, we aim to identify such accounts that are at the early stages of their activity on the platform, potentially before abuse has been manifested. By detecting fake accounts early, we mitigate their ability to launch abuse against other users.
We designed and built an algorithm, named SybilEdge, that processes the way new users add friends (or “edges”) to their social networks. By looking at the selection of friend request targets and the corresponding request acceptances and rejections, SybilEdge accurately detects fake accounts with as few as 20 friend requests.
How we did it
In order to launch abuse on a social network, abusers need to connect to targets. On Facebook, this means that the abusers first need to find targets, then send them a friend request, and finally have the request accepted. We observed these actions over time for two sets of accounts: benign people and those that were deemed fake based on actual abuse. We found that these two sets of users differed significantly in both their selection of potential friends (targets), and those targets’ responses to their friend requests.
In Figure 1, we show the distribution of the rate of rejections (number of rejected requests out of total friend requests). As the figure shows, fake accounts’ rejection rate is skewed to the right, meaning that their requests are rejected more often than real users’ requests.
This is a rather intuitive finding; people are alert, and they are more likely to reject requests coming from fake accounts (that they probably don’t know) than from real people (whom they are more likely to know). However, as the figure also shows, requests from real people are also rejected sometimes, and fake users aren’t rejected all the time.
In order to overcome this, we took a closer look at individual users and the difference in their rate of acceptance of requests coming from real and fake accounts. Figure 2 shows the distribution of these rates: 1 indicates people that are just as likely to accept fake accounts as they are to accept real people; greater than 1 indicates acceptance of more requests from real people than from fake ones; and less than 1 indicates those that accept more requests from fake accounts than from real ones.
As Figure 2 shows, while there is a large mass of users that are as likely to accept requests from real accounts as they are to accept requests from fake ones, there are many users that behave in a way that provides a signal about the requester: If the receiver is more likely to accept a request from a real account, and they accepted an incoming request, it serves as a signal that the requester is a real user. Similarly, if they rejected the incoming request, it increases the probability that the requester is fake. Moreover, even the people who accept more requests from fake accounts than real accounts can be leveraged, as they provide a similar signal but in the other direction: If they accept a request, the probability that the requester is fake increases.
Finally, another intuitive behavior that we observed in data is that fake accounts oftentimes are careful when picking their friend request targets, most likely to maximize the probability of their requests being accepted. Figure 3 shows the distribution of the rates of incoming requests from real users and from fake users:
Like the plot in Figure 2, this plot shows that we can leverage the targets of friend requests as a signal to the likelihood of the sender being fake. People on the >1 side of the plot are more likely to receive requests from real people, while people on the <1 side are more likely to receive requests from fakes. As such, we can increase the probability of the requester being fake or real based on the target of the requester.
These observations land nicely into a probabilistic framework, where we determine the probability of a user to be fake, by observing the set of targets (people that friend requests were sent to) and their corresponding responses (accepting or rejecting).
SybilEdge works in two stages. First, we train the model by observing data over some period of time, and leveraging outputs from other classifiers. Specifically, on Facebook, we use behavioral and content classifiers that flag an account as abusive based on actual abuse. This training phase provides us with all the necessary model parameters. Then, we run the model in real time for each friend request and response (accept or reject), and update the probability for the requester being fake.
While there are a few Bayesian equations to solve, it turns out to be quite simple and efficient to compute. Those interested in the exact details can refer to our research paper. SybilEdge also produces great results compared with the state of the art. Figure 4 shows a comparison between SybilEdge and related models, using the area under curve (AUC) of the precision/recall curve (AUC=1 is a perfect classifier, while AUC=0.5 is a random class-prior classifier) for increasing the number of friend requests.
As Figure 4 shows, SybilEdge significantly outperforms existing models, reaching a very high AUC. Furthermore, it converges quickly, with as few as 15 friend requests on average. Interestingly, the performance of the other models actually degrades with more friend requests. This is likely the result of more friend requests being accepted overall as more friend requests are sent, which possibly throws these models off.
SybilEdge has some additional desirable properties:
- Rapid classification of new users: SybilEdge converges quickly, especially if the user sends requests to highly discriminating users. For example, it takes only a few rejects by savvy real users for an eager abusive account to be flagged as abusive.
- Adversarial robustness: SybilEdge has two main components: one is the selection of the target, and the other is the responses of the targets. While the former can be controlled by attackers, the latter is completely out of their control, thus making it difficult to circumvent our detection model. In the paper, we show a version of SybilEdge that includes only the responses, and while it has a lower performance than the full SybilEdge model, it still outperformed the state-of-the-art models.
- Low complexity: SybilEdge’s complexity is linear in the number of requests, which, due to the sparsity of the social network, is proportional to the number of people — i.e., assuming V to be the set of people in the social network, SybilEdge’s complexity is O(|V|).
- Interpretable: A favorable property of the Bayesian setting is that we can explain the reason for a given output, e.g., the user is likely to be fake because they were rejected by people who tend to reject fakes. This is unlike more blackbox models, such as neural nets, which are extremely difficult to reason about.
- Robust training: Even though SybilEdge uses behavioral and content models to learn its priors, it is quite robust to inaccuracies of these models. In addition, it also performs well in a wide range of settings, including varying levels of fakes in the network and different social network topology (attachment models). We refer the avid reader to the paper, where we study these robustness properties extensively.
A key challenge in fighting abuse is detecting abusive users quickly and confidently, and then removing them from the platform before they can launch their attacks. SybilEdge helps us identify abusers quickly and in a way that can be explained and analyzed. In the near future, we plan to look at additional ways that can further speed up the detection of abusive accounts and help make confident decisions even faster than SybilEdge. We plan to accomplish this by mixing feature-based and behavior-based models.
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Software security efforts are rarely successful without buy-in from the project manager. In most organiza¬tions, security will not be a concern to individual project members if left to their own devices. Part of the reason is because the skills required to be effective at secure development do not overlap much with tradi¬tional development skills. Another reason is because most development is feature-driven, whereas — beyond basic integration of technologies such as SSL — security rarely shows up as a feature. The project manager generally has several key responsibilities in this space:
- First among them is promoting awareness. Usually all team members will need to have basic exposure to the application security strategy, and often several team members will need significant training, as few people have the necessary skills in their toolbox.
- Additionally, the project manager should promote awareness outside his team. The rest of the organization needs to understand the impact of application security on the business, such as schedule trade-offs and security risks that the team may not address.
- Another primary responsibility of the project manager is monitoring the health of the organization. Generally, this involves defining a set of basic business matrices and applying them on a regular basis.
Project managers are encouraged to review sections A through F of the CLASP Resources.
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Microsoft has released a new version of the Sysinternals package and updated the Sysmon utility with the ability to detect Process Herpaderping and Process Hollowing attacks.
Sysinternals is a collection of apps designed to help system administrators debug Windows computers or help security researchers track down and investigate malware attacks.
The Sysinternals package comes with more than 160 different apps, each useful for a particular task.
One of the most widely used Sysinternal apps is called Sysmon, or System Monitor, which works by logging system-level events (process creations, network connections, and changes to file creation time) to the default Windows event log.
Across the years, the tool has become a must-have for all security researchers, either if they're involved in defending networks or performing digital forensics and incident response (DFIR) operations. This is because Sysmon allows them to record in-depth logs and then trace the roots of malicious attacks to specific processes and apps.
With today's release of Sysmon 13.00, Microsoft says that the Sysmon app can now detect and log when malware tampers with a legitimate process.
When this happens, the Sysmon utility will create an alert in the Windows event log with the "EventID 25" identifier. System administrators and security researchers can then scan for this ID and detect what process a malware attack tried to modify.
Microsoft says that under the hood, the new Sysmon EventID 25 triggers "when the mapped image of a process doesn't match the on-disk image file, or the image file is locked for exclusive access."
Process Herpaderping is a relatively new technique that was first detailed last year and which describes a method that malware can use to hide the intentions of a process by modifying its content on disk after the image has been mapped, allowing it to pass malicious code in apps that security software designates as safe.
Process Hollowing is an older technique that works the same, but during which malware suspends a legitimate application's process, "hollows" its content, and then injects its own malicious code to be executed from the trusted service.
While other tools in the Sysinternals package have been used in previous years to detect process hollowing attacks, this marks the first time that support has been added for detecting the newer Process Herpaderping technique, which many security researchers expect to see being used in the wild in the coming years.
Previews of both Sysmon EventID 25 warnings are available below from Mark Russinovich, one of the Sysinternals co-creators, who previewed them last year on Twitter. A deep dive into the new Sysmon 13.00 release and its support for detecting Process Herpaderping and Process Hollowing attacks is available here, from security researcher Olaf Hartong.
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July 19, 2022 Force Multiplier: Penetration Testing and Attack Surface Mitigation Choosing between attack surface mitigation and penetration testing to ensure the security of your organization is no either/or question. You need both. Ben Wallace Enterprise Architect Discussions about software security are ubiquitous in every industry since breaches can come from any part of the technology. There are numerous ways of compromising a computer system. While breaches aren’t common, they often have disproportionate financial and reputation costs. Not to mention the regulatory impact that could easily shut down a fledgling company. Today, we’ll discuss two of the many methods available to mitigate these risks: limiting the attack surface and penetration testing. You’ll see very quickly how these two are interwoven and how to leverage that. Attack Surface Mitigation Imagine somebody walking through a parking lot, checking the door handles on cars in hopes of finding one unlocked. They aren’t spending much time at each vehicle and don’t intend to break into one. The person simply looks for one specific thing and moves on if they don’t find it. This is essentially what an automated attack on a computer system looks like. It uses automated probing tools to scan your organization’s or application’s “surface” for open ports or other easy-to-patch vulnerabilities. In the security context, “attack surface” refers to any publicly accessible digital asset such as an API or web page that anyone can get into over the internet. Attack surface mitigation (ASM) is considered preventative maintenance and constitutes the bare minimum for risk detection in publicly facing systems. It’s generally performed monthly and comes at a relatively low cost. When scanning for common vulnerabilities, industry-standard risk frameworks, such as the OWASP Top 10, are used. As an automated process, ASM tools generate automated reports that call out the priority of the discovered issues. Full-service providers (such as MentorMate) create corrective action plans using this information and execute the development and deployment of remediation plans. The primary function of these security services is to provide insight into the unknown and protect your company from vulnerabilities and compliance gaps. But they also expose unknown costs and configuration errors. Many organizations I’ve assisted in the past discovered unneeded domains, users, and services that present more cars in the parking lot for a bad actor to check the door handles. Here at MentorMate, we not only scan for those attack vectors, we reduce the surface area. As a side benefit, there are often financial gains by shutting down unused legacy systems. Now that we’ve seen what automated computer system attacks are capable of, we can go one step further with a more sophisticated method of discovering vulnerabilities. Penetration Testing Let’s get back to the parking lot. While attack surface scanning is more of a did-you-lock-your-door approach, a penetration test (or pen-test) involves a professional locksmith with picks, lights, and tools trying to get into one targeted car. While ASM reduces the number of attack paths, pen-tests look for vulnerabilities in parts that must be exposed to do business. Pen-tests proceed only with strict privacy and disclosure agreements due to the inherent risks of known findings. The test itself is performed by trained and certified professionals and is closely monitored and recorded. Pen-tests are akin to actual hacking where a skilled technologist uses sophisticated tools to probe every imaginable way to break in. When getting penetration tested, clients obtain valuable security and risk information that goes deeper than what’s on the surface. For this reason, ASM is usually carried out monthly, whereas pen-testing is generally performed at critical deployment steps or annually. Something to remember is that penetration testing is invasive and triggers anti-intrusion countermeasures. Thus, it can cause operability issues in deployed infrastructure or applications and is therefore done with a copy to not disrupt user experience. MentorMate brings clients value beyond pen-test services with advice on how to abate and prevent vulnerabilities. MentorMate can help implement those changes as well. A Symbiotic Approach Your business goals demand a high level of risk awareness and practical security to safeguard your customers and yourselves. By combining the inside-out (ASM) and outside-in (pen-test) approaches, you get a holistic view of the risks you face as well as a path to address them. Start with ASM. A reduced surface area will save time, effort, and cost with pen-testing. Pen-testing is a larger and more expensive effort and should always begin with the most critical attack surfaces, then expand. Here at MentorMate, our expert risk identification team has vetted and mitigated hundreds of risks for our clients. This breadth of experience gives us an advantage that your business can leverage. Our ever-present goal is to prevent the breach be it via ASM or a pen-testing review. I’ve outlined the fundamental differences between penetration testing and attack surface mitigation. But how do you choose which one to use? Due to budget constraints, some companies may only be able to afford ASM to start and opt for a pen-test when they can — or if an investor demands it. At the same time, if finances allow, many companies combine both approaches. They have attack surface detection going all the time and conduct penetration testing annually or as needed. Tags Security Share Share on Facebook Share on LinkedIn Share on Twitter Share Share on Facebook Share on LinkedIn Share on Twitter Sign up for our monthly newsletter. Sign up for our monthly newsletter.
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A security testing framework leverages attack patterns to generate test cases for evaluating security of Multi-Party Web Applications (MPWAS). Attack patterns comprise structured artifacts capturing key information to execute general-purpose attacker strategies. The patterns recognize commonalities between attacks, e.g., abuse of security critical parameter(s), and the attacker's strategy relating to protocol patterns associated with those parameters. A testing environment is configured to collect several varieties of HTTP traffic. User interaction with the MPWA while running security protocols, is recorded. An inference module executes the recorded symbolic sessions, tagging elements in the HTTP traffic with labels. This labeled HTTP traffic is referenced to determine particular attack patterns that are to be applied, and corresponding specific attack test cases that are to be executed against the MPWA. Attacks are reported back to the tester for evaluation. Embodiments may be implemented with penetration testing tools, in order to automate execution of complex attacker strategies.
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|Titolo:||Dynamic analysis security testing of multi-party web applications via attack patterns|
|Data di pubblicazione:||2017|
|Appare nelle tipologie:||6.1 Brevetto|
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Binary hardening is a web security technique for analyzing or manipulating binary files to protect against exploits. Binary planting continues to persist as one of the most crippling types of attacks on applications. Even though its prevalence has declined, it has the potential to expose an entire infrastructure. There are a few different methods of binary hardening, each targeted at a different type of binary planting.
How Binary Hardening Works
- Buffer Overflow Protection
A buffer overflow occurs when a program exceeds a buffer’s boundaries while writing data, thus overwriting other memory locations. It’s caused by a binary attack on a program. The most common way to protect against this involves compiler-enforced protection, which implements canary values to change the organization of stack-allocated data. [More Information]
- Binary Stirring
Applications often have static instruction addresses in their binary code. These static addresses are vulnerable to attack from a malicious binary file. Binary stirring protects against this by randomizing the instruction addresses every time the executable is launched. [More Information]
- Pointer Masking
Many code injection attacks focus on modifying code pointers to gain access. Code pointer masking enforces “the correct semantics of code pointers” to protect an application. It does so without the use of canaries to change stack organization. [More Information]
Example of Binary Hardening
Binary planting commonly utilizes insecure access permissions. Suppose you install an application named MyApp on a system with multiple users. When prompted, the application installer creates a root directory and installs the application in C:\MyApp. However in this instance, the installer failed to limit write access, allowing non-privileged users to access the directory.
Now a user with bad intent inserts a malicious binary file into C:\MyApp. When you go to launch MyApp next, the application loads and executes the malicious file. The attack causes a buffer overflow and overwrites adjacent memory locations.
This problem can be avoided by utilizing buffer overflow protection. Using canary values with a compiler-enforced protection scheme, a type of “early warning system” is produced that disallows a buffer overflow. With this application protection in place, the system is safe from memory exploits corrupting data.
Binary planting continues to persist as one of the most dangerous attack types. These attacks can modify software native to the operating system, and even the operating system itself.
In 2010, there was a massive influx in binary planting, largely due to third party application DLL files. That same year Acros (whose parent company is Thermo Fisher Scientific) conducted a study concluding that there were over 500 exploitable bugs in around 200 commonly-used Windows applications. While new security updates in Windows 10 have largely corrected this misstep, binary hardening remains a crucial step in protecting an application and overall system.
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OpenDNS cannot filter specific images from search engine results (except for Bing). However, OpenDNS can filter all image results on a network from appearing if the network Always Block list has been configured correctly. The one exception to this is Google Images, which is explained in more detail further down.
The following is a list of domains and subdomains that popular search engines use to host image search result content. Blocking these domains and subdomains will block image search results on their respective image search engine.
Google: Google embeds images as data in the HTML source, which cannot be blocked by OpenDNS unless you block google.com as a whole. As an alternative you might try using Google SafeSearch. Google SafeSearch may be able to be enforced with the instructions on the this SafeSearch article.
Most image may be blocked by blocking the following:
Please note, blocking images of a search engine may cause other search engine functionality to not be displayed correctly.
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Configure File access rules to allow or deny access for this user.
Banned files are files that can't be accessed on server.You can specify file/path mask (?, * supported) : *.jpg, c:\path\images_200?\
Using this form you can define allow/deny access based on File name for this user account.
If you do not specify any file/path, this user can access all the files on the server. But if you set an allow list, the user can only access the files allowed in the list. If you set a deny list, the user can access all the files except those in the deny list. The order of the rules is very important too.
Can not access/store any file except *.rar.
Can access/store any file except *.zip.
The rule list shows the current list and order of file access rules. Rules can be added and removed from the list using the Add and Delete buttons.
Also, the order of the rules may be altered using the Up and Down buttons on the right of the rule list.
To define access rules, you can use the wildcards ? and *.
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Both DMARC and DKIM are email authentication protocols helping organizations combat impersonation attacks and email compromise. Both DMARC and DKIM are important tools for protecting your brand, but they do not replace each other. So it’s important that you understand what each one does before deciding on which one works best for your needs.
First, let’s break down the acronyms:
DMARC is an acronym for Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance. It is a protocol that uses SPF and/or DKIM records to authenticate emails. It also allows you to monitor and control what happens to unauthenticated emails sent from your domain.
DKIM is an acronym for DomainKeys Identified Mail. It is a method of verifying the authenticity of emails using cryptographic authentication.
DMARC definition & how it works
DMARC is based on SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM. It verifies if the message aligns with these standards. DMARC allows for the rejection of fraudulent messages and it also allows for reports to be emailed to you from the recipient’s mail server. It is a protocol that allows an organization to say “if you send mail from my domain, I will authenticate it.” It also creates a feedback loop between the sender and receiver that lets both parties know if the other party is following the specified policy.
To begin with, the basic function of DMARC is to determine whether or not an email should be delivered to its intended recipient. In order to do this, it determines what kind of DNS records are stored for a particular domain. The DMARC record itself contains instructions as to where the email should be sent if it fails either SPF or DKIM checks.
It also provides instructions as to how much of the message should be delivered if it fails authentication. There are three possible options here:
- ‘none’ means that all failed messages should be treated as normal
- ‘quarantine’ means that some portion of the message should be delivered, but only with a warning
- ‘reject’ means that no part of the message should be delivered at all
DKIM definition & how it works
DKIM is a cryptographic method of verifying that an email is sent from an authorized server. This is done by cryptographically signing each email with a private key, which then allows it to be verified by the recipient using a public key. DKIM performs a different role in email authentication as opposed to DMARC. DKIM is a form of email authentication that allows you to verify if a message has been sent by someone using your domain name. The verification is done by adding a digital signature to each message sent from your server. This signature is added by adding a header to the email that contains a few key pieces of information:
- The domain name used to send the email
- A DKIM selector is used to help locate the DKIM public keys in the DNS in case there are multiple DKIM records published
- The public key will be used by the recipient’s mail server to decrypt part of the message and compare it against another part of the message in order to verify that it was sent from an authorized server
- A hash value is generated from parts of the message so that those parts can be verified by anyone who has authorized access
DMARC Vs DKIM: Which to use and when?
DMARC and DKIM are both email authentication techniques that help improve the security and deliverability of your emails. While they’re often confused, and many companies have a hard time understanding the differences between these two protocols, DMARC and DKIM are actually quite distinct from each other as explained above.
It is important to note that neither of the two protocols is interdependent, and can be configured individually. Let’s find out how:
Configuring DMARC paired with SPF
You can skip setting up DKIM for your domain and still configure DMARC by pairing it up with SPF. This is because for your emails to pass DMARC, either SPF or DKIM identifier alignment is required. To implement DMARC without DKIM:
- Make a list of all your authorized sending sources
- Create an SPF record using our free SPF record generator and include all your sending sources to authorize them
- Paste the record on your DNS
- Create a DMARC TXT record for your domain using our free DMARC record generator
- Copy and paste this record on your DNS to activate DMARC
Configuring DKIM on its own
If you want to skip DMARC configuration, you can choose to implement DKIM on its own. To do so head over to the PowerDMARC DKIM record generator tool and enter the following information:
- A unique DKIM selector key (it can be a 1024 or 2048 bits long alphanumeric value)
- Your domain name (without any prefixes, for example, if your website URL is https://www.domainname.com, your domain name will be domainname.com)
Once you hit the generate record button our AI generates your DKIM TXT record along with instructions on how to publish it on your DNS to activate the protocol.
DMARC, SPF, and DKIM: How they can work in unison for well-rounded email protection
We believe that having a multi-factor approach to email authentication can be a game-changer in terms of domain and information security. This is why experts in the industry recommend organizations implement DMARC, SPF as well DKIM for well-rounded email protection.
Aligning your emails against both SPF and DKIM authentication standards while using DMARC for special instructions and reverse feedback can help you gain 100% compliance on your emails. It also helps build trust and create a solid foundation for your organization’s domain, and ensure deliverability.
The PowerDMARC email authentication suite gives you an automated experience while configuring your protocols. Our DMARC services come paired with SPF and DKIM to take your email’s security to the next level. Sign up for our free DMARC today to try out the benefits yourself!
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In my blog post last week, Demystifying Machine Learning: Making Informed Security Decisions, I discussed a framework for evaluating Machine Learning claims. This week, let’s see how to apply it.
I’ve included below a blurb from the website or data sheet of a fictitious security company called Acme Security. While the company is fictitious, the content is derived from looking at similar material from various security companies (including my own):
Acme’s Cognitive Correlation Threat Engine identifies and blocks attacks as they are happening. Our patented machine learning algorithm models threat across thousands of dimensions, analyzing and learning from massive amounts of data across multiple data sources. Our enhanced solution uses the latest Deep Learning techniques to detect, block and predict attacks with virtually no false positives.
If you are used to reading security marketing content, this blurb may seem familiar…and you likely skimmed over it without really gathering any insight into the underlying solution. But, by applying the framework described earlier, you can start dissecting the specific claims of Acme Security.
Once you’ve done this type of mapping, you’re in a much better position to evaluate claims and ask questions. The claims associated with the Machine Learning components often break down into the following areas:
Claim: “We model threats using hundreds/thousands/millions of features/dimensions.”
While the number of features is relevant, what’s more important is how well they model what you’re trying to identify…or what you’re trying to differentiate between, for example legitimate and malicious activity. In the space of Email Security, it’s common to use content-related features (e.g. URLs with IP addresses, disparity between the From: and link domains, presence of specific words like “Locked” and “Verify”) to identify phishing attacks. Unfortunately, these features don’t do a good job of modeling the recent spate of Business Email Compromise attacks that triggered wire transfers and loss of W-2 information. These types of attack messages don’t generally contain URLs or have the common phishing trigger words. The features used by traditional email solutions aren’t durable in the face of changing criminal behavior.
With Agari Enterprise Protect, we’ve focused our feature selection to best model legitimate email traffic. We’ve found that features that involve time- and volume-based behavior can be used to identify which servers legitimately send messages for a given domain…and which ones are trying to spoof messages for that domain. We’ve found that these features lead to a more accurate and durable model that withstands changes in the social engineering or malware content used by criminals.
Faced with a claim of a large number of features, the area to explore is how durable the model is in the face of new threat.
2) Training Set
Claim: “We have the largest footprint/most sources of data.”
Almost every vendor will talk about the size and uniqueness of their dataset. But having access to a lot of data doesn’t necessarily mean that you can use it to train a Machine Learning solution. The key element of a good training set is clean labeling – you need to accurately know which examples in your data correspond to the classes of good and bad. Furthermore, you need to have a reasonable ratio of both the good and the bad to accurately model the differences.
At Agari, we’ve been lucky to have worked in the area of Email Authentication and helped some of the largest senders of email on the planet definitively identify their legitimate email streams. The result is a highly accurate and massive training set of both good and bad traffic with high representation of legitimate and phishing messages.
Faced with the claim of access to a massive dataset, the question to ask if how much is actually used for training and how accurate labels are found.
Claim: “We use [substitute the latest machine learning algorithm/approach].”
The selection of the algorithm used by a Machine Learning solution to train a model is critical in its ability to differentiate between the different classes of examples. But it turns out that the correct selection and tuning of a ML algorithm is highly dependent on the data in the training set and features used. Some data and features “separate” using simple techniques, others require more complex ones.
Data Scientists and Marketers gravitate to the shiny object, so it’s not uncommon for solutions to use a sophisticated algorithm even if it isn’t necessary. The Agari Data Science team generally starts with the basic toolkit – algorithms like Logistic Regression and Support Vector Machines – before breaking out the big guns. It’s surprising how often we’ve found that the simpler approaches work just as well or better than the latest and greatest.
The bottom line is that the ML algorithm used is often inside baseball that, in itself, isn’t an indicator of the quality of a solution. So if a vendor touts their underlying ML algorithm, the importance to place on that fact is very little.
Claim: “We have no False Positives/False Negatives”
Of all the elements of a ML-based product, understanding the accuracy of the solution is critically important to evaluating whether it makes sense for your environment. It’s also the place where many security vendors are the least clear about the performance of their products.
It turns out that it’s very easy to create a solution that has zero False Positives – all the solution has to do is say that all traffic is safe. The problem with such as solution, of course, is that it will let through all traffic. Conversely, a zero False Negative solution can be built by saying that all traffic is malicious – you’ll catch all the bad stuff, but also let through none of the good.
The point is that False Positive and False Negative rates are closely related and a ML-based solution needs to be tuned to balance these, and many other, performance metrics. A common evaluation component is a Receiver Operating Characteristic or ROC curve – a way of performing a cost/benefit analysis on tuning a solution to change the False Positive and False Negative rates. It’s unlikely that a security vendor will show you a ROC curve for the solution in question, and you don’t have to be an expert at reading one. But a security vendor should be able to have an intelligent conversation about accuracy metrics.
So, when faced with a claim of Zero False Positives or False Negatives, the approach to take is to show the security vendor the door.
Machine Learning, at its core, is relatively simple – it’s an algorithmic approach based on building a model based on a set of features and a training set of examples in order to make accurate data-driven predictions or decisions on new examples. Unfortunately, many security vendors purposefully introduce complexity into the description of their Machine Learning based solutions, either because they think doing so suggests a higher value for their product or because they are masking some underlying weakness. Hopefully the framework introduced in the previous blog post – the components of Features, Training Set, Algorithm and Accuracy – can help you better evaluate, introspect and decide on which Machine Learning based security solutions to use.
If you’d like to learn more, register for our webinar this Thursday: Machine Learning in Security: Detecting Signal in the Vendor Noise.
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The International Journal of Innovative Research in Computer and Communication Engineering
Virtual Machines (VMs) are based on the specifications of a presumptive computer. It is an independent instance and performs the function as like the original host machine. It can be created upon use and disposed upon the completion of the tasks or the detection of error. One of the main demerits of virtual machine is that if there is no malicious activity, the user has to redo all of the work in her actual workspace since there is no easy way to commit. So, a lightweight commitment approach called SeCom have been proposed, which eliminates the malicious program at the end of virtual machine termination i.e. while committing the benign data.
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[Snort-users] Re: VERY simple 'virtual' honeypot
iob at ...5235...
Thu Mar 7 21:45:08 EST 2002
Lance Spitzner wrote:
> However, I was just thinking, why bother deploying the box?
> Why not create a list of Snort rules that generate an alert
> whenever a TCP/SYN packet or UDP packet is sent to an IP
> address that has no system? This could incidate a probe,
> scan or attack, the same principles of a honeypot, but
> without deploying an actual system.
> Of course this does not give you the Data Capture capabilites
> of a honeypot, as there is no system for the attacker to
> interact with. However, this could be used to help detect
> scanning or probing activity.
if your snort (or other sensor) is part of the network infrastructure (a bridge,
a switch or a router) then you will have the packet. if not, then you should
really only see an ARP request from the router.
Of course, you can proxy ARP for the addresses on or near your sensor box. then
you should see the packets, and you even have the possibility to interact with
the attack. I think that functionality is very much what LaBrea does.
Ian O'Brien What kind of head of security would I be if I let people
408-696-2182=Pgr like me know things that I'm not supposed to know?
iob at ...5235... --- Michael Garibaldi, B5
More information about the Snort-users
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Table of Contents
In the toolkit to counter cyber threats, the Intrusion Detection System (commonly abbreviated as “IDS”) stands out as a cornerstone in cybersecurity defences. IDS plays an integral role in an organisation’s security posture, providing monitoring and detection capabilities that help protect against malicious activity and unauthorised access to system resources.
An IDS is a sophisticated device or software application that meticulously monitors network traffic or system activities for any signs of potential violations, unauthorised access, or malicious activities. Its primary function is to detect these anomalies, raise alarms, and often produce detailed logs to aid further analysis.
Think of it as a vigilant watchdog, continually scanning its surroundings and barking to alert the owner when it perceives a threat. By providing an early warning of suspicious activities, IDS helps organisations take timely action to mitigate risks and prevent breaches.
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How IDS Works
An Intrusion Detection System is a vigilant monitor that constantly oversees network traffic for any signs of unauthorised access or malicious activities. When such activities are detected, the IDS springs into action by alerting relevant authorities or personnel. Here’s a breakdown of the IDS mechanism:
- Monitoring and Analysis: The IDS continually examines network traffic flow while scrutinising activity for anything suspicious.
- Rule and Pattern Comparison: It utilises a database of predefined rules and patterns, acting as the IDS’s criteria for potentially suspicious or malicious behaviour.
- Alert Generation: When network activity resonates with any of these established criteria, the IDS raises a flag by alerting the system’s administrator or relevant authority.
Intrusion detection systems can be categorised based on their placement or methodology. Each approach takes a different function behind how the IDS operates.
It’s also vital to differentiate IDS from its proactive counterpart, the Intrusion Prevention System (IPS). While both monitor network traffic for potential threats, the primary focus of an IDS is detection and alerting. In contrast, an IPS takes a more active stance to prevent the detected threats from causing harm.
In addition to its detection capabilities, the potency of IDS lies in its ability to enhance security responses. It identifies hosts and devices within the network, examines the data carried by network packets, and traces it back to the origin of a potential attack. This comprehensive approach fortifies a network’s defence against malicious intents.
IDS is an integral early-warning system for networks that plays a pivotal role in any organisation’s cybersecurity strategy.
Types of IDS Detection
Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) employ various detection techniques to identify suspicious activities within a network. While the first two (below) are the primary types of IDS detection, alternative methods are used for specific environments:
As one of the most common detection methods, signature-based detection relies on a database of known attack patterns, often termed “signatures”. When incoming traffic matches one of these patterns, an alert is generated. While effective against known threats, it can’t detect new, previously unrecorded threats.
Unlike signature-based systems, anomaly-based IDS focuses on establishing a baseline of “normal” network behaviour. If the incoming traffic deviates significantly from this baseline, it triggers an alert. This approach is beneficial for detecting new or unknown threats but can sometimes produce false positives.
Heuristic-based IDS uses advanced algorithms and analytics to predict an attacker’s next move based on their behaviour patterns. It can adapt and learn from observed traffic, protecting against novel and evolving threats.
Stateful Protocol Analysis
This method involves understanding and tracking the state of network protocols in use. It identifies deviations that might indicate an attack by comparing observed events to pre-determined profiles of generally accepted definitions of benign activity.
This type functions on a defined set of policies or rules the network administrator sets. Any activity that violates these policies triggers an alert. It’s a proactive approach requiring periodic policy updating to stay relevant.
Not a traditional detection technique, honeypots are decoy systems that attract potential attackers. They divert the attacker from the actual systems and gather information about their methods. The insights from honeypots can inform other IDS about emerging threat patterns.
Understanding the different detection types is critical in selecting the proper IDS for specific network environments. The best approach often combines multiple detection methods to ensure a comprehensive protective layer against a wide array of threats.
Intrusion Detection Systems vs. Intrusion Prevention Systems
Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) and Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS) are essential network security tools designed to identify and combat malicious activities or policy breaches within a network. Their primary distinction lies in their respective reactions to perceived threats.
While IDS and IPS have distinct roles, they often function best when used in tandem. IDS ensures nothing slips through unnoticed, and IPS prevents detected threats from causing harm.
IDS vs. Firewalls
Intrusion Detection Systems and firewalls are both integral components of network security. However, they serve different purposes, primarily based on their functionality and response mechanism.
While firewalls control the flow of traffic based on set parameters, IDS monitors the network to identify and alert on anomalies. For a robust security posture, using both together offers layered protection, with firewalls filtering unwanted traffic and IDS ensuring continuous monitoring.
IDS vs. SIEM
While IDS is a specialised tool for detecting threats, Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) provides a comprehensive security data analysis and management platform. Each operates in different capacities within a network security framework.
SIEM operates as the main control centre, offering a 360-degree view of security status, trends, and threats. It’s the analytical and integrative counterpart to the IDS’s vigilant watch. Leveraging both in unison ensures rapid threat detection combined with in-depth insights and layered defence.
To combat these evasion tactics, organisations must regularly update and configure their IDS. Additionally, IDS should be integrated with other security tools, as combining multiple layers of security and maintaining vigilance can help mitigate the risk of such evasion techniques.
How Proofpoint Can Help
Proofpoint’s Emerging Threat Intelligence solutions deliver timely and accurate threat intelligence, which provides the backbone for supporting modern Intrusion Detection Systems. Equipped with the solution’s ET Pro Ruleset, organisations can leverage an advanced rule set that helps detect and block threats via their existing network security appliances.
Proofpoint’s fully verified intel provides deeper context and integrates seamlessly with security tools to enhance decision-making. Its threat intelligence feeds can be directly fed to SIEMs, firewalls, intrusion detection systems (IDS), intrusion protection systems (IPS), and authentication systems.
When integrated with IDS, Proofpoint’s Emerging Threat Intelligence can help improve the detection and prevention of malicious activities or policy violations in a network. Emerging Threat Intelligence also provides separate lists for IP addresses and domains, and subscribers get free use of their Splunk technology add-on.
For more information, contact Proofpoint.
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Immersive AR/VR technology is rapidly transforming the landscape of cybersecurity, offering innovative ways to model and analyze network traffic. In this virtual environment, cybersecurity professionals can visualize complex network infrastructures in a 3D space, making it easier to comprehend intricate network relationships and data flows. This visualization is particularly beneficial for monitoring large-scale networks, where identifying anomalies or patterns in traditional 2D interfaces can be challenging.
Moreover, immersive technology in cybersecurity extends to the analysis and simulation of network scenarios. AR/VR environments can simulate various cyberattack scenarios, enabling IT professionals to practice response strategies and understand the potential impact of different security breaches in a controlled, yet realistic setting. This kind of simulation is invaluable for training purposes, helping teams to prepare for a range of cyber threats, from DDoS attacks to advanced persistent threats (APTs).
By employing AR/VR, users can navigate through a virtual representation of their network, observing real-time data traffic, and instantly spotting irregularities or potential breaches. This immersive approach not only simplifies the process of network monitoring but also enhances the accuracy and speed of threat detection. It allows for a more intuitive understanding of the scale and scope of network activities, which is crucial in developing effective security strategies and responses.
Furthermore, these virtual environments can be used for forensic analysis, providing a dynamic way to investigate and backtrack security incidents. By reconstructing how a breach occurred in a visually rich and interactive setting, cybersecurity teams can gain deeper insights into attack vectors and vulnerabilities, leading to more robust defense mechanisms. Overall, the application of immersive AR/VR technology in cybersecurity not only enhances current practices of network monitoring and analysis but also paves the way for more proactive and effective defense strategies against evolving cyber threats.
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The Financial Action Against Money Laundering Group (FATF) has decided to tighten regulation of the cryptomoeda sector, in particular, to compel bitcoin stock exchanges and other cryptographic service providers (VASPs) to comply with AML and CFT procedures the financing of terrorism) similar to traditional financial firms.
Embargo Virtual Asset Guidance by ForkLog on Scribd
Thus, despite criticism of proposals and warnings about the adverse consequences for the industry, the group decided that bitcoin exchanges should exchange user data when transacting between sites.
VASPs should provide each other with the following data:
- the name of the sender and the data in your digital wallet;
- the name of the recipient and the data in your digital wallet;
- physical address of the sender, your passport or user ID, which links you to the company, date, or place of birth.
Regulators of member countries of this intergovernmental organization will have to ensure compliance with these requirements and ensure that all VASPs share and store such information. Businesses and governments have exactly 12 months to implement the recommendations, and the first FATF test will take place in June 2020.
Many analysts, including the company Chainalysis, have tried to convince FATF that in the blockchain industry it is quite difficult, if possible, to meet the same banking industry standards. They have alerted the organization that a cryptomoeda business may enter partially into the shadows, and user privacy and the effectiveness of law enforcement operations may be impaired.
However, now any cryptographic service provider, an individual or a legal entity, will have to undergo a licensing or registration procedure in their jurisdiction. Thus, according to the FATF, competent authorities will have to make sure that offenders are not the beneficiaries of VASP.
If the service provider wants to change the ownership structure or the organization of the business, it will need to obtain approval from the regulator.
It is worth mentioning that the FATF recommendations touched and mixed services. Therefore, VASPs should mitigate the risks associated with these transactions, which obfuscate senders and recipients, and if this is not possible, providers should not be allowed to do so.
In addition, the VASPs should freeze the funds of the users that are included in the penalty lists.
It should be noted that there are 37 member countries in the FATF and they are not required to follow the recommendations, however in this case they will be blacklisted and face a foreign investment exit.
Recall earlier in the Russian Federation they prepared proposals for the regulation of cryptomoeda in accordance with the requirements of the FATF.
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The macro NULL is defined in the stdio.h header file. This header file is included in the get_dscr.c, get_infc.c, get_strd.c, and get_cnfg.c source files. The include statement is of the form
Since the compiler did not complain about not being able to find stdio.h, it may be that there is another stdio.h header file in the search path that does not define the NULL macro or the get_xxxx.c files have been modified and they no longer include stdio.h header file. One could add this Macro definition to each file but it would be better to find out why it is not being defined by the header file that normally resides in C:\Keil\C51\INC.
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- Shift Left Academy
To optimize software development in today's fast-paced economy, teams need to employ more tool automation than ever before. One of the most productive technologies to utilize is static analysis, which must balance the ability to find important defects against analysis time.
After the automated analysis, all reported warnings must be interpreted by a human to determine if actions are warranted. The criteria for judging warnings can significantly vary, depending on the role of the analyst, the security risk, the nature of the defect, the deployment environment, and many other factors. With such considerations, it can be difficult to decide the best way to configure a single tool.
This paper presents a model for computing the value of using a static analysis tool. Using inputs such as engineering effort, the cost of an exploited security vulnerability, and some easily-measured tool properties, the model allows users to make rational decisions about how best to deploy static analysis.
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This special session is organised and supported by Al-Nahrain University -College of Engineering -Computer Engineering
- Dr Ahmed H. Y. Al-Noori, Al-Nahrain University , Iraq
- Prof. Dr Bilal Al-Khateeb , University of Anbar ,Iraq
- Dr Shaymaa W. Al-Shammari , Al-Nahrain University , Iraq
- Assist. Professor Dr Duraid Y. Mohammed, Al-Iraqia University, Iraq
- Dr William Baily , University of Sheffield ,UK
- Dr Joshua Meggitt , University of Salford, UK
- Prof. Dr Jamila Harbi , Al-Mustansiriyah University, Iraq
- Assist prof. Dr Hanaa Mohsin Ali Al-Abboodi, University of Babylon, Iraq
Recently Machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) have become widely used in different fields. One of
these fields is related to cyber security and digital forensics. ML (and its advanced DL) approaches play a
substantial role in improving cybersecurity and forensics, especially in biometrics authentication, intrusion
detection, digital forensics, and access control. On the other hand, Cyber attackers could breach the
trustworthiness and performance of ML and DL models, such as, injecting malicious data into the training
exploiting the model structure, validating and/or testing sets, and/or modifying hyper-parameters of the
In order to improve performance in cybersecurity and forensics areas, the goal of this special session is to
compile recent research efforts devoted to the study of ML and DL in information security and digital forensicsrelated applications and approaches. For example, improve the quality in spoofing detection, intrusion detection biometrics, authentication, digital forensics, access control, identification, image steganography and steganalysis, deep learning computation and training security, and malicious web content identification, etc..
Specifically, looking for high-quality and unpublished work on recent advances in new ML and DL methodologies that can be applied to a broad range of applications.
The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
• Object detection and transfer learning.
• ML/DL based forensics and anti-forensics.
• Deep Fake threats and challenges.
• Biometrics authentication and identification.
• ML/DL for video and image processing.
• ML/DL for cryptography protocols.
• Adversarial attacks in deep learning.
• Deep learning for cyber security applications.
• Confidentiality and privacy trust challenges associated with machine and deep learning.
|Prospective authors are invited to submit full-length papers (not exceeding 6 pages) conform to the IEEE format . All papers will be handled and processed electronically via the EDAS online submission system.|
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Topic 1: Data-Driven Authentication and Authorization
Data-driven Authentication Synopsis:
Simple password based authentication are widely used and easy to deploy. But, as an individual user now-a-days is involved in hundreds of online resources, s/he needs to manage a lot of passwords which is difficult, and also insecure as they can be easily guessed or cracked by hackers. Alternatives like two-factor authentication (2FA), multi-factor authentication (MFA), biometrics like iris scanning, facial recognition, fingerprint matching techniques are around for some time, but the adaptation rate is low due to some issues in terms of implementation and usability, and even these alternatives can also be compromised. Data driven authentication research will focus on highlighting the shortcomings of these techniques, and introduce novel techniques involving gait signature, facial expressions, gaze, behavioral attributes and other dynamic profiles of the individuals. These in turn will eliminate the need to remember passwords, and make the authentication process safe and secure.
Authorization Rule Extraction, Synthesis and Refinement:
Once an individual is authenticated into a system, s/he is subjected to an authorization process to determine whether s/he should be permitted access to a protected resource. There are many different types of access control models used by the organizations, but each has its shortcomings over the other due to dynamic nature of the cyber systems. One primary class of such models are role-based access controls in which authorization decisions are made by assigning roles to users and permissions to roles. A related body of work called role-mining has been focused on extracting meaningful roles from organizational data including individual user permissions. This problem is complicated, especially when the problem domain size is large. We use recent advances in big data analytics to mine contextually meaningful roles.
Another primary example is attribute-based access control (ABAC) which has gained in popularity in recent years. In this authorization model, access control rules are defined based on conditional statements on attributes of subjects, objects, and actions. Extracting the explicit and hidden attributes of entities requires a thorough data-driven understanding of the subjects (users), and objects (resources) in the system. Little research has been dedicated to extraction and identification of these attributes from the contextual data, investigation of how an optimal set of rules could be defined based on attributes, or transition from older access control models such as discretionary access control (DAC) to ABAC.
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SMS-A Security Management System for Steam Turbines Using a Multisensor Array
IEEE Systems Journal
Cyber-physical systems (CPSs), cybersecurity methods, steam turbines
Cyber-physical systems, such as large power plants, apply open networks for monitoring and control purposes. This may increase the risk of cyberattacks to these infrastructures. Cybersecurity methods have been employed as promising techniques to deal with cyber threats and isolate possible cyberattacks. This article introduces a new security management system (SMS) for an industrial steam turbine. As such, the most probable threats, such as denial-of-service (DoS) attack, deception attack, and replay attack in various sensors and actuators of the steam turbine system, are considered. Then, a new SMS system consisting of an attack detection unit and an attack isolation unit is designed. The attack detection unit utilizes a dynamic neural network to detect any potential attack in the system using the concept of residual generation. The attack isolation unit identifies the type of attacks using an integrated feature selection strategy and support vector machine classifier through multisensor information. Several case studies are investigated to evaluate the proposed SMS. The test results show the effectiveness of the proposed SMS with multisensor information when compared to SMS without multisensor array.
Kordestani, Mojtaba; Chaibakhsh, Ali; and Saif, Mehrdad. (2020). SMS-A Security Management System for Steam Turbines Using a Multisensor Array. IEEE Systems Journal, 14 (3), 3813-3824.
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