Tag Archive for: potent

Apple patches iOS against potent zero-day spyware attack

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Apple is issuing patches for three iOS zero-day vulnerabilities known as Trident that have been exploited for years by an Israel-based spyware vendor against a human rights activist, an investigative journalist and others.

The attack, called Pegasus, is flexible, letting attackers steal a broad range of data from iPhones and iPads, according to the firms that discovered it.

“In this case, the software is highly configurable: depending on the country of use and feature sets purchased by the user, the spyware capabilities include accessing messages, calls, emails, logs, and more from apps including Gmail, Facebook, Skype, WhatsApp, Viber, FaceTime, Calendar, Line, Mail.Ru, WeChat, SS, Tango, and others,” according to a blog post by Lookout Security, which, along with Citizen Lab, unearthed the vulnerabilities and Pegasus.

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Network World Tim Greene

Botnet preying on Linux computers delivers potent DDoS attacks

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EITHER/XOR

Security researchers have uncovered a network of infected Linux computers that’s flooding gaming and education sites with as much as 150 gigabits per second of malicious traffic—enough in some cases to take the targets completely offline.

The XOR DDoS or Xor.DDoS botnet, as the distributed denial-of-service network has been dubbed, targets as many as 20 sites each day, according to an advisory published Tuesday by content delivery network Akamai Technologies. About 90 percent of the targets are located in Asia. In some cases, the IP address of the participating bot is spoofed in a way that makes the compromised machines appear to be part of the network being targeted. That technique can make it harder for defenders to stop the attack.

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Ars Technica » Technology Lab

Hacking Team’s Flash 0-day: Potent enough to infect actual Chrome user

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The Adobe Flash zero-day exploit that spyware developer Hacking Team made available to customers worked successfully against even the advanced defenses found in Google’s Chrome browser, researchers said Friday. They also noted that it was used to infect computer users multiple times before it was leaked.

Google developers patched the underlying Flash vulnerability in Chrome on Tuesday (for proof, use enter about:version in the address bar and note the Flash version), and Adobe published a general fix a day later.

The leak of the previously unknown exploit resulting from the devastating hack of Hacking Team last weekend and exploit kits available on the black market quickly added attack code to use the flaw. It allows attackers to surreptitiously install malware on targets’ computers, and there’s evidence that before last weekend’s breach, Hacking Team customers used the Flash zero-day against live targets.

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Ars Technica » Technology Lab

IE users get new protection against potent form of malware attack

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Microsoft developers have fortified Internet Explorer with new protections designed to prevent a type of attack commonly used to surreptitiously install malware on end-user computers.

The “isolated heap for DOM objects” made its debut with last week’s Patch Tuesday. Just as airbags lower the chance of critical injuries in automobile accidents, the new IE protection is designed to significantly lessen the damage attackers can do when exploiting so-called use-after-free flaws in the browser code. As the name suggests, use-after-free bugs are the result of code errors that reference computer memory objects after they have already been purged, or freed, from the operating system heap. Attackers can exploit them by refilling the improperly freed space with malicious code that logs passwords, makes computers part of a botnet, or carries out other nefarious behavior.

Use-after-free flaws are among the most commonly exploited, often at great expense to end users. Recent in-the-wild attacks that targeted IE versions 9, 10, and 11 capitalized on a use-after-free bug. The bug class has been at the heart of many other real-world attacks on IE that are too numerous to count. (They have also been known to bring down Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.) Wei Chen, an exploit developer with Rapid 7’s Metasploit vulnerability framework, likens use-after-free exploits to sneaking tainted cookies into an already-opened bag of Oreos.

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Ars Technica » Technology Lab