Security

Articles about Security on omid.dev — guides, topics, and notes from the field.

My Facebook wall has been viewed X times – viral survey scam spreads rapidly

Published: April 4, 2011 Reading time: 3 min

SophosLabs wrote: Do you want to know the total number of times that your Facebook wall has been viewed? Are you curious as to who may be stalking you on Facebook? If so, you’re a prime candidate for scammers who are exploiting that desire to put money into their own pockets. Here are the latest messages spreading virally between thousands of Facebook users who have fallen for the scam: ...

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Comodo Group Issues Bogus SSL Certificates

Published: April 2, 2011 Reading time: 2 min

from Schneier on Security by Schneier: This isn’t good: The hacker, whose March 15 attack was traced to an IP address in Iran, compromised a partner account at the respected certificate authority Comodo Group, which he used to request eight SSL certificates for six domains: mail.google.com, www.google.com, login.yahoo.com, login.skype.com, addons.mozilla.org and login.live.com. The certificates would have allowed the attacker to craft fake pages that would have been accepted by browsers as the legitimate websites. The certificates would have been most useful as part of an attack that redirected traffic intended for Skype, Google and Yahoo to a machine under the attacker’s control. Such an attack can range from small-scale Wi-Fi spoofing at a coffee shop all the way to global hijacking of internet routes. ...

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Massive SQL injection attack making the rounds—694K URLs so far

Published: April 1, 2011 Reading time: 3 min

Thanks to my friend, Pondus! Ars Technica: Hundreds of thousands of URLs have been compromised—at the time of writing, 694,000 (it’s over millions of site when you are reading this)—in an enormous and indiscriminate SQL injection attack. The attack has modified text stored in databases, with the result that pages served up by the attacked systems include within each page one or more references to a particular JavaScript file. ...

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Analysis of TR/Spy.SpyEye

Published: March 30, 2011 Reading time: 1 min

Avira TechBlog: SpyEye is a malware family which we are monitoring for some time. Today we are analyzing a sample which is detected as TR/Spy.SpyEye.flh by Avira. The Trojan is able to inject code in running processes and can perform the following functions: Capture network traffic Send and receive network packets in order to bypass application firewalls Hide and prevent access to the startup registry entry Hide and prevent access to the binary code Hide the own process on injected processes Steal information from Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox A detailed analysis of this malware by Liviu Serban, Virus Researcher at Avira. ...

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Security Vulnerabilities in Chrome

Published: March 25, 2011 Reading time: 1 min

Avira TechBlog: It looks like new Chrome releases aren’t due every six weeks as Google announced a few weeks ago, but once a week now – the company just released Chrome 10.0.648.204 and fixes 6 highly critical security vulnerabilities with it. Those security vulnerabilities allow attackers to smuggle in malware like Trojans without the user noticing. That is why the automatic update mechanism is so important: When clicking on the tool symbol and choosing the “About Google Chrome” menu entry, the version check should show that Chrome is already on the current release – or offer to download and install the update in case that didn’t happen yet. ...

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Google, Yahoo, Skype targeted in attack linked to Iran

Published: March 24, 2011 Reading time: 4 min

Cnet: A malicious attacker that appears to be the Iranian government managed to obtain supposedly secure digital certificates that can be used to impersonate Google, Yahoo, Skype, and other major Web sites, the security company affected by the breach said today. Comodo, a Jersey City, N.J.-based firm that issues digital certificates, said the nine certificates were fraudulently obtained, including one for Microsoft’s Live.com, have already been revoked. A fraudulent certificate allows someone to impersonate the secure versions of those Web sites–the ones that are used when encrypted connections are enabled–in some circumstances. ...

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Data loss at Play.com

Published: March 23, 2011 Reading time: 3 min

Play.com, one of the largest online retailers of DVDs, CDs, MP3s, books and gadgets, emailed its customers yesterday admitting to a security breach in its marketing communications. Names and emails may have been compromised. Play.com claims the breach happened outside its walls, so presumably they use a third party marketing consultancy to manage part or all of its marketing activities. Here is one of the messages that was sent out to customers by Play.com: ...

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Firefox Extension Used in Facebook Scam

Published: March 23, 2011 Reading time: 3 min

Symantec Connect: Not only Facebook is adding new and interesting features to its toolbox; spammers and scammers in Facebook are, too. Currently there is a scam making rounds using a classic “who is viewing your profile” themed bait. So far – nothing new. After the user grants the application the requested privileges, which of course will send out the above mentioned spam posts to all his or her friends, the user gets redirected to a download instruction site. There he or she is asked to download the Firefox browser and then install a popular Firefox extension which allegedly gets downloaded over 27,000 times per week. This simple tweak should generate a new menu entry in Facebook which would then show user statistics. ...

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Many Updates: Flash Player, Mac OS X, Firefox

Published: March 22, 2011 Reading time: 2 min

Avira TechBlog: Today is a busy day for those who want to keep their computers secure: Many updates are available, from Adobes Flash Player over Apples Mac OS X operating system to the Firefox web browser. There is a security vulnerability in Flash player which became public as a zero day vulnerability a week ago. It has been attacked in a limited fashion. Now Adobe released this security update which users can download from the website of the company. As this security vulnerability already gets actively exploited, users and administrators should apply the update immediately. ...

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A Technical Analysis on the CVE-2011-0609 Adobe Flash Player Vulnerability

Published: March 17, 2011 Reading time: 3 min

Microsoft Malware Protection Center: On March 14, Adobe released a security advisory (APSA11-01) warning of 0-day attacks affecting Adobe Flash Player (versions earlier than and including 10.2.152.33). These attacks were hidden inside Microsoft Excel documents that were used as a vehicle to deliver the exploit. The Adobe Flash file embedded inside the Excel file is another carrier for the exploit. It loads shellcode inside memory, performs heap-spraying, and loads a Flash byte stream from memory to exploit the 0-day vulnerability, which is tracked as CVE-2011-0609. ...

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