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US law enforcement hauls high-profile häçkers into the law courts, Russian government unsurprisingly supports häçking, WordPress sites targeted by malware, Tesco remains silent on photo site häçk, chip giant Intel aims to protect computers on wheels (cars) and some cyber students creepily ‘kill’ human dummy – with remote häçks.
WordPress sites targeted by malware
WordPress websites are being targeted by malware with visitors being redirected to a site that hosts Nuclear exploit kit.
You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now. seeks out vulnerabilities in common applications such as Flash, Silverlight, PDF, and Internet Explorer. It then uses these vulnerabilities to launch other malware, including ransomware.
You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now. which highlighted the WordPress malware says the infection rate on WordPress sites is steadily climbing and recently gathered pace with a significant spike upwards.
The aim of the malware is for cyber criminals to download their malware onto as many computers as possible.
Sucuri says it has detected thousands of sites compromised with this malware and 95% of them are using WordPress.
From all the sites that have been compromised, 17% of them have already been blacklisted by Google and other popular blacklists.
To stay safe, if you are a WordPress user, make sure you keep all your plugins updated.
Keep your Windows operating system and your vulnerable software up-to-date with the latest security patches.
And if you’re running You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now. or other antivirus
protection make sure you haven’t turned it off so it can update regularly.Tesco remains silent on photo site häçk
In July this year a malware attack shut down the online photo print operations at six retailers. These were US operations Sam’s Club, Costco, CVS, RiteAid, and Walmart Canada and the UK’s Tesco. At that time all six sites were taken down.
The attack took place via servers hosted by PNI Digital Media which is owned by the office supply superstore chain Staples. It is believed some customer data was captured during the attack, You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now..
CVS issued a statement advising its online photo customers of the possible loss of their information. Costco has also reopened its online print shop, but also warned its shoppers that some of their information may have been stolen.
The company is providing identity theft protection for one year free of charge and is suggesting users change their password for the site. Costco said PNI has input new security measures.
Costco said: “Our investigation indicates that some Costco members who typed credit card numbers onto the site during the compromise window had credit card information (including security code and expiration date) taken, along with other information that may include name, phone number, billing address, email address, password and ship-to information.
It does not believe that stored credit card numbers or photos were compromised, and Costco.com itself was not impacted,” Costco said in a posted statement.
Walmart Canada and Tesco removed the photo areas from their sites and have to date not posted any updates regarding the situation.
Serial häçkers nabbed
A few years back a swathe of companies admitted to being häçked. It was a bit like witnessing falling dominoes, first one went, then another and another, and so on.
The companies included 7-Eleven, Carrefour, JC Penney Co, JetBlue Airways, and Heartland Payment Systems among others. Some of the häçks went back ten years of more.
More than 160 million credit card numbers were compromised and hundreds of millions of dollars in damages caused as the credit card numbers went for up for sale on the deep net.
You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now. that two Russian häçkers, Vladimir Drinkman and Dmitriy Smilianets, were picked up in the Netherlands in June this year as they travelled through the country.
They have now been charged by the US authorities with conspiring to illegally access computers and conspiring to commit wire fraud.
If found guilty they are both looking at 30 years in an American jail, while a further three häçkers from Russia and the Ukraine are still being sought.
The trial could shed an interesting light on the machinations of identity thieves. Apparently Smilianets was in charge of sales, selling data to trusted identity theft wholesalers.
The credit card numbers went for between $10 and $50 a piece depending on the country of origin. The häçks were the largest known data breaches in the US at the time.
The initial entry was often gained using a “SQL injection attack.” SQL, or Structured Query Language, is a type of programming language designed to manage data held in particular types of databases. The häçkers allegedly identified vulnerabilities in SQL databases and used those vulnerabilities to infiltrate a computer network.
Once the network was infiltrated, the defendants allegedly placed malicious code in the system. This malware created a ‘back door, leaving the system vulnerable and helping the defendants maintain access to the network.
In some cases, the defendants lost access to the system due to companies’ security efforts, but were allegedly able to regain access through persistent attacks.
Something in the stars
A peculiar feature of the news over the last seven days or so is the rash of stories about häçkers who have been nabbed and are set to stand trial.
A case in point is the Latvian computer code writer You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now. who helped create a virus dubbed You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now. that spread to more than a million computers worldwide.
It infected more than 1 million computers worldwide and 40,000 US computers, including 190 at NASA while other computers were damaged in Germany, the UK, Poland, France, Finland, Italy, Turkey and elsewhere.
Calovskis pleaded guilty in a Manhattan court room to conspiring to commit computer intrusion.
He faces a likely prison term between 18 months and two years, according to the terms of a plea deal with the US government.
Before the plea, he had faced charges that could have carried a prison term of up to 67 years upon conviction.
Calovskis admitted that he was hired to write code for the Gozi virus and with a potential 60 plus years ahead of him in prison it’s hardly surprising that he decided to cooperate.
Fresh from the Kremlin?
While we’re on the subject of Russians (or East Europeans) a häçker group working out of Russia is doing so with the blessing of the government, claims aYou do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now.
The group, known as The Dukes, have been doing their häçking thing for seven years attacking among others government bodies and political think tanks in the US, Europe and Central Asia, as well as a NATO in Georgia and Uganda’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The report claims rather boldly: “The Dukes are a well-resourced, highly dedicated and organised cyber-espionage group that we believe has been working for the Russian Federation since at least 2008 to collect intelligence in support of foreign and security policy decision making.”
Professional developers are believed to be behind the Dukes and by looking at the times when the häçkers were operational as well as the Russian government not being targeted by the group, the report claims it believed, “with a high level of confidence, that the Dukes toolsets are the product of a single, large, well-resourced organisation… that provides the Russian government with intelligence on foreign and security policy matters in exchange for support and protection.”
The fact that government is using cyber capabilities to spy is hardly surprising. Many nation states have cyber capabilities in place and have been using them for some time.
In our networked world malware and häçking are force multipliers in the realm of spies enabling governments to access levels of information rarely achieved previously.
Apparently The Dukes have an easily identifiable attack footprint which consists of a ‘fast but noisy break-in followed by the rapid collection and exfiltration of as much data as possible.
If the target is discovered to have value, the häçkers change the tools they are using and move to s†éálthier tactics focused on long-term intelligence gathering.
A few eyebrows may be raised at the claim that the Russian government is using an ‘independent’ team of häçkers to do its cyber spying but it’s certainly not alone.
There are plausible claims that FBI carried out extensive häçking against foreign organizations by hooking a well-known häçker and getting him to enlist other häçkers who unwittingly took part in these häçks.
Chip giant aims to stop cars from being häçked
Intel maybe well known for providing processors for most of the world’s desktop PCs and laptops but the company is muscling into the car häçking space.
And the move is timely, industry analysts Gartner estimates there will be a quarter of a billion vehicles connected to the internet by 2020.
And by today’s standards many of them will be häçkable – enter Intel. The chip giant has set up an You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now., to test and develop techniques and strategies to make software in cars more secure.
This may seem like a departure for the company but it’s also put a lot of weight behind the Internet of Things and clearly sees a point in the future where clunky desktops and chunky laptops will become associated with Jurassic-age computing.
Big Blue, as it’s colloquially known, has tried to carve out a space in the world of mobile computing in the past, with its Atom processors and sub-tablet sized devices. These never really never took off, hence, its foray into the Internet of Things.
Car häçking is indeed a reality today and vehicles are crammed with numerous technologies such as Google’s Android Auto and Apple’s CarPlay to name just two.
Intel says the more complex and sophisticated systems are larger targets for häçkers, and has published a diagram of the 15 most häçkable or exposed features on a car. Those include the Engine & Transmission Engine Control Unit (ECU) and the steering and braking ECU, among others.
But auto-manufacturers are also taking steps to ramp up protection. Bloomsberg for instance reports that Volkswagen has teamed up with insurer Allianz SE, medical company Bayer AG and chemicals producer BASF SE to sell IT security services to firms in Germany.
The four companies will provide the seed money for a new operation dubbed ‘DCSO’ (German Cybersecurity Organization).
Apparently German companies lose about 51 billion euros a year to cybercrime, with the car, chemicals and pharmaceutical industries most affected.
So Intel turns to car protection, pharma giant Bayer and Volkswagen put their weight behind a new IT security firm and cyber villains just keep on häçking.
The dummy is dead
A group of cybersecurity students have häçked the pacemaker of a simulated human. And killed it.
The simulated human or dummy, dubbed You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now. with internal robotics that mimic human cardiovascular, respiratory, and neurological systems.
Medical students practice on iStan to hone their skills before working on real patients.
It responds to 300 different types of simulated medications and procedures, and the physiological response is identical to that of a human. Creepily, it even speaks and breathes.
However, the cyber security students used publicly available information on iStan to identify weak spots in its software and then used easily-acquired tools to exploit them.
They have published a You do not have permission to view the full content of this post. Log in or register now. on their findings.
In the paper they claim the intent behind the experiment was to help expose the security shortcomings in medical devices.
They say their main concern was the possibility that häçkers could interfere with medical mannequins used for training students and doctors: “Subtle modifications could go undetected and yet influence training classes of medical professionals to incorrectly assess situations based on inaccurate feedback from medical devices.”
To launch such an attack you would have thought requires a disturbed individual, slighted by the medical system and with a deep and simmering resentment, along with good häçking skills to launch such an attack. But then again, it could be the sort of thing a mischievous häçker might do.
This type of attack might seem far-fetched but why did former US vice president **** Cheney in 2013 have the wireless function in his heart implant disabled? It was because of the fear that terrorists might häçk the pacemaker and kill him, by for instance speeding up or slowing down the defibrillator.
And of course, this is precisely what the cyber security students demonstrated with iStan.