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Archive for the ‘Disclosure’ Category
Thursday, January 22nd, 2009
Heartland Payment Systems disclosed little information in a press release regarding a security breach that they discovered last week. The company provides “credit/debit/prepaid card processing, payroll, check management and payments solutions to more than 250,000 business locations nationwide”.
The lack of information in the release is curious, because the news was released right on Jan. 20th, buried amongst the media focus on the new president, and the release contains little details on what may potentially be the largest known breach to date.
“Payments processor Heartland Payment Systems has learned it was the victim of a security breach within its processing system in 2008. Heartland believes the intrusion is contained.”
“We found evidence of an intrusion last week and immediately notified federal law enforcement officials as well as the card brands,” said Robert H.B. Baldwin, Jr., Heartland’s president and chief financial officer. “We understand that this incident may be the result of a widespread global cyber fraud operation, and we are cooperating closely with the United States Secret Service and Department of Justice.”
It’s interesting and eye-opening that the company did not have systems in place to identify the breach themselves. They were tipped off to it by Visa and MasterCard:
“After being alerted by Visa® and MasterCard® of suspicious activity surrounding processed card transactions, Heartland enlisted the help of several forensic auditors to conduct a thorough investigation into the matter. Last week, the investigation uncovered malicious software that compromised data that crossed Heartland’s network.”
“Heartland apologizes for any inconvenience this situation has caused. Heartland advises cardholders to examine their monthly statements closely and report any suspicious activity to their card issuers. Cardholders are not responsible for unauthorized fraudulent charges made by third parties.”
We will monitor for more information regarding the malware itself. However, further details will most likely not be released in the midst of an ongoing investigation.
Posted in Disclosure, Security breach, Undetected malware, cybercrime | No Comments »
Tuesday, December 9th, 2008
A suspected IE7 0day has surfaced on servers in China. Ryan Naraine posted information earlier this morning on the state of the patch and the exploit.
A couple of our ThreatFire users unfortunately visited the site, but fortunately they have been protected against multiple exploit attempts from that site. We are trying to trigger and analyze the 0day amongst the others, but it appears to be rather unreliable in exploiting a mshtml.dll vulnerability. The site attempts to attack multiple ActiveX control vulnerabilities, the ancient MS06-014 vuln, and several others. At the very least, the stash of trojans, rootkit components and password stealers delivered by it are prevented by ThreatFire.
Most of the malware appears to be gaming password related, and the 0day exploit implemented in javascript attempts to identify the OS your system is running and attacks WindowsXP or Windows 2003 accordingly.
Be sure to keep your Microsoft patches up-to-date, there should be more later today. A patch for the 0day flaw will follow.
Posted in Disclosure | No Comments »
Thursday, November 20th, 2008
When federal government systems are hit with malware, the incidents often receive no public reporting. However, the slew of infections from removable drive based worms have become so bad on the U.S. Dept of Defense’s infrastructure that they’ve banned usb drives altogether, according to Wired’s reporter Noah Shachtman. It’s unfortunate that these drives are not being properly scanned, and that doing so must not be a part of process to this point.
The military’s policy decision is somewhat unsurprising, considering that the Gammima worm that made it onto the international space station this past August also spread using the Usb autostart technique. Worms have been very effectively spreading using this technique to deliver password stealing components since early 2007, and it’s about time policies are clamping down on the slack. Quick releases of worm variants evading anti-virus scanners continue to use the same autostart technique today. Of course, users running ThreatFire have been protected from these AV-evading autostart worms since they installed it.
Update (11/25/2008): The US-CERT posted information about what they are calling two popular “methods”. Basically, the post describes removable drive-based infection vectors — both to the removable drives, when worms copy themselves to the media from an infected system, and from the removable drives, when a worm abusing Windows’ autoplay functionality executes itself on the system. Nice to see awareness increasing — Autoplay can be dangerous!
It’s not always a waste of time anymore. In addition to running TF, you can scan your usb drives on a system with Autoplay disabled with your anti-virus scanner. The scanning solutions have, for the most part, caught up with the two year old technique.
Posted in Disclosure, Password stealing, Undetected malware, Worm | No Comments »
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