21 October 2016 is a date that will live in infamy. At 11:10 UTC, internet performance management company Dyn began monitoring a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against its Domain Name System (DNS) infrastructure. It took Dyn approximately two hours to mitigate the attack. In that span of time, the DDoS campaign took down the websites...

Two malware families known as GootKit and Godzilla are closing out the year strong with separate campaigns designed to harvest users' financial information. In Canada, the GootKit trojan is targeting members of several financial institutions. The campaign begins when a user receives a spam message that appears to have originated from a trusted actor...

Often times I am asked by friends and family: what’s the most important thing I can do to protect myself online? The answer I always give to them is to never use the same password on multiple sites. Ever. The reason this is my number one answer is simple: every day there is another breach announced. Some of these breaches are major events that you...

With 2016 coming to a close, The State of Security wanted to give our readers an overview of some of the most interesting, educational, and standout blogs from the year to help fill the time between eating holiday treats and celebrating the New Year. 6 Stages of Network Intrusion and How to Defend Against Them In June, David Bisson wrote up...

A new Android trojan targets wireless routers and performs DNS hijacking instead of attacking users directly. Kaspersky Lab found that the trojan, dubbed Trojan.AndroidOS.Switcher, generally adopts one of two disguises. The first facade (com.baidu.com) is a fake mobile client for the Chinese search engine Baidu. The second (com.snda.wifi) is a fake...

As the year approaches the end, it is a time to reflect on 2016 and industrial control systems (ICS) security. Why ICS security? Because securing ICS should be everyone’s concern. Consider the impact on this critical infrastructure and what it means to you. Impact Why? Your entertainment—watching movies on your TV or laptop,...

In a recent article, I discussed how HDDCryptor, Cerber, and eight other families dominated the ransomware scene in 2016. It was a good year for ransomware authors. But they weren't the only ones who closed out 2016 in the black. Scammers also made a killing off unsuspecting users. They did so partly because 2016 saw such a dramatic spike in scams....

A pseudo-Darkleech campaign is exposing users to Nemucod malware that in turn downloads Cerber ransomware onto their machines. Heimdal's security evangelist Andra Zaharia found the campaign hinges on pseudo-Darkleech infections by which malicious actors compromise WordPress websites and inject code into core WP files. The code displays a malicious...

As John McAfee, founder of McAfee Antivirus, tells us: "Social engineering has become about 75% of an average hacker's toolkit, and for the most successful hackers, it reaches 90% or more." Breaching a firewall is hard; impersonating tech support over the telephone is easy. Few motivated hackers planning an attack on a target will try technical...

Tumblr is back up and running following a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that took the social media platform down for several hours. At approximately 15:15 EST on 22 December, online status tools reported the website was down. Tumblr confirmed as much on Twitter, saying some of its users were "experiencing latency affecting the...

When virtual reality (VR) makes it big, what do we have to worry about when it comes to security? Until recently, locking down VR devices hasn’t been much of a concern, as the technology has only been a curiosity without much adoption… not a big target for hackers. For example, primitive and bulky prototype VR devices were being tested in labs as...

Ransomware is a significant problem, there's no doubt about that. Time and time again, companies and individuals fall foul of malware that encrypts their data files and demands a ransom be paid for the elusive decryption key. But sometimes, just sometimes, the ransomware authors make mistakes. Because sometimes, ways are found to undo the damage...

Purple Teaming is gaining a lot of movement and popularity. Before delving deeper into some top tips for exercises, I thought I would re-iterate that “Purple Team” is essentially a buzzword for getting the most out of a pentest / red team exercise. There’s nothing complicated about it. Yes, it is a buzzword, but one that instantly helps everyone to...

I am going to put the spoiler warning right here in the first sentence: I am going to be talking about season two of Mr. Robot, and I'm not holding anything back. Read on if you have already watched it. If you haven't watched it, keep reading to see how life imitates art. And if not art, then at least a cable TV show. Those of you here at The State...

A new malware family named Alice is lean, mean, and designed solely to empty the safe of ATMs. Researchers at the Los Angeles security software company Trend Micro first discovered Alice in November 2016. It appears to have been in the wild since October 2014. Alice makes use of several evasive techniques to avoid detection. First, it follows the...

‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse...” But you can bet your Inbox received at least one lump of coal in the form of a phishing email. That’s right, the bad actors have been very naughty in 2016 delivering millions of fraudulent messages trying to entice trustworthy people to...

2016 was an exciting year in information security. There were mega-breaches, tons of new malware strains, inventive phishing attacks, and laws dealing with digital security and privacy. Each of these instances brought the security community to where we are now: on the cusp of 2017. Even so, everything that happened in 2016 wasn't equally significant...

A free tool called RansomFree that helps protect computers and servers running Windows against ransomware is now available for download. Boston security firm Cybereason developed its tool to respond to the evolution of ransomware, including the ability of most crypto-malware to bypass anti-virus solutions. As Cybereason Labs researcher Uri Sternfeld...

Ask any geek and they'll tell you how fun it is to install Linux on a new machine. Whether you're trying out a new distro or installing an upgraded version, there is something cathartic about jumping on the Linux bandwagon and hacking away on a new system. Although Linux by nature is more secure than Windows, there are still steps that need to be...

The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) has arrested a man for renting out portions of the Xtreme DDoS-for-hire service to conduct distributed denial of service attacks. On 9 December, the FBI arrested and charged Sean Sharma, a 26-year-old graduate student at the University of Southern California, for launching a DDoS attack against the San...