With the increasing popularity and real-world use of cryptocurrencies and the fact that cybercriminals will always try to exploit something that can make money for them, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that malware targeting Bitcoin ATMs have started appearing in underground markets.
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This blog tackles the recently ill-famed VPNFilter malware and if deployed devices are vulnerable to it. VPNFilter is a newly discovered, multi-stage malware (detected by Trend Micro as ELF_VPNFILT.A, ELF_VPNFILT.B, ELF_VPNFILT.C, and ELF_VPNFILT.D) that affects many models of connected devices. Based on our data from June 1 to July 12, plenty of the devices are still using old firmware versions. In fact, 19 known vulnerabilities, not only taken advantage of by VPNFilter but other malware as well, can still be detected in devices up to this day.
Read More Even before the term IoT was coined, we had the routers at the gateway, most of the time publicly exposed on the internet. In the context of the IoT, the router is perhaps the most important device for the whole infrastructure. All traffic goes through it and it allows for the provision of many services, such as Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), Domain Name System (DNS), content filtering, firewalls, and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), to all connected devices, including computers, smartphones, and IP cameras. If an attacker is able to compromise the router, every device connected to it can be affected. And that’s what a hacking group in Brazil just did.
Read MoreIn this blog post, we will discuss how we developed a human-readable machine learning system that is able to determine whether a downloaded file is benign or malicious in nature.
The development of this actionable intelligent system stemmed from the question: How can we make our knowledge about global software download events actionable? More specifically, how can we use such information to do a better job at detecting the threats posed by the large amounts of new malicious software circulating on a daily basis?
In this last installment of this blog series, we will answer such questions and give a summary of what we did with the information we’ve obtained. Our research paper titled Exploring the Long Tail of (Malicious) Software Downloads provides a more comprehensive look into how we’ve gathered and analyzed our software downloads data.
Read MoreUsing a machine learning system, we analyzed 3 million software downloads, involving hundreds of thousands of internet-connected machines, and provide insights in this three-part blog series. In the first part of this series, we took a closer look at unpopular software downloads and the risks they pose to organizations. We also briefly mentioned the problem regarding code signing abuse, which we will elaborate on in this post.
Code signing is the practice of cryptographically signing software with the intent of giving the operating system (like Windows) an efficient and precise way to discriminate between a legitimate application (like an installer for Microsoft Office) and malicious software. All modern operating systems and browsers automatically verify signatures by means of the concept of a certificate chain.
Valid certificates are issued or signed by trusted certification authorities (CAs), which are backed up by parent CAs. This mechanism relies entirely and strictly on the concept of trust. We assume that malware operators are, by definition, untrustworthy entities. Supposedly, these untrustworthy entities have no access to valid certificates. However, our analysis shows that is not the case.
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