PhoenixDzine

Ever since Stuxnet hit the news last year, there has been an increased interest in the area of industrial control systems (ICS). This has been evidenced by the fact that we’ve seen a recent surge in public releases of zero-day (unpatched) vulnerabilities and exploits.

Earlier this week, we saw no less than 34 unpatched vulnerabilities posted to Bugtraq. In the original article by The Register, there’s also mention of a SCADA exploit pack which is currently for sale to pen-testers.

At our international press tour held in Moscow in early February, we spoke about the dissolution of trust on the internet and discussed the possibility of Certificate Authority subversion and the impact of abused digital certificates.

Our speculation was partly driven by the abuse of trust that Kaspersky Lab monitored and prevented by the stolen Stuxnet digital certificates.

    The news of the death of Elizabeth Taylor is already being used in social engineering scams on Twitter. Here is an example of one I saw this morning:  

Bit.ly statistics show the same short URL has been recycled since November 2010 for different on-click fraud campaigns (pay per traffic) related to the same affiliate program.

Twitter is celebrating its 5th birthday this week. Since its inception in July of 2006 Twitter has grown to become an essential part of many people’s daily lives in just 140 characters. Twitter has also spawned multiple malware campaigns and continues to be a successful avenue of attack to this day.

Security on Twitter has had an eventful history, even considering its relatively young age. There have been all sorts of different types of attacks from trending topics to hacked admins, to account hijacks, just to name a few. In fact, due to Twitter’s popularity and its constant security lapses, the Federal Trade Commission actually brought charges against Twitter in 2010. As a result Twitter had to adopt a number of new security policies, and includes such security options as default SSL connectivity and OAUTH support for external Twitter clients.