This is a deep-diving species that “fed on small prey items such as squid.”
Academic paper.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
Read my blog posting guidelines he…
The Aspen Institute’s Aspen Cybersecurity Group — I’m a member — has released its cybersecurity policy agenda for the next four years.
The next administration and Congress cannot simultaneously address the wide array of cybersecurity risks confronting modern society. Policymakers in the White House, federal agencies, and Congress should zero in on the most important and solvable problems. To that end, this report covers five priority areas where we believe cybersecurity policymakers should focus their attention and resources as they contend with a presidential transition, a new Congress, and massive staff turnover across our nation’s capital…
The Finnish psychotherapy clinic Vastaamo was the victim of a data breach and theft. The criminals tried extorting money from the clinic. When that failed, they started extorting money from the patients:
Neither the company nor Finnish investigators have released many details about the nature of the breach, but reports say the attackers initially sought a payment of about 450,000 euros to protect about 40,000 patient records. The company reportedly did not pay up. Given the scale of the attack and the sensitive nature of the stolen data, the case has become a national story in Finland. Globally, attacks on health care organizations have escalated as cybercriminals look for higher-value targets…
Payment card processing giant TSYS suffered a ransomware attack earlier this month. Since then reams of data stolen from the company have been posted online, with the attackers promising to publish more in the coming days. But the company says the malware did not jeopardize card data, and that the incident was limited to administrative areas of its business.
FireEye was hacked by — they believe — “a nation with top-tier offensive capabilities”:
During our investigation to date, we have found that the attacker targeted and accessed certain Red Team assessment tools that we use to test our customers’ security. These tools mimic the behavior of many cyber threat actors and enable FireEye to provide essential diagnostic security services to our customers. None of the tools contain zero-day exploits. Consistent with our goal to protect the community, we are proactively releasing methods and means to detect the use of our stolen Red Team tools…
FireEye was hacked by — they believe — “a nation with top-tier offensive capabilities”:
During our investigation to date, we have found that the attacker targeted and accessed certain Red Team assessment tools that we use to test our customers’ security. These tools mimic the behavior of many cyber threat actors and enable FireEye to provide essential diagnostic security services to our customers. None of the tools contain zero-day exploits. Consistent with our goal to protect the community, we are proactively releasing methods and means to detect the use of our stolen Red Team tools…
Microsoft today issued its final batch of security updates for Windows PCs in 2020, ending the year with a relatively light patch load. Nine of the 58 security vulnerabilities addressed this month earned Microsoft’s most-dire “critical” label, meaning they can be abused by malware or miscreants to seize remote control over PCs without any help from users.
This new protocol, called Oblivious DNS-over-HTTPS (ODoH), hides the websites you visit from your ISP.
Here’s how it works: ODoH wraps a layer of encryption around the DNS query and passes it through a proxy server, which acts as a go-between the internet user and the website they want to visit. Because the DNS query is encrypted, the proxy can’t see what’s inside, but acts as a shield to prevent the DNS resolver from seeing who sent the query to begin with.
IETF memo.
The paper:
Abstract: The Domain Name System (DNS) is the foundation of a human-usable Internet, responding to client queries for host-names with corresponding IP addresses and records. Traditional DNS is also unencrypted, and leaks user information to network operators. Recent efforts to secure DNS using DNS over TLS (DoT) and DNS over HTTPS (DoH) havebeen gaining traction, ostensibly protecting traffic and hiding content from on-lookers. However, one of the criticisms ofDoT and DoH is brought to bear by the small number of large-scale deployments (e.g., Comcast, Google, Cloudflare): DNS resolvers can associate query contents with client identities in the form of IP addresses. Oblivious DNS over HTTPS (ODoH) safeguards against this problem. In this paper we ask what it would take to make ODoH practical? We describe ODoH, a practical DNS protocol aimed at resolving this issue by both protecting the client’s content and identity. We implement and deploy the protocol, and perform measurements to show that ODoH has comparable performance to protocols like DoH and DoT which are gaining widespread adoption,while improving client privacy, making ODoH a practical privacy enhancing replacement for the usage of DNS…
Clever tactic:
This new malware was discovered by researchers at Dutch cyber-security company Sansec that focuses on defending e-commerce websites from digital skimming (also known as Magecart) attacks.
The payment skimmer malware pulls its sleight of hand trick with the help of a double payload structure where the source code of the skimmer script that steals customers’ credit cards will be concealed in a social sharing icon loaded as an HTML ‘svg’ element with a ‘path’ element as a container.
The syntax for hiding the skimmer’s source code as a social media button perfectly mimics an ‘svg’ element named using social media platform names (e.g., facebook_full, twitter_full, instagram_full, youtube_full, pinterest_full, and google_full)…
Clever tactic:
This new malware was discovered by researchers at Dutch cyber-security company Sansec that focuses on defending e-commerce websites from digital skimming (also known as Magecart) attacks.
The payment skimmer malware pulls its sleight of hand trick with the help of a double payload structure where the source code of the skimmer script that steals customers’ credit cards will be concealed in a social sharing icon loaded as an HTML ‘svg’ element with a ‘path’ element as a container.
The syntax for hiding the skimmer’s source code as a social media button perfectly mimics an ‘svg’ element named using social media platform names (e.g., facebook_full, twitter_full, instagram_full, youtube_full, pinterest_full, and google_full)…
