Robby Pedrica's Tech Blog

Category: Security

  • Office365 Ransomware attack

    Office365 Ransomware attack

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    Robby Pedrica
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    There is a massive ransomware attack targeting Office365 users at the moment. Originating on the 22nd of this month, the attack used phishing emails to distribute the Cerber ransomware, which encrypts users’ files and demands a ransom to decrypt the files. Cerber was widely distributed after its originator was apparently able to easily confirm that…

  • ISP data breach

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    Robby Pedrica
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    For anyone using local ISP CrystalWeb for internet access, you may want to immediately change your details and password on their system as that system has just been fully breached – someone called -hades has posted CrystalWeb’s full client list online including usernames, passwords, emails and other. More importantly, if you reuse this password anywhere else, it’s…

  • Security News – WK4 May 2016

    Security News – WK4 May 2016

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    Robby Pedrica
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    The great Linkedin hack A hacker called “Peace” recently tried to sell a password database of ~ 117 million Linkedin login details that come as a the result of a 2012 breach on the professional relationship social media site. In a blog post published on May 18, LinkedIn CISO Cory Scott wrote, “Yesterday, we became…

  • Surprise!

    Surprise!

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    Robby Pedrica
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    And following on from Locky comes Surprise, this week’s flavour of ransom-ware! Yeah! This latest ransom-ware family that’s being distributed with Teamviewer 10, specifically version 10.0.47484, launches a file remotely called surprise.exe and then silently goes about its business injecting malware and encrypting files. Teamviewer themselves have indicated that they’ve had no breach of credentials…

  • DROWN

    DROWN

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    Robby Pedrica
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    Another day, another SSL attack. A new, low-cost attack has been found, that decrypts sensitive communications in a matter of hours and in some cases almost immediately. I hereby name you DROWN! And CVE-2016-0800. The attack works against TLS-protected communications that rely on the RSA cryptosystem when the key is exposed even indirectly through SSLv2, a TLS precursor…

  • Security News – Wk2 Feb 2016

    Security News – Wk2 Feb 2016

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    Robby Pedrica
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    We start off this week with news of Adobe’s Creative Cloud deleting data on Apple MACs – not a security issue in itself but still a serious issue. I’m sure there’s a lot of pissed-off people out there – losing data due to someone else’s problem is not nice. Onto security-specific news, the UK GCHQ…

  • Security News – wk4 Jan 2016

    Security News – wk4 Jan 2016

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    Robby Pedrica
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    Backdoors seem to be the order of the day: SEC Consult in Austria have found what they term a “deliberately hidden backdoor account” in NX-1200, a network controller appliance for conference rooms manufactured by AMX, which is used by governmental and military bodies (even the US White House), educational and healthcare institutions, hotels and conference centers…

  • Security News – wk2 Jan

    Security News – wk2 Jan

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    Robby Pedrica
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    I’m going to be pushing my security column out on at least a bi-monthly basis from now on – a 2016 resolution! ; ) This past week’s Patch Tuesday from Microsoft was quite a serious affair – 9 security advisories covering 25 vulnerabilities of which 6 advisories address critical level flaws in IE, Office, Windows and…

  • The scourge of Ransomware

    The scourge of Ransomware

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    Robby Pedrica
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    From Wikipedia: Ransomware is a type of malware that prevents or limits users from accessing their system. This type of malware forces its victims to pay the ransom through certain online payment methods in order to grant access to their systems, or to get their data back. Some ransomware encrypts files. To say that Ransomware…

  • Adobe: Stop using Flash

    Adobe: Stop using Flash

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    Robby Pedrica
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    Wow! This is one for the books – Adobe telling everyone to stop using a product of theirs! http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2015/11/flash-html5-and-open-web-standards.html?scid=social_20151201_55826586&adbid=671559505906282496&adbpl=tw&adbpr=63786611 This is just reinforcing what we’ve known all along – Flash is a security nightmare! Mozilla and Chrome have been actively blocking flash for some time now and I must say, I don’t really miss it. Considering…

  • Security issues invade non-traditional areas

    Security issues invade non-traditional areas

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    Robby Pedrica
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    We’re mostly used to malicious attacks being associated with computer, servers, mobiles and other IT-related systems. But more and more, computing is being pushed into areas that aren’t traditional for these attacks yet are fast becoming critical areas. InternetOfThings (IoT ) devices and automotive applications are starting to appear on hackers’ radars. Some security researchers…

  • Backups and online data

    Backups and online data

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    Robby Pedrica
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    This past weekend has not been a good one for Mweb Business. On Friday, some misconfiguration, glitch or human error caused the loss of many clients’ hosted systems on Mweb’s virtual hosting platform. Clients were greeted with a message stating that their new/clean virtual machines were now up with a new IP address. And no data. That…

  • Flash triple threat

    Flash triple threat

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    Robby Pedrica
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    The last week has been a very interesting one ( read OMG it’s almost the end of the world ) in the security world. There were new threats from all corners but Adobe Flash stole the show with 3 critical issues in 2 days. All 3 issues could result in remote code execution or DoS attacks.…

  • MS Windows critical font vuln

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    Robby Pedrica
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    Microsoft release an out-of-order patch yesterday for a critical vulnerability relating to custom fonts resulting in remote execution of code on a machine. More details here: http://gizmodo.com/go-update-windows-right-now-1719187152 Note that because Windows Server 2003 has just gone end-of-life, there is no update for it.