Vulnerabilities and exploits

Opinion

Securing Your Email Space

Yesterday, Lavabit – a secure e-mail provider – announced that it’s closing down their operations. The official text and the Website looks like this: Lavabit was one of the very few secure e-mail service providers bringing security for its paid customers by encrypting all locally stored e-mail messages with an asymmetric key and AES-256. This means

Research

Master Keys and Vulnerabilities

Last weeks have been quite busy with announcements of either master keys or Chinese master keysbeing unveiled, both qualifying as critical vulnerabilities for the Android platform. Although things have finally calmed a bit, we are still waiting for the final act in Las Vegas at Black Hat USA, where Jeff Forristal (the researcher who discovered one of the

Research

Malicious URLs in .lc Zone

While analyzing suspicious URLs I found out that more and more malicious URLs are coming from.lc domain, which formally belongs to Santa Lucia country located in in the eastern Caribbean Sea. Our statistics confirm this trend. Cybercriminals from different places of the world are actively using this domain, including cybercriminals from Brazil abusing free Web

Software

Microsoft Updates July 2013

As promised in Microsoft’s July Advance Notification, Microsoft ships seven security bulletins this month (MS13-052 – MS13-058). At least 34 CVE are being patched. Six of the Security Bulletins are rated “critical” due to remote code execution issues. The vulnerabilities being fixed this month enable RCE across all versions of Windows operating systems, but most of these serious flaws have all been privately reported and there is no indication that they are publicly known or exploited yet. Some however, are publicly known and drew attention from a number of exploit developers. The kernel mode vulnerability, CVE-2013-3172 is publicly known, along with another kernel mode bug publicly disclosed by Tavis Ormandy in May. Unfortunately, an exploit abusing that vulnerability was touched up by another contributor and then already integrated into metasploit for public distribution and use. It’s also interesting that the update for the kernel mode TrueType Font Parsing CVE-2013-3129 bug effects code paths in seven different software packages (Office, Lync, Visual Studio, .NET, Silverlight, and “Windows components”) updated separately by Security Bulletins MS13-052, MS13-053, and MS13-054.

Software

Microsoft Updates May 2013

Microsoft released a long list of updates for Microsoft software today. The most interesting appear to be those patching Internet Explorer and the kernel software vulnerabilities. In all, ten critical “use-after-free” vulnerabilities are patched in IE along with one important Information Disclosure vulnerability, and three elevation of privilege vulnerabilities are being patched as well. Almost

Research

An Ambush for Peculiar Koreans

While researching PlugX propagation with the use of Java exploits we stumbled upon one compromised site that hosted and pushed a malicious Java applet exploiting the CVE 2013-0422 vulnerability. The very malicious Java application was detected heuristically with generic verdict for that vulnerability and it would have been hardly possible to spot that particular site

Software

Microsoft Updates April 2013

Microsoft released two Bulletins this month patching 3 critical vulnerabilities. Along with these immediate issues, they released five other Bulletins rated “Important”. It appears that the two critical Bulletins address use-after-free vulnerabilities that can all be attacked through Internet Explorer. For the Windows workstation environments, all versions of Internet Explorer need to be patched asap,

Reports