There were a number of incidents in 2016 that triggered increased interest in the security of so-called IoT or ‘smart’ devices. They included, among others, the record-breaking DDoS attacks against the French hosting provider OVH and the US DNS provider Dyn. These attacks are known to have been launched with the help of a massive botnet made up o

Introduction Hajime (meaning ‘beginning’ in Japanese) is an IoT worm that was first mentioned on 16 October 2016 in a public report by RapidityNetworks. One month later we saw the first samples being uploaded from Spain to VT. This worm builds a huge P2P botnet (almost 300,000 devices at the time of publishing this blogpost), but its real purpose

The Clifford Stoll’s interesting story of stalking the wily hacker back in the 80s was probably the first time deception was used for catching a hacker. Since then, the technology has changed a lot, but the concept of honeypots and deception in general has remained the same.Despite the undeniable and important role that honeypots have in proactive defense st

Being a volunteer for the SANS Internet Storm Center, I’m a big fan of the DShield service. I think that I’m feeding DShield with logs for eight or nine years now. In 2011, I wrote a Perl script to send my OSSEC firewall logs to DShield. This script has been running and pushing my logs every 30 mins for years. Later, DShield was extended to colle

Interactivity is a security system feature that implies interaction with the attacker and their tools as well as an impact on the attack scenario depending on the attacker’s actions. For example, introducing junk search results to confuse the vulnerability scanners used by cybercriminals is interactive. As well as causing problems for the cybercriminal

It may soon become easier for Internet service providers to anticipate and block certain types of online assaults launched by Web-based attack-for-hire services known as “booter” or “stresser” services, new research released today suggests. The findings come from researchers in Germany who’ve been studying patterns that emerge w

Recently a massive DDoS attack has disconnected a large portion of users from the Internet, hackers exploited IoT devices. Is your router secure? “Are we ready to live in a world where all devices are exposed to cyber attacks?” That is how I opened my presentation in QurtubaCON16 – cyber security event at Córdoba City (Spain) – and how I will op

Multiple stories published here over the past few weeks have examined the disruptive power of hacked “Internet of Things” (IoT) devices such as routers, IP cameras and digital video recorders. This post looks at how crooks are using hacked IoT devices as proxies to hide their true location online as they engage in a variety of other types of cybe

A new book by two New York University professors offers a fresh perspective on how individuals and corporations can hide their more private information in plain sight. The book, “Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest,” surveys the more interesting historical examples of the notion and provides some interesting context for prac

A security firm has released the results of an experiment that used a honeypot script named “GasPot” to determine the security threats facing gas tanks.These results were announced by Trend Micro researcher Kyle Wilhoit and Industrial Control Systems (ICS) expert Stephen Hilt during their presentation for Black Hat 2015, “The Little Pump Ga

Internet Noise Honeypots are an easy and popular way to get statistics on the “Internet noise.” Getting more knowledge on Internet noise gives you more insight into what is out there and is one of the sources that helps in getting better security analytics. I was curious what kind of traffic a honeypot name server receives in a public cloud; my r

Apparently no vulnerability is too small, no application too obscure, to escape a hacker’s notice.A honeypot run by Trustwave’s SpiderLabs research team recently snared an automated attack targeting users of the open source Rejetto HTTP File Server (Rejetto HFS). Someone was trying to exploit a vulnerability—which has since been patched—and insta

After almost two months of untimely and unexpected outage, The Pirate Bay (TPB) finally came back this weekend. But the re-launch of the infamous torrent-indexing website raised a question among those suspicious about this new setup — Is it really The Pirate Bay? A few days back we reported that The Pirate Bay – a widely popular file-sharing we

In order to see where attacks targeting industrial control systems were coming from, ThreatStream, a Google Ventures-backed security startup, set up a decoy network to lure in attackers. The Honeypot was successful, but the data on attack sources were not especially surprising. Most of the attacks were traced back to the United States but other countries inc

What is a “honeypot”? How does it work? And how can companies use it to enhance their defenses?According to Lance Sptizner, a honeypot is “an information system resource whose value lies in unauthorized or illicit use of that resource.” It has no production value of its own and does not give legitimate users any reason to ever interact with it. For these rea