Category Archives: Stuxnet

Researchers find cyberweapon capable of knocking out electric grids

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A newly discovered malware framework, which some believe carries signs of Russian authorship, can be used by hackers to disrupt industrial control systems and cause mass power outages, according to research conducted by cybersecurity firms Dragos Inc. and ESET. The findings are significant because they represent the first known real-world case of a computer virus designed to directly interact with electric grid hardware, explained Sergio Caltagirone, director of threat intelligence for Dragos. Researchers believe that a version of the malware framework, dubbed “CrashOverride” or “Industroyer,” was previously leveraged to hack into an electric transmission station in Ukraine causing a black out for several hours last December in neighborhoods just north of Kiev. Evidence of a connection between CrashOverride’s author and the attackers behind last year’s Ukrainian power grid incident exists, according to Caltagirone, but was not published in Dragos’ technical analysis. In January, iSight Partners, a subsidiary of U.S. cybersecurity […]

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Software flaw that allowed Stuxnet virus to spread was the most exploited in 2016

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Software updates might strengthen cybersecurity, but they’re hardly the full picture when it comes to digital hygiene. One of the most famous Windows vulnerabilities in history — a coding flaw that was originally discovered in 2010 and had a role in the elaborate Pentagon mission to handicap Iran’s nuclear enrichment program — was the most widely exploited software bug in both 2015 and 2016, according to new research by antivirus provider Kaspersky Lab, even though Microsoft rolled out a patch in August 2010. “The life of an exploit doesn’t end with the release of a security patch designed to fix the vulnerability being exploited,” Kaspersky Lab researchers wrote in a blog post Thursday sourcing proprietary and open-source intelligence reports. “Once made public, a vulnerability can become even more dangerous: grabbed and repurposed by big threat actors within hours.” Kaspersky Lab found that 27 percent of its user base had at one point encountered the “CVE-2010-2568” Microsoft exploit between […]

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Shadow Brokers data dump reveals yet another NSA-Stuxnet link

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When the Shadow Brokers dumped on Friday another batch of data allegedly stolen from the Equation Group, which has been linked to the NSA, security researchers dove right in. Their first disclosed findings were of Window exploits taking advantage of bugs that were believed to be still unpatched, and apparent evidence that the NSA has hacked into Dubai-based EastNets, a firm that oversees payments in the global SWIFT transaction system for a considerable number of … More → Continue reading Shadow Brokers data dump reveals yet another NSA-Stuxnet link→

Duqu Malware Techniques Used by Cybercriminals

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Duqu 2.0 is a really impressive piece of malware, related to Stuxnet and probably written by the NSA. One of its security features is that it stays resident in its host’s memory without ever writing persistent files to the system’s drives. Now, this same technique is being used by criminals: Now, fileless malware is going mainstream, as financially motivated criminal… Continue reading Duqu Malware Techniques Used by Cybercriminals→