Twitter as Command and Control

It’s been a while since I’ve posted on some actual exploits, and for that I apologize.

There is a particular exploit that came to light a couple of months ago, but that I still find intriguing.  In this case, botnets were using Twitter as a Command and Control center.  The way it worked was the infected machines (bots) knew to look at the tweets on a particular Twitter account.  These tweets held encoded information about where the new command and control center for the botnet was located.

This is an example of business logic abuse – in this case the bot herder used the tweet function to control his bots.  This means he was using Twitter in exactly the way it was intended – to post tweets on his own account – but was doing it to perpetrate malicious activity.

The brilliance of this comes from that fact that command and control centers are the heart of a botnet.  And by having his bots check for updates on Twitter, the bot herder was guaranteeing that the place the bots would check would always be live – who would take down Twitter?  Of course, Twitter disabled his account, so that beats my logic, but, still, this is incredibly devious.

It will be very interesting to see what business logic abuse types stem from this attack!

By popular demand: Recording of Zeus Strikes Back Webinar

We again received great feedback from people who watched the Zeus Strikes Back webinar.  On October 13, Mike Eynon, Silver Tail’s CTO, gave a presentation on how Silver Tail was targeted by the Zeus criminals because of a previous webinar we had given on Dissecting Zeus.

Mike’s webinar discusses how we realized we were being attacked, how the criminals were able to get past Silver Tail’s defenses, and what we’ve done since then to make sure we are completely locked down.

For those of you who missed it, you can access the video of the webinar here.  If you are interested in the September webinar where we dissected Zeus, you can get a link to the recording of that video here.

Enjoy!

Silver Tail Article in FSTC Innovator

The new edition to FSTC Innovator is available now.  It features an article I wrote on how the threat landscape for financial institutions is evolving.  No longer are criminals only transferring money out of accounts.  Now they are also scraping check images for multi-channel fraud, gaming incentive programs, etc. 

It talks about how the criminals are extremely motivated and have a vast amount of resources and just looking for traditional fraud is no longer good enough.

You can get a copy of the Innovator here.

Obama Promotes National Cyber Security Awareness Month

As mentioned in a previous post, October is National Cyber Security Awareness Month (NCSAM).  It’s sponsored by the National Cyber Security Alliance  (NCSA).  The NCSA has just sent an announcement about a video showing President Obama promoting NCSAM. 

Here’s the information from the NCSA announcement.

We wanted to alert you to a new video from President Obama promoting NCSAM. He covers the theme of our shared responsibility as well as specific cybersecurity tips. Of course, we are thankful for the President’s leadership on cybersecurity issues. His voice and clear vision of what we need to do to secure our cyber infrastructure are critical to our efforts to get every American to secure the computers and networks they use.

The video is only 3 minutes and I have to say it’s quite cool to see the president extolling the benefits of staying safe.  Enjoy!

Silver Tail to be featured in SC Magazine!

Silver Tail was selected as one of the top companies in this week’s SC World Congress Innovators Throwdown!  We presented yesterday along with 9 other companies and were chosen as one of the best.  Because of this, we’ll be featured in an upcoming edition of SC Magazine.  Very exciting!  Stay tuned for links to the article.

More information about the Throwdown can be found here.

Washington Post Blog: Zeus Inflitrates Security Firm

For those of you who haven’t seen it, Brian Krebs posted a blog on Silver Tail.  You can find the blog here.

The blog gives an overview of how Silver Tail was attacked by Zeus.  My colleague, Mike Eynon, will be covering the details of the attack in our webinar tomorrow, Oct 13, at 10am Pacific time.  If you are interested in attending, you can sign up here.

If you miss the webinar and are interested, we’ll be recording it.  Send me an email or post a comment to this blog and we’ll be sure you get a copy.  We’ll also be blogging about it once we get the recording finalized.

We’re looking forward to talking with you all tomorrow!

October is National Cyber Security Awareness Month

Given that October in National Cyber Security Awareness Month, this is a good time to ask what you are doing to help improve cyber security.  Does your company have programs to educate the employees?  Have you worked with your children on cyber security?  What about your parents?

If you want to do something and aren’t sure where to start, this page has great suggestions.

This initiative is sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security and the National Cyber Security Alliance.

For those of you in California, there is an event in Sacramento on October 14: Cyber Security West 2009.  You can find more information about this event here.

Silver Tail wins Finovate Best of Show!

Silver Tail is pleased to announce that we were chosen Best of Show at Finovate in New York last week!  This is in addition to our Best of Show award at Finovate Startup in April. 

For those of you who don’t know, Finovate showcases hot new technology relevant to the financial sector.  Presenters at this year’s conference included Fidelity, Intuit, and Fiserv.  There were some amazing presentations which is why this award is even more flattering. 

We demo’d both Forensics and Mitigation and the audience got to see not only how Man in the Browser impacts Aunt Sally, but how we can detect it and stop it.

The video of our demo isn’t posted yet, but when it is, we’ll be sure to include a link here so you can see it.