Anonymous says it will go after Mexican Drug Cartel

• Anonymous claims one of its members was kidnapped at a street protest
• Anonymous claims it will start releasing details about journalists, taxi drivers, police officers and government officials who are on the Cartel’s payroll, if the kidnap victim is not released by November 5th (Guy Fawkes Day)
• No information about the person who was allegedly kidnapped has been released
• Anonymous hopes that releasing this information, the government will be able to pursue the allegedly corrupt officials. However, depending on the type of information, it is unlikely that the evidence provided would be enough to convict someone.
• There are serious concerns that the release or even the threat of the release of such information could result in a violent backlash from the Cartel.
• It would seem that anyone who’s name appears on the lists released by anonymous would be in serious danger. A case of mistaken identity or speculation could result in the death of an innocent person.
• Anonymous has claimed it would attack a number of entities, including the NYSE and Facebook, a large number of these attacks have never taken place, or were unsuccessful and never mentioned again.

Series of spear phishing attacks against chemical and defense companies

• At least 50 different companies were targeted by attackers attempting to steal research and development documents and other sensitive information.
• The attacks started in July, and continued through September, it is also believed that the same attackers were targeting NGOs and the auto industry earlier this year.
• The attacks where spear phishing attacks, a specialized form of the common email attack. Unlike a typical phishing scam, where an attacker poses as your bank and attempts to get you to enter your login credentials and other personal information in to a fake site designed to mimic the look of your banks site, a spear phishing attack specifically targets individuals, using information that is known about them and where they work. Spear Phishing attacks also commonly involve impersonating someone you might expect to receive such an email from.
• The emails sent in this case often took the form of meeting invitations with infected attachments. In other cases when the messages were broadcast to many victims, they took the form of security bulletins, usually riding on actual vulnerability announcements for common software such as Adobe Reader and Flash Player. It also seems the attackers attached the infected files in 7Zip format, to evade many spam filters and virus scanners that block or scan .zip files. The attackers also took to encrypting the zip files with a password, and providing that password in the email, again to avoid virus scanners on the inbound mail servers.
• This attackers used PoisonIvy, a common backdoor trojan written by one or more persons who speak Mandarin. The Trojan also contained the address of a Command and Control (C&C) server used to feed it additional instructions.
• Once the attackers made their way in to the network through one or more infected machines, they leveraged that access to eventually gain permissions to copy sensitive documents and upload them to an external server where they could then be recovered.
• One of the command and control servers was a VPS operated in the United States, owned by a Chinese individual from Hebei province. Investigators have not been able to determine if this individual was part of the attacks, if anyone else had access to the VPS, or if he was acting on behalf of another group. It is possible the server was compromised, or that it could have been made to look like that was the case.
• Symantec says that there were a number of different groups attacking these companies during this time span, some using a custom developed backdoor called ‘Sogu’ and using specially crafted .doc and .pdf files. There is no word on if these additional attacks were also successful.
• Full Report

Feedback:

• Remote Downloads?
• Q: I have a question regarding downloads, in particular, remote downloads.
• A: There are a number of options, ranging in capability and ease of use.
• rTorrent – A command line torrent client, works great over SSH (especially when combined with Screen). This is what Allan uses to seed the Linux Action Show torrents.
• uTorrent – uTorrent (microTorrent) is available for windows, mac and linux. It offers an optional web UI (the web UI is the only option for linux) for remotely controlling the torrents, and can also automatically start downloading torrents when they are placed in a specified directory. uTorrent also incorporates an RSS reader.
• wget – is a standard command line downloading tool included in most GNU Linux distros. Also available for windows
• curl – A library and utility for dealing with http, it is a common feature of most web hosting servers, and easily integrates with PHP. You could write a short PHP script that would download files to the report server when prompted (possibly by an email or access from your mobile phone)

Round UP:

• Windows Kernel Zero Day Vulnerability Found in Duqu Installer
• Stop Online Piracy Act Introduced in the House
• Data points to China as source of March RSA breach, wider attacks
• Authorities Seize Duqu’s C&C Servers in India
• AWS Load Balancer Sends 2 Million Netflix API Reqs To Wrong Customer
• Mac OS X Trojan steals processing power to produce Bitcoins