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A report prepared by Northrop Grumman on Chinese capability to wage information warfare offers some valuable insights into the nature of professional and national security cyber-attack teams. REPORT ON CHINESE CYBER WARFARE & ESPIONAGE – [uscc.gov] “Capability of the People’s Republic of China to Conduct Cyber Warfare and Computer Network Exploitation” Prepared for The US-China [...]

A new paper that discussed Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) has been released by Mandiant and has sparked new interest in the topic. excerpt from the original post on APT APT or Advanced Persistent Threat describes cyber attacks mounted by organizational teams that have deep resources, advanced penetration skills, specific target profiles and are remarkably persisent [...]

CCDC Documentary Preview CyberWATCH YouTube channel with videos shot and edited from the 2009 CCDC hacker versus students competition Other CCDC related posts

This thoroughly researched paper by Dave Dittrich at the University of Washington, reflects on how malware and cyber criminals have evolved their techniques and activites over recent years. Hybrid combinations of penetration methods make it more difficult to defend against the malware and good use of social engineering increases the success percentage. Nugache in fact [...]

APT or Advanced Persistent Threat describes cyber attacks mounted by organizational teams that have deep resources, advanced penetration skills, specific target profiles and are remarkably persisent in their efforts. They tend to use sophisticated custom malware that can circumvent most defenses, stealthy tactics and demonstrate good situational awareness by evaluating defenders responses and escalating their [...]

Physical attacks are attacks that involve penetrating the physical security protecting information systems. In a facility with low physical security or public access, it can be as simple as walking into a building and sitting down at a computer system. Here is a list of some of the types of physical attacks: Walk-in – where [...]

Application attacks focus on application software instead of the operating system, where most classical perimeter exploit vulnerabilities are found. A wide variety of application attacks are aimed at web servers and associated functions, but they can also use other applications and protocols. Here is a sample list of some application attack vectors: SQL injection – [...]

Client-side attacks take advantage of weaknesses found in client software usually running on users workstations. Most client-side attacks involve either a web link to a web page that can deliver malware to exploit the client vulnerability or an email with some form of embedded malware that can exploit the client. Another common variation is to [...]

Wireless attacks are constantly changing and so are the defensive techniques used against them. Here are some of the areas involved with different wireless attacks: Recon – most wireless attacks start out with some form of recon. It is usually possible to sniff the wireless packets WEP – this security protocol is no longer safe [...]

Perimeter attacks involve using exploit code to take advantage of weaknesses detected in perimeter devices to take control of them or leverage some level of access into greater access. The list of known security holes in windows based systems is quite large and constantly growing. This puts the defenders in a position of needed to [...]